Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (97 page)

49
. Liberals also complained after 2002 that Republicans appropriated insufficient funds to support the act and that the emphasis on testing was misplaced.

50
. Greene,
The Presidency of George Bush
, 76–77.

51
.
City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co.
, 488 U.S. 469 (1989), involving minority setasides in construction contracting; and
Ward’s Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio
, 490 U.S. 642 (1989), concerning racial discrimination in employment.

52
. John Skrentny,
The Minority Rights Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 332–33.

53
. In 2003, this rate was seven times as high as the rate for the population at large.
New York Times
, Jan. 18, 2004.

54
. Skrentny,
The Minority Rights Revolution
, 333; Terry Anderson,
The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action
(New York, 2004), 276.

55
. Anderson,
The Pursuit of Fairness
, 201–2.

56
.
Webster v. Reproductive Health Services
, 492 U.S. 490 (1989).

57
.
New York Times
, July 8, 1989; James Patterson,
Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy
(New York, 2001), 195–97.

58
. Lawrence Friedman,
American Law in the Twentieth Century
(New Haven, 2002), 524–25.

59
. After 1992, President Bill Clinton set about to reverse this process. His efforts, like those of Bush, aroused great controversy on the Hill. When he left office, eight of the thirteen courts still had GOP majorities.

60
.
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey
, 505 U.S. 833 (1992). Justice Harry Blackmun, informed that Justice Anthony Kennedy was joining him to create a majority, was greatly relieved, scribbling, “Roe sound.”
New York Times
, March 4, 2004. These three Republican-appointed justices were Sandra Day O’Connor and Kennedy, named by President Reagan, and Souter. Conservatives, greatly disappointed by Souter’s liberal positions, later pleaded, “No more Souters.”

61
. A total of forty-three Republicans and nine Democrats (five of them conservatives from the South) backed Thomas’s nomination on the final vote. Two liberal Republicans, Robert Packwood of Oregon and James Jeffords of Vermont (who became an independent in 2001), joined forty-six Democrats in opposition.

62
. One of the women elected to the Senate was Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, the first black woman in Senate history. Still, in 1993 women had only six seats (6 percent) in the Senate and forty-seven seats (11 percent) in the House (as compared to twenty-eight seats [6 percent] in 1991–92), and 20 percent of those in state legislatures (as compared to 18 percent in 1991–92). Moseley Braun was defeated for reelection in 1998.
Stat. Abst., 2002,
247.

63
. See
chapter 9
for race relations in the 1990s.

64
. Lou Cannon, “Official Negligence,” PBS Online Forum, April 7, 1998; Haynes Johnson,
Divided We Fall: Gambling with History in the Nineties
(New York, 1994), 169–208. In 1993, a racially mixed federal jury in Los Angeles found two of the policemen guilty of having violated King’s civil rights.

65
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 305. For the S&L crisis and bailout, see
chapter 5
.

66
. Greene,
The Presidency of George Bush
, 79–88, 183–86.

67
. Garry Wills, “The Tragedy of Bill Clinton,”
New York Review of Books
, Aug. 12, 2004, 60–64.

68
. Byron Shafer,
The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics
(Lawrence Kans., 2003), 59–63; Greene,
The Presidency of George Bush
, 166–75; and Witcover,
Party of the People
, 642–51.

69
. For Clinton and the primary, see Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace
, 101–20.

70
. Paul Boller,
Presidential Campaigns
(New York, 1996), 391.

71
. Ibid., 387.

72
. Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace
, 143–54.

73
. Robert Collins,
More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America
(New York, 2000), 216.

74
. In May 1991, Bush was found to have Graves’ disease, a hyperthyroid condition, which some people later speculated may have sapped his energy in 1992. The evidence for such speculation was inconclusive. Greene,
The Presidency of George Bush
, 153.

75
. David Frum,
Dead Right
(New York, 1994), 18.

76
. The four states were Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee. He also carried the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia.

77
. Some 45 percent of women were believed to have voted for Clinton, 37 percent for Bush, and 17 percent for Perot. Men divided a little more evenly: 41 percent for Clinton, 38 percent for Bush, and 21 percent for Perot.
World Almanac, 2003
, 40.

78
. Judis and Teixeira,
The Emerging Democratic Majority
, 28–29.

1
. Bork,
Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline
(New York, 1996), frontispiece. Yeats closed his poem with the lines “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

2
. Ibid., 1–5, 331.

3
. (New York, 1996), 3–5.

4
. Bloom,
The Closing of the American Mind
(New York, 1987); Hirsch et al.,
Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know
(Boston, 1987).

5
. Some of these books, in order of publication: Bork,
The Tempting of America
(New York, 1990); Dinesh D’Souza,
Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus
(New York, 1991); William Bennett,
The De-Valuing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children (New York, 1992)
; and Bennett,
The Book of Virtues
(1993). As head of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Reagan between 1981 and 1985 and then as education secretary (1985–88), the voluble Bennett had fired some early salvos in the culture wars. A more temperate and thoughtful example of conservative unease is James Wilson,
The Moral Sense
(New York, 1993).

6
. Brzezinski,
Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century
(New York, 1993), x.

7
. Cited in Kevin Phillips,
Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American Politics
(Boston, 1994), 62.

8
. See Sara Diamond,
Not by Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Religious Right
(New York, 1998), 174–76.

9
. William Martin,
With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America
(New York, 1996), 299–303, 329–32; and Daniel Williams, “From the Pews to the Polls: The Formation of a Southern Christian Right” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2005),
chapter 7
.

10
. Francis Fukuyama,
The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstruction of Social Order
(New York, 1999). Fukuyama’s book, reflecting the more optimistic mood of the late 1990s, argued that by then the worst of the disruption had passed.

11
. Moynihan, “Defining Deviancy Down,”
The American Scholar
62 (Winter 1993), 17–30.

12
. See, for instance, David Calleo,
The Bankrupting of America
(New York, 1992); Edward Luttwak,
The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States from Becoming a Third World Country and How to Win the Geo-Economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy
(New York, 1993); Robert Hughes,
Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America
(1993); Brzezinski,
Out of Control
; and Phillips,
Arrogant Capital
.

13
. See Amitai Etzioni, comp.,
Rights and the Common Good: The Communitarian Perspective
(New York, 1995).

14
. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,”
Journal of Democracy
6 (Jan. 1995), 65–78. See also Putnam’s later book,
Bowling Alone: The Collapse of American Community
(New York, 2000). Communitarian writing of the time includes Amitai Etzioni,
The Spirit of Community
(New York, 1993); and Michael Sandel,
Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy
(Cambridge, Mass., 1996). Among the many reactions to Putnam are Theda Skocpol,
Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life
(Norman, Okla., 2003); Jeffrey Berry,
The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups
(Washington, 1999); and Everett Ladd,
The Ladd Report
(New York, 1999).

15
. Putnam,
Bowling Alone
, 277–84.

16
. Marie Winn,
The Plug-In Drug
(New York, 1977).

17
. Putnam,
Bowling Alone
, 100.

18
. Jonathan Zimmerman,
Whose America? Cultural Wars in the Public Schools
(Cambridge, Mass., 2002).

19
. See chapters 1 and 2. Divorce rates were highest in the South, in part because the average age of first marriage was lowest there. The South, of course, was also the region where the Religious Right was strongest.

20
.
New York Times
, March 3, 2003. The worst year was 1994, when four people were killed in attacks on clinics or doctors. There were eight other attempted killings in that year, in addition to arson and vandalism of clinics.

21
. James Davison Hunter,
Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America
(New York, 1991), 234.

22
. Garry Wills,
Under God: Religion and American Politics
(New York, 1990), 288–89; Hunter,
Culture Wars
, 231; Hughes,
Culture of Complaint
, 159–66.

23
. Myron Marty,
Daily Life in the United States, 1960–1990: Decades of Discord
(Westport, Conn., 1997), 313.

24
. Hughes,
Culture of Complaint
, 188–90.

25
. Robert Newman,
Enola Gay and the Court of History
(New York, 2004).

26
. Peter Stearns et al.,
Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives
(New York, 2000), 1; Zimmerman,
Whose America?
216–17. For an account by historians of the long-running struggle over history standards, see Gary Nash et al.,
History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past
(New York, 1997).