The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity (10 page)

For a time, these divisions were muted by the circumstances facing America. During the 1930s and 1940s, Americans were “in it together,” first in the Great Depression and then in World War II. These epochal events were a great crucible of consensus building. The Cold War period created a sense of shared risks and responsibilities as well, meaning that Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson all could feel, at least until 1965 or so, that they were presiding over a society that shared certain touchstones. This feeling of consensus began to unravel in the early 1960s and by the 1980s was lost.

There were innumerable reasons for this, far too many to trace in detail. Here are some. The ebbing of Cold War tensions, ironically, created an environment in which smoldering social tensions could be acknowledged rather than suppressed under a veneer of consensus. The rapidly changing role of women in society—itself the result of World War II, birth control, and economics that pulled women into higher education and the workforce—created new social divisions and eventually contributed to the “culture wars” of the 1960s and onward. The Vietnam War divided the country between hawks and doves, a division that would persist in later conflicts. The counterculture movement of the 1960s pitted traditional households against more experimental lifestyles. Changing sexual mores unleashed controversies that continue to today.

I’ll focus on four more trends that I believe have also played a deep and lasting role and are even more directly related to the changes in Washington. The first is the civil rights movement, which led to major advances in the economic and social conditions of African Americans but also to a political backlash among some white Americans, notably in the South. The second is the rise of Hispanic immigration, another source of ethnic division. The third, and perhaps deepest, change is the demographic and economic rise of the Sunbelt, which brought new regions and values to the forefront
of American politics. Finally, the suburbanization of America, including the residential sorting of Americans by class, contributed to polarized politics.

Civil Rights and Political Realignment

The civil rights movement marked the moment in which political power shifted from the Snowbelt to the Sunbelt. I had a visceral glimpse into the changing social and political landscape by virtue of growing up in Detroit, Michigan, in the 1960s. My father was a labor lawyer and local civil rights leader, and our house was a meeting place for progressive politics. We knew full well the tensions of the time. Yet nothing prepared my family or the Detroit community for the devastation of the rioting in African American neighborhoods in 1967. Dozens of people died, the city burned, and Detroit began a downward spiral into poverty and abandonment. The riots were followed by massive white flight to the suburbs and an astonishing political backlash. The segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, found a surge of support in working-class neighborhoods in his third-party run for the presidency in 1968 and won the 1972 presidential primary in Michigan.

It is here, I believe, that one must start the narrative of the anti-government and anti-tax revolt that culminated in Reagan’s election in 1980. The civil rights movement caused a nearly immediate and decisive political realignment throughout the country. The South, solidly Democratic for a century after the Civil War, suddenly flipped to the Republican Party. The Deep South and the Southwest (which together constitute the Sunbelt) were now politically ascendant in that they could deliver a Republican president (first Richard Nixon in 1968, then Reagan in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1988, and George W. Bush in 2000), ushering in an era in which white opposition to federal programs had an underlying racial component. Before the civil rights era, federal social spending was mainly for
white voters. Federal support for farmers, home owners, and retirees introduced in the 1930s to 1950s overwhelmingly benefitted the majority white community and was precisely designed that way. When Social Security was introduced in the 1930s, it excluded farmworkers and therefore most of the poor African American population in the South.
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With the success of the civil rights movement and the rise of antipoverty programs in the 1960s, federal benefits increasingly flowed to minority communities. The political reaction was a sharp turn of many white voters away from government’s leadership role.
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This backlash was amplified by repeated overreaching by liberal leaders. Ending discrimination was broadly acceptable to the white working class, but affirmative action was a step too far for many whites. Desegregation of neighborhood schools was acceptable, but busing children long distances was another step over the line. Nor did it help that the civil rights era was cut in two by race riots and a surge in urban violent crime.

The emergence of white evangelical Christians as a solid Republican voting bloc also has a racial background. Up until the late 1970s, white evangelical voters divided their loyalties between the two parties. It was in the late 1970s, mainly in reaction to intensified federal pressure to desegregate religious schools, that the white evangelicals moved en masse into the Republican fold.
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The swing of these middle-income white voters to the Republican Party made an enormous difference in the emergence of Republican presidents for twenty of twenty-eight years between 1980 and 2008.

The Hispanic Immigrant Surge

The rapid rise of the Hispanic population in the United States created yet another huge source of political and ethnic division, pushing white voters toward a philosophy of low taxation and retrenchment of the federal government. In 1965, the United States adopted the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This legislation, which ended quotas on national origin introduced in the Immigration Act of 1924, decisively changed America’s demography.
Figure 5.1
shows the remarkable dip in the share of foreign-born population in the United States after 1924 and then the sharp rise beginning after 1965. As of 1970, the Hispanic population in the United States was an estimated 10 million, equal to around 5 percent of the U.S. population, and heavily concentrated in California and Texas. By 1990, under the liberalizing provisions of the 1965 act, the Hispanic population had doubled, to 22 million and 8.6 percent of the population, and by 2009 the Hispanic population had doubled again, to 48 million and 15.7 percent of the population, with sizable communities in the Southwest, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and the Northwest.
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Hispanic votes have become decisive in key national and state elections, including the 2008 presidential election, in which Hispanics voted overwhelmingly for Obama.

The surge in Hispanic immigration exacerbated racial tensions and put immigration policy back at the forefront of national politics, feeding directly and powerfully into the growing anti-tax sentiments of the 1970s and afterward. The national tax revolt movement began most vividly in California’s referendum on Proposition 13 in 1978. California’s tax revolt was strongly influenced by the surge in the state’s Hispanic population and the opposition in much of the white community to the added property taxes being levied to provide schooling for an increasingly Hispanic student population.
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Figure 5.1: Foreign-Born Percentage of U.S. Population, 1850–2010

Source: Data from U.S. Census Bureau.

It is important to understand the special animus attached to illegal immigration. The political backing for programs that assist the poor (for example, with health care, education, income support, food stamps, and other programs) depends entirely on there being a sense of shared community among the members of the society. That sense of community is hard enough to achieve in America’s ethnically and religiously divided communities. It is nearly impossible to achieve when the borders are open to illegal inflows. With a vast, impoverished world of literally hundreds of millions if not billions of people who are eager to enter the United States, middle-class and working-class American taxpayers understandably believe that the fiscal demands on their checkbooks will be essentially without bounds if America fails to secure its frontiers. The animus is probably less toward specific groups, e.g., Hispanics, than it is toward the sense of unfairness of working very hard and then being called upon to support perfect strangers who number in the millions and rising.

This sentiment needs to be taken seriously. Social transfer programs must go hand in hand with a clearer immigration policy and clearer standards for the participation of new immigrants (documented or undocumented) in social programs. Washington has so far been unable to take up these questions honestly and directly and has squandered the public’s trust as a result. Fortunately, the fiscal costs of immigration, including illegal immigration, are nowhere near as adverse as anti-immigrant groups believe. Millions of illegal immigrants pay federal taxes, partly in the hope of an eventual amnesty. Social Security collects billions of dollars per year from undocumented immigrants, and millions of illegal immigrants file personal income tax returns.
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The Sunbelt Overtakes the Snowbelt

The civil rights movement and the surge in immigration not only divided Americans according to race and ethnicity but also helped to change the geography of political power. For a century after the Civil War, American national power was centered in the North, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. Almost all American presidents hailed from the North. Industry, too, was concentrated in the North, as was great wealth. The South lagged for many complex reasons beyond the obvious one of defeat in the Civil War: an agrarian rather than industrial economy, low technological skills, poor public education, and the burdens of tropical diseases such as yellow fever, malaria, and hookworm. All those factors meant that economic power remained concentrated in the North.

Then came the great political change. Between 1900 and 1960, the Snowbelt states provided every U.S. president but one. But between 1964 and Obama’s election in 2008, the Sunbelt states provided every one!
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The civil rights movement created a stark dividing line between the Snowbelt and Sunbelt presidential eras. Starting with Nixon, Republican candidates garnered the bulk of the South’s electoral votes. Until Obama, only two Democratic candidates (Carter and Clinton), both from the Sunbelt, were able to shake loose even a few electoral votes in the now strongly Republican region. Northern Democrats tended to face a wall of southern white middle-class opposition, making them nearly unelectable. (Lower-income white voters tended to remain in the Democratic Party column.)

The rise of the Sunbelt to presidential power in the 1960s and afterward was far more than merely a civil rights backlash, however. It also reflected the gradual rise in economic power of the South after World War II, especially as electrification, air-conditioning, public investments in infrastructure (such as western dams and large-scale water projects), and greatly improved health care and education all made possible the migration of industries such as textiles and apparel
from the high-cost, highly unionized Northeast to the low-cost, nonunionized Sunbelt. The shift of industries from the Snowbelt to the Sunbelt was, in many ways, a dry run of the later transfer of industry from the high-wage United States to the low-wage Asia. As the Sunbelt economy boomed and the U.S. population (including both native-born Americans and Hispanic immigrants) increasingly settled in the Sunbelt, political power necessarily gravitated to the South.
Figure 5.2
shows the remarkable rise of the Sunbelt relative to the Snowbelt along three crucial dimensions: the share of population, the share of national income, and the share of total congressional seats (which also tracks the share of electoral votes for presidential elections).

On all three dimensions, the Sunbelt was far smaller than the Snowbelt in the 1940s to 1960s but rapidly caught up and overtook the Snowbelt by 2000. Political power has followed suit with the rising share of population and income.

Here is a funny thing about the rise of the Sunbelt anti-government political power: it created Sunbelt power without necessitating a nationwide swing in values. The shift in the Sunbelt’s demographic and economic weight was enough to give rise to a new national political orientation. Let me explain through a simple numerical illustration how powerful a role demographic shifts can play in national politics.

Figure 5.2: The Rise of the Sunbelt, 1940–2010