by Jill Lepore
As had been the case in the decades before the Civil War, when evangelicals re-entered politics, partisan politics took on the zeal of religion. Alarmed, political scientists devised new methods for quantifying Americans’ growing political fervor, including measuring polarization among members of Congress by analyzing roll-call votes. By that measure, congressional polarization had begun to decline not long after the Civil War, and it continued to decline throughout much of the twentieth century, when Republicans became more moderate. In the 1970s, when Republicans became more conservative, polarization surged. The migration of Southern Democrats to the GOP explains only about a third of this shift. Much of it is better understood as a consequence of the politicization of abortion. Between 1978 and 1984, pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans were purged from their parties. After Reagan, a so-called gender gap appeared to open. Between 1920, the beginning of women’s suffrage, and 1980, women had tended to vote disproportionately for Republican presidential candidates, if by small margins. That changed in 1980, when more women voted for Carter than for Reagan by a gap of 8 percentage points, presumably because the Democratic Party had begun billing itself as the party of women. Republican strategists concluded that, in trading (white) women for (white) men, they’d gotten the better end of the deal. Said one Republican consultant about the Democrats, “They do so badly among men that the fact that we don’t do quite as well among women becomes irrelevant.”63
The change came slowly. Until the late 1980s, Republicans were more pro-choice than Democrats.64 But before long, the parties were sorted ideologically, and, while conservatives thought of themselves as perfecting targeted political messaging through emerging technologies and liberals believed that they were advancing identity politics, together they amounted to the same thing: a more atomized and enraged electorate, conveniently reached through computer-generated mailing and telephone lists.
The ERA’s last chance at ratification expired in 1982. “Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead” the amendment’s opponents sang at a celebration of its defeat.65 By then, both parties had abandoned a political settlement necessary to the stability of the Republic—equal rights for women—and descended into a politics of seemingly interminable division that would outlive nearly all of the people who had been its architects, including Phyllis Schlafly, whose last public act, in 2016, at the age of ninety-one, only months before her death, would be to endorse Donald J. Trump as the nation’s next president.
II.
“GOVERNMENT IS NOT the solution to our problem,” Ronald Reagan said in his inaugural address, in 1981. “Government is the problem.” Two months after he was sworn in as president, he told the Conservative Political Action Conference that his social, economic, and foreign policy agendas were three parts of a whole: “Just as we seek to put our financial house in order and rebuild our nation’s defenses, so too we seek to protect the unborn, to end the manipulation of schoolchildren by utopian planners, and permit the acknowledgement of a Supreme Being in our classrooms.”66
Ronald Reagan, a man of immense personal charm, greeted supporters in Indiana during his 1980 campaign. Reagan had ridden into office on the back of a revolt against an elaborate and tortured tax code, an accretion of exemptions, preferences, credits, and loopholes. To the extent that the tax code represented a liberal agenda, liberals failed to defend it and, instead, agreed with its critics. Campaigning in 1976, Jimmy Carter called the tax code “a disgrace to the human race.” A new American tax revolt began in earnest in 1978, when Californians passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that cut the state’s property tax by 57 percent and eviscerated the state’s public education system; California voters endorsed it 2 to 1; the New York Times called the referendum a “primal scream by the People against Big Government.” Tom Wolfe pronounced the seventies the “Me Decade.”67
Reagan’s economic thinking had been influenced by the writing of Milton Friedman, who, over the course of Reagan’s own political career, moved from the academy to celebrity. Friedman earned a PhD at Columbia in 1946 and during the 1940s and 1950s became well known among economists as a contrarian on monetary policy and a vigorous opponent of Keynesianism. In 1962, Friedman published a book aimed at a general audience, Capitalism and Freedom, in which he argued that personal freedom can only be assured by the free market system. In his 1967 presidential address to the American Economic Association, Friedman upended conventional thinking about a trade-off between unemployment and inflation; when stagflation arrived in the 1970s, he appeared prescient. From 1966 to 1984, Friedman wrote a regular column for Newsweek, a period during which he also was interviewed in Playboy (1973), won the Nobel Prize (1976), appeared on The Phil Donahue Show (1979), and hosted a PBS series, Free to Choose (1980).68
Friedman’s prominence as a public intellectual lent support to the call for tax cuts made by conservatives who, beginning with Republican congressman and ex–football star Jack Kemp in 1977, endorsed “supply-side economics,” arguing that reducing the tax rate would promote economic growth. But the “bible of the Reagan revolution” was Wealth and Poverty, a book published in 1981 by George Gilder, the living writer Reagan cited more than any other.69
Gilder, born in 1939, had been a speechwriter for Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, and Richard Nixon in the 1960s, after a stint in the marines and an undergraduate education at Harvard. He wanted to write like Joan Didion, with whom he was infatuated. By the early 1970s, he’d met William F. Buckley and abandoned liberal Republicanism. He achieved the writerly fame he’d wished for as a bad boy of American journalism when he in 1973 published Sexual Suicide, a frantic indictment of feminism that earned him the title of Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year, awarded to him by both NOW and Time. In Sexual Suicide, Gilder argued that the liberation of women would violate what he called the “sexual constitution,” the unwritten arrangement that, through sex, binds men to women, who take care of their children for them. “The whole sexual constitution is based on the maternal tie,” Gilder wrote. “Women’s liberation tries to reject this role.” Feminists were ruining this arrangement, he charged, and were to be blamed for “the frustration of the affluent young and their resort to drugs, the breakdown of the family among both the rich and poor, the rising rate of crime and violence.” Preserving the sexual constitution, he argued, “may be even more important to the social order than preservation of the legal constitution.”70
Eight years later, Wealth and Poverty served as a bridge between the conservative critique of feminism and the conservative embrace of supply-side economics, in which Gilder attacked fellow conservatives for being too restrained in their approval of capitalism. Steve Forbes compared it, in importance, to Adam Smith’s 1776 The Wealth of Nations. For Gilder, wealth is always altruistic—“capitalism begins with giving”—and “real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind,” the dependency cultivated by government relief. As Gilder saw it, working women posed a problem not only for the traditional family but for economic growth; by raising family incomes, they contributed to inflation, which had become rampant by the end of the decade. A man’s role as primary breadwinner was central to Gilder’s social thought in the 1970s; his celebration of the unregulated entrepreneur was central to his economic thought in the 1980s.71 For his third act, in the 1990s, Gilder would play the role of digital utopian, arguing for a regulation-free Internet.
Influenced by Gilder and supply-side economics, Reagan made tax cuts the centerpiece of his campaign. During his time in office, the top income tax rate, which had been above 90 percent in the 1940s and 1950s, fell from 70 percent to 28 percent. He also slashed certain kinds of federal spending, arguing that Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, and other programs promoted dependency and immorality and were destructive of family life, especially by providing counterincentives to marriage. Between 1970 and 1990, the percentage of illegitimate birth rose from 38 percent to 67 percent for blacks and from 6 percent to 17 percent for whites. The number of
recipients for AFDC had risen from 7.4 million in 1970 to 10.6 million in 1980. Under Reagan-era reforms, more than a million poor people lost food stamp benefits.72
Meanwhile, Reagan’s administration doggedly protected other forms of federal assistance, calling programs like Social Security and Medicare, which provided assistance to the elderly rather than to the poor, off-limits. He also vastly expanded military spending by 35 percent from 1981 to 1989, the largest-ever peacetime increase.73 During Reagan’s eight years in office, the national debt tripled, rising from $917 billion to $2.7 trillion; by 1989, it constituted 53 percent of the gross domestic product. The federal government grew, too, as the number of federal employees rose from 2.9 million to 3.1. Deregulating the economy also proved costly. Reagan-era deregulation included allowing savings-and-loan banks to sell junk bonds and high-risk securities. Freed from federal government oversight, many S&Ls acted recklessly and eventually collapsed; the federal government spent $132 billion in taxpayer dollars to bail them out.74 Conservatives proposed cutting spending and shrinking the federal government. But what came to be called “Reaganomics” did neither. Instead, conservatives consolidated their power by answering the liberal claims for reproductive rights with a different constitutional demand: the right to bear arms.
IN MARCH 1981, outside the Washington Hilton, John Hinckley Jr., the twenty-five-year-old mentally ill son of the president of a Denver oil company, shot Ronald Reagan with a.22-caliber revolver that he’d bought at a pawn shop in Dallas. Hinckley fired six shots in 1.7 seconds, hitting not only the president but also a DC police officer, a Secret Service agent, and James Brady, the White House press secretary. Reagan was rushed into surgery while a worried nation held its breath.
Not only had gun ownership and gun regulation not, historically, been partisan issues, they hadn’t been matters of extensive constitutional debate, either. The National Rifle Association, founded in 1871, had fought for state and federal gun safety measures in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1957, when the NRA moved into new headquarters, its motto, at the building’s entrance, read, “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.” The NRA supported a ban on mail-order gun sales debated by Congress in 1963, after Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy with an Italian military surplus rifle that he’d ordered from the NRA magazine, American Rifleman. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States,” said the NRA’s executive vice president, testifying before Congress. The NRA supported the 1968 Gun Control Act, passed after the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., banning mail-order sales, restricting certain high-risk people from purchasing guns, and prohibiting the importation of military surplus firearms. Some elements of the legislation “appear unduly restrictive and unjustified in their application to law-abiding citizens,” said the NRA’s executive vice president, but “the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”75
During this debate, the Second Amendment—“A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”—had little place, since it had generally been understood to protect the right of citizens to bear arms for the common defense. In the two centuries since the nation’s founding, no amendment had received less attention in the courts than the Second, except the Third, which concerns the quartering of troops. This began to change in the 1960s, not because the NRA started talking about the Second Amendment, but because black nationalists did. In 1964, not long before he was shot to death, Malcolm X said, “Article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” That same argument animated the founding of the Black Panther Party.76
Republicans had been, at that time, as likely as Democrats to support gun safety measures, as part of law and order campaigns. Reagan, as governor of California, had supported gun safety measures, signing the Mulford Act in 1967. And both Nixon’s law-and-order campaign and his declared war on drugs involved support for gun regulation. In 1972, Nixon, who believed guns to be “an abomination,” urged Congress to pass a ban on “Saturday night specials,” privately wished Congress would ban all handguns, and confessed that he found the idea that gun ownership is a constitutional right to be absurd. “I don’t know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house,” he said, echoing remarks made earlier by Reagan.77
The idea that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to carry a gun, rather than the people’s right to form armed militias to provide for the common defense, became the official position of the NRA only in the 1970s, and only after a struggle not unlike the contest over abortion among the leaders of the Republican National Committee. Part of the backlash against both feminism and civil rights, gun rights became a conservative political movement, a rights fight for white men.
If, in the 1960s, the gun debate took place in the shadow of the Black Power movement, in the 1970s it took place in the shadow of a growing White Power movement. A whitelash that began as a reaction against the civil rights movement in the 1960s gained strength in the 1970s and 1980s as a reaction to changing patterns of immigration. No federal law had restricted immigration before the 1870s, but the United States had instituted a set of quotas by place of origin, most significantly in the National Origins Act of 1924. By 1970, only 9.6 million Americans, less than 5 percent of the U.S. population, were foreign-born, the lowest percentage in more than a century, and most of these immigrants had come from Europe. By 2000, the number of foreign-born Americans had risen to 28 million, constituting 29 percent of the U.S. population. Most of these newer immigrants were from Latin America and East Asia. Five million immigrants had entered the United States between 1931 and 1965; 4.5 million entered in the 1970s, 7.3 in the 1980s, and 9.1 in the 1990s, not counting those who entered the country illegally.78 Immigration moved to the center of American political debate.
Immigration patterns had begun to change in the second half of the 1960s as a result of Johnson’s 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, usually classed with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act as his signal accomplishments. Aimed at defeating Jim Crow–era racial discrimination, the 1965 Immigration Act had replaced the old quota system with a new system that did not discriminate on the basis of race or national origins. The new quota system mandated an equivalence: quotas from any country, anywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere, were the same: 20,000 per country. And it also raised the total number of immigrants per year to 290,000. Instead of setting racial and national-origins preferences, the legislation established preferences based on family and occupation. Beginning in 1965, in short, people from the developing world were legally able to immigrate to the United States. They also entered a nation that was redefining citizenship. “Citizenship is man’s basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to have rights,” Earl Warren had written in 1958.
Under the new system, the number of legal immigrants from non-European countries rose, but the number of legal immigrants from Mexico fell. Under the 1924 regime, Mexico and the rest of the Western Hemisphere had been exempt from the quota system; that ended in 1965. And the Bracero Program, which had brought migrant workers from Mexico into the country legally since 1942, was also ended. Under the post-1965 regime, the number of legal immigrants from Mexico fell by 40 percent. The scale of Mexican immigration, however, remained virtually the same: roughly the same number of Mexicans continued to cross the border after the labor reforms, but two out of every five were now “undocumented” and deemed to be illegal aliens, subject to deportation. Mexican American intellectuals and activists had in the 1960s been at the vanguard of the academic study of ethnicity and the pursuit of immigration reform as an integrationist civil rights struggle, a position that took a turn toward ethnic separatism and nationalism with t
he emergence of the Chicano movement. By the 1970s, an older generation of Mexican Americans, led by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, considered illegal Mexican immigrants a threat to unionization efforts, while younger Chicano activists urged the lifting of immigration restriction, classing Immigration and Naturalization Service sweeps as actions of a brutal police state. By the mid-1970s, the Chicano activists had won this debate, both sides agreeing that “to learn how to protect the rights of workers without papers is to learn how to protect ourselves.” Nevertheless, by the 1990s, the U.S.-Mexican border had become, effectively, a military zone.79
The gun rights movement was tightly bound to anti-immigrant animus. The NRA turned itself from a sporting and hunting association into a powerhouse political interest group during the very years that hostility against immigration was on the rise. In 1975, the NRA created a lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, and named as its head Harlon Bronson Carter, an award-winning marksman and former chief of the U.S. Border Control. Not long after, the NRA’s leadership, objecting to Carter’s political aims, decided to force him out and to move the organization’s headquarters to Colorado Springs. But at the NRA’s annual meeting in 1977, Carter and his allies staged a rebellion and succeeded in ousting the old leadership, rewriting the organization’s bylaws and, instead of moving to Colorado, keeping the NRA in Washington. At the door of its headquarters, a new motto appeared, cleaving the second clause of the Second Amendment from the first: “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.”80