hello and welcome back I am Professor Joe Thompson and this is U.S history 1865 to the president and today we are going to talk about the new conservatism this is a follow-up lecture to the high tide of liberalism which dated back really to the New Deal we talked about the New Deal and FDR's successful efforts to not only improve the economy but to convince Americans to think about government in a whole new way and it seemed to many liberals that by the 1960s that whole new way would never be challenged but as we shall see in this lecture that way it is challenged or was challenged rather and that challenge has remained in place fairly successfully since the 1960s so let's talk about the new conservatism and let's first look at why we're called beginning it in 1964 even though as I had said in another lecture 1964 was really the high tide of liberalism in that uh Lyndon Johnson was re-elected in a landslide so why do I pick 1964 as a starting point well that's because it is in 1964 that the Democrat or the Republican Party rather begins to redefine itself so let's call part one Goldwater and grievances in 1964 the Republican Party which had been moving toward the center During the period of the night or during the 1940s and 50s nominated Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona to be their uh presidential uh nominee uh it had begun as a Grassroots campaign The Establishment which is uh the Eastern establishment of the Republican party was not really behind this effort they eventually you know fell into line but it really started as a draft Goldwater movement among the rank and file Goldwater was extremely conservative by the standards of the 1960s it was very conservative it was anti-big government anti-communist many voters saw him as too conservative he had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. he had favored massive military spending at a time when which we were at peace he talked about making Social Security voluntary Social Security was a very popular program he even talked about allowing commanders in the field in Vietnam to use weapons at their own discretion the Democrats portrayed him as crazy in fact some moderate Republicans thought he was a little nuts too his famous campaign slogan in your heart you know he's right was turned around by the Democrats in your heart you know he might meaning might drop an atomic bomb in your guts you know he's nuts and of course you can all go online and take a look at the so-called Daisy Daisy girl or peace little girl commercial that aired one time the 60-second commercial that aired on the 7th of September 1964 in which the Johnson Administration used a mushroom cloud a nuclear mushroom cloud to indicate what Goldwater would do if he became president well Goldwater lost in 1964 to the incumbent Lyndon Johnson we already talked a little bit about that land that Landslide victory in 1964. Johnson got 61 percent of the popular vote 846 electoral votes we never a government was popular in 1964. a University of Michigan poll said that 75 percent of Americans liked government they wanted government in their lives to help them out and liberals saw this Landslide as validation of their policies and their ideas the stuff we talked about in an earlier lecture about what the Liberals were doing with food stamps and with Head Start and with the environment and civil rights and Medicare and Medicaid all those things so liberals said hey look you know you're never ever going to beat us again but a closer look at the election shows that a political realignment had begun we were entering to into what political scientists call the sixth party system it's really incumbent upon viewers here my students to to read about the party systems in America and I believe we are currently entering into the seventh party system but the political party system really get starts in the mid-1960s because the Civil Rights Movement had redrawn the political map because it had opened up the South to the Republican party for the first time since the Republican era Republicans or or Reconstruction Era rather Republicans were winning seats in the old Democratic South the so-called solid South the Democrat that the Democratic party had held since the Civil War Goldwater won five states South Carolina Georgia Alabama Mississippi and Louisiana in the Deep South that was Unthinkable in 1935 or 38 it starts to to kind of shift a little in 48 with the dixiecrat uh candidate Strom Thurman the other thing you need to notice whoops I messed up there um 27 million voters uh thought that Goldwater should be president so um 38.5 percent of the population did not think he was crazy and while while Johnson won in a landslide he still had to reckon with the fact that there was about 40 percent of the population or yeah close to 40 percent of the population say he's not crazy we agree with him so what did they agree with in the 1960s Goldwater and conservatism in general appealed to voters who oppose certain things and were angry about other things so what did they oppose first off they oppose civil rights legislation and the integration that followed it this explains the shift in white Southern loyalty they also opposed welfare programs they believed that welfare made people soft that it rewarded laziness and among some conservatives certainly not all they believe that welfare went disproportionately to African Americans and that black people were getting special treatment from the government and they opposed like conservatives throughout American history they opposed high taxes all of these new government programs that Johnson was proposing involved raising taxes so everything old is New Again nobody likes high taxes and conservatives were especially angered by that or yeah they opposed it and again this is not something that should surprise anybody conservatives tend to appreciate lower taxes and understand that individualism and self-reliance is more important than than government programs conservatism also appealed to people who were angry people who were anxious about what I you know lumped together in what they would have called a culture in Decay now this is a loaded phrase and and you can dismiss it if you want but it's an easy way to kind of summarize their belief that America was on the wrong path that there were certain things about the liberal America that had been introduced beginning in the 19 um 30s and 40s and especially in the early 1960s that really was upsetting to many um many uh conservatives first well what were some of those things they didn't like the so-called activist Supreme Court judges who they said were overstepping their Authority in 1962 in a Supreme Court ruling called Engel versus vital they took prayer out of the public schools but that wasn't the only one that that was seen as a there was a slap in the face to God to many of these people and there are conservatives today who still think we should bring prayer back into public schools but the so-called rights revolution in general Baker versus Carr 1962 which established the principle of one man one vote seemed to favor cities over rural areas it did um Griswold versus Connecticut said that contraception or Banning contraception was unconstitutional many people thought that this was a kind of a wink and an odd to the to the free love movement go ahead and and and and use contraception and do whatever you want Miranda versus Arizona the famous uh um you know you have the right to remain silent decision 1966 seemed to suggest that we were getting soft on criminals and loving versus Virginia 1967 overturned State bans on interracial marriages something racist had prohibited since the Jim Crow era were other things going on that were upsetting them Rising crime rates which many of uh these uh White Southern conservatives thought associated with black people the urban riots that were that were coming or occurred in the 1960s but we all know that the Baby Boomers were coming of age they were more unsupervised people out there and the Civil Rights Movement was becoming more militant and so there were Rising crime rates uh whether or not it was something that had anything to do with government programs is debatable and I would reject it out of hand it just had to do with the fact that half of America was under the age of 25 and those tend to be the people who commit uh the most crime um court ordered busing was forcing integration Nationwide here's a picture on the screen the one in the lower left hand corner that's up in Queens New York where uh you know desegregation was something that Northerners uh associate with the South but then all of a sudden uh the the states and and cities are coming in saying you're going to bust your kids to neighborhoods uh so that we can integrate schools anti-war protesters student radicals and other anti-war people seem to be insulting the nation's Pride we're talking about the Vietnam War the Hawks thought the war was winnable and by 1969 the dubs were the majority and a lot of people saw that these people were burning flags and protesting the war they were showing disrespect to the military the counter-culture movement read all about this this is the sex drugs in rock and roll hippies smoking dope and and listening to rock and roll music and burning Flags embracing alternative Lifestyles and alternative religions and there were even some left-wing terrorists like the weather underground and a lot of people regarded the Black Panther Party as a terrorist party so there's this there's this sense that the kids are are are leaving behind all that all the values of their parents generation and of course there was the feminist movement and again I want you to read about this in your textbook the woman pictured on the lower right hand corner that is Betty Friedan and in 1963 she wrote a powerful book titled the Feminine Mystique and in 1966 she would be one of the co-founders of the National Organization of Women a lot of fem a lot of men and and a lot of women too so saw feminists undermining traditional family values that women should be in the home women should not be pressing for rights they should be raising the kids and it's the fact that they're not home raising the kids that we have all these these this crime and this drug use and everything like that so there were the conservatives were were very upset about certain things and then a lot of this stuff is upsetting but what what sets them apart is the fact that they tended to blame big government liberalism and the Democratic party for this culture and declare and Decay this was especially true among the white working class white working-class voters were especially upset with Democrats many Democrats they believed um had abandoned them they believed that the Democratic party now served the interests of minorities not the working class specifically working class white people even though most working most minority people are working class as well but the Democrats were thinking that oh no you are now the party of of black people and and and women and gay people in other words you were the party of identity politics and you no longer represent me well Republicans took advantage of this anger and this fear and this anxiety Republicans told the white working class you know what you're right it is the Democrats who are to blame for all your troubles it is big government that blames for that that that that that is the problem it's not big money now as you recall in the in the Gilded Age of the 1890s um the working class was was rallying against big money and the populist party that agrarian party of the 1890s was rallying against big corporations like railroads and Banks well the conservatives the populace of the the the 1960s 70s and 80s were running not against big money but against big government and what they did and this is very clever if you think about it they campaigned on vague issues issues that appeal to a nostalgic white working class issues like family values who doesn't like family values right you know and so when conservatives start talking about we are the party of family values how can you resist that you know we are the party of patriotism we are the party that is tough on crime this is what we would call right-wing populism it's the politics of nostalgia this is a repeat of the 1920s when when the fundamentalists were talking about coming back to to our original values and by the way this Nostalgia would carry over into the 1970s movies and television would romanticize the 1950s and early 1960s famously American Graffiti which came out in 1973 and the following year happy days which ran for 10 years from 1973 to 1974 glorified the 1950s as this time of innocence is this time of of sock hops and and all this great stuff that I talked about in an earlier lecture um I don't know if any of you recognize the two images on the screen the guy in the top is a fictional character by the name of Archie Bunker Archie Bunker was on a TV series called All in the Family which ran for most of the 1970s he was a World War II veteran a blue collar worker a family man who thought that the Democratic party had become the party of of black people and gay people and women and feminists and so he turned to Richard Nixon he's a big fan of Richard Nixon he was from the borough of Queens and the guy beneath him is President former president rather Donald Trump Donald Trump was also a white guy from Queens who literally hugged the flag at the CPAC convention in 2019. you know and these are the kind of things that appealed to people it's like oh yeah yeah you love America you love the flag so those were the Grievances and the first person to benefit from those grievances the first person to really capitalized on it was not Barry cold water Barry Goldwater lost in 1964. so let's look at part two and let's talk about the rise and fall of Richard Nixon in 1968 the Republican presidential candidate was Richard Nixon now we had met Richard Nixon earlier on he had been vice president in the 1950s under Eisenhower he ran for president in 1960 against John F Kennedy he ran for governor of 19 of California in 1962. he was a perennial face in American politics in fact between 1952 and 1972 Richard Nixon was on the Republican Party ticket for all but one year 1964. in other words he ran for vice presidents in 52 and 56 president in 60 68 and 72. he is the the only other person to appear on a national ticket five times is Franklin Roosevelt who ran for president four times and vice president once well Richard Nixon exploited the fear of this white working class he exploited this politics of nostalgia he referred to his supporters as the silent majority like many conservatives he argued that all the people making noise in the streets and demonstrations those were college educated minorities elitists they were a moral disorderly they were condescending but the that they were the minority to him the average American was religious and God-fearing the average American was law abiding quiet ordinary patriotic and this kind of you know touched people's hearts he used what observers called the southern strategy to attack to attract rather white voters coded language political symbolism references to the Supreme Court doing things to force blacks and whites together to disrupt neighborhood schools and things like that he would win a very narrow victory over a deeply divided Democratic party just over half a million votes on Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey who was Lyndon Johnson's vice president so he was very close to Lyndon Johnson and all the anti-war sentiment of that election Nixon ran on a promise that he would end the war he he uh Hubert Humphrey he could do nothing to distance himself from the war and from Johnson the Democrats were really divided there had been a police ride at their convention in Chicago in 1968 one of their leading candidates Robert Kennedy was assassinated after winning the California Primary in June of that year of 1968. so you have a Democratic party that's really divided and Richard Nixon who is willing to exploit that division exploit fear and exploit that resentment now in the long run uh Nixon's brand of polarizing politics would produce a Republican party that was now more conservative back in the 1930s and 40s and 50s and 60s you could find liberals within the Republican Party Eisenhower famously said when it comes to human beings I'm a liberal when it comes to money I'm a conservative but now the Republican party is becoming more and more conservative it's today it's purging itself of what it calls rhinos r-i-n-o which means Republican in name only it's really really hard to find today even a moderate Republican this new party was centered in the south its strongest base of support is the southern states I'll explain this map in a second at the bottom and then um it is it is almost entirely White the Democratic party on the other hand initially became more liberal in 1972 the Democrats nominated probably their most liberal candidate ever in George McGovern they didn't fare very well in the intervening years so by the 1990s they would become more Centrist under Bill Clinton and later Barack Obama and Joe Biden the Democratic party is more of a Centrist party they are also strongest in the Northeast and along the west coast and they are increasingly black and ethnic in fact Lyndon Johnson was the last Democrat to win the majority of the white vote but that white vote is becoming increasingly or or less important over the years I'll talk about that later on when I talk about the post-1965 immigration but I think this this was the sixth party system that's how we Define the two parties in the sixth party system and I think that's the sixth party system Peaks around 2012. I believe we're entering into What's called the seventh party system this is the party system of Donald Trump's Republican Party um but if you look at the 2012 election results that's where you'll see the Democrats are strong in the Northeast they could still win Florida and Ohio they're starting to make a Headway in the Rocky Mountain West uh and the and the Republican party is still strong in the Great Plains along that center of the country and then of course in the Deep South okay so let's meet Richard Nixon Richard Nixon was born in Yorba Linda California on the 9th of January 1913. he would serve as president from 1969 to 1974. uh for you trivia Buffs he was a Quaker the second Quaker president Herbert Hoover was a Quaker as well he was a veteran of World War II a lieutenant commander who served in the U.S Navy in the Pacific Theater he did not have combat experience still he served his country uh he was an anti-communist Crusader when he entered Congress he was very famous famously known as the man who was able to get Alger Hiss we talked about algerhiss earlier on and he was Eisenhower's vice president my favorite quote about Nixon is as president Richard Nixon was only as conservative as he could be and only as liberal as he had to be in other words in today's society ID it's hard to kind of pin down where Nixon would fit Nixon was a conservative he vetoed more than 20 spending bills passed by the Democratic Congress he placed a 2.5 billion annual cap on federal welfare spending he also gave a nod to the state's rights section of the party so this is when the Republicans start championing states rights and he does this through Grant strategies or or so-called block grants where he gives money to the States but doesn't dictate exactly what those states have to do with that money so it's for example instead of saying here is a grant a Federal grant to improve reading scores in schools that have more than 50 percent minority populations that would be a liberal Grant uh what the Liberals would do a conservative block grant would say here's money for education do with it what you will right so there there's that uh see so he's a champion of states rights he also signed into law three crime bills which again is the tough on crime strategy this is often code for cracking down on minorities this is an example of what we call dog whistle politics where you you kind of talk about crime but what you're really talking about is black people uh and and criminal Behavior Uh by African Americans but as the saying goes he was as liberal as he had to be and so Nixon was in many ways a moderate and in some ways would fit in with the Democratic party of uh Clinton Obama and Biden um he expanded the welfare state including Social Security and Medicare he supported affirmative action in 1969 he issued the Philadelphia order which implemented Fair Labor practices in the Philadelphia construction industry and required government contractors in the industry to use affirmative action when hiring minority workers um the Supreme Court under modern conservatives has struck down certain aspects of affirmative action in higher education so that's a big change he also created new agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency he also well you know 1970 Environmental Protection Agency 1971 the occupational safety and health administration OSHA the consumer protection safety commission or consumer product safety Commission in 1972. these are entities that modern Republicans want to see abolished so this is a real change from from the the Republican party of today as president Richard Nixon eased Cold War tensions it's very important for you guys to understand that in foreign policy it was a very successful well at least in in terms of the Cold War he was very successful he pursued what was known as de taunt with the Soviet Union trade agreements Arms Control agreements cultural exchanges the word by the way de taunt is from the French it means release from tension here he is pictured with Leonard Brezhnev who would serve as the the premier of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982. he also opened up formal really or no he opened up relations he didn't make he didn't formalize them but he begins the process of formalizing relations with communist China which the United States did not even recognize until later in the 1970s here he is pictured with Mount saidung so-called Chairman Mao and this is when he came went to Beijing in in 1972. so both of these were taking place during the the presidential election year and Nixon was making some serious inroads into easing tensions in uh in the in the Cold War Nixon brought an end to U.S involvement in Vietnam he did this by implementing what he called Vietnamization the Nixon Doctrine it's the more formal name of the Nixon Doctrine which he announced shortly after his first inaugural uh in the summer of 1969. his plan to end U.S involvement and bring what he called Peace With Honor was to remove U.S troops from combat and replace those troops with South Vietnamese forces the army of the Republic of South Vietnam in other words to quote um what um to paraphrase what Lyndon Johnson had said let Vietnamese boys do Vietnamese fighting in other words get the Americans out and then gradually replace them now give them cover while that was happening he intensified bombing of North Vietnam secretly mined the harbors uh in in the haifan outside Hanoi and he wanted to force the Communists to negotiate so he said we're going to start bombing more heavily up in the north and we want you to come to the table we need you to negotiate this is something that Lyndon Johnson had been talking about since March of 68. now before leaving southeast Asia however Nixon would actually expand the war into neighboring Cambodia and Laos you can see on the map Cambodia is the nation just to the west of South Vietnam Laos is to the west of North Vietnam or at least most of Laos is to the west of North Vietnam it also Border South Vietnam in 1969 he began a secret bombing campaign called operation menu and the idea was to wipe out the Communist bases along the South Vietnamese border this bombing would last four years uh in April of 1970 he are uh he invaded he ordered U.S ground troops into Cambodia he argued that this was necessary to protect the security of American units um that were then in the process of withdrawing from Vietnam but he also wanted to buy security for the Saigon regime so you know these These are dense jungles the lines on the map are are merely that lines on the map and communist guerrillas were were moving freely back and forth between the the two Nations um in the wet in westerners understood these lines um and and played by different rules than communist guerrillas who simply you know went back and forth so Nixon said well I'm going to follow you in there soon after the invasion of Cambodia became public Americans were just outraged Nixon had been promising to end the war but it seemed that he was just escalating it one-third of the college campuses in the United States shut down as students walked out of classes professors joined them administrators joined them one-third of the campuses in this country shut down in protests I want you to read about the events at Kent State University on the 4th of May 1970 Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of student protesters killing four unarmed students this is one of the great tragedies of the anti-war movement back in Vietnam itself morale among U.S soldiers was dropping through the floor the War seemed pointless they were told by their president that that um they were they were ending the war so why should they care we're leaving we need to go home they hear news of indifferent and sometimes hostile homecomings you know these guys were gone for a year and when they come home their buddies go hey where were you you know this wasn't like World War II where everybody was involved in the war effort this was a war in which most of the country wasn't actively involved they hear of the anti-war movement some some U.S personnel committed acts of rebellion attacking officers this is called fragging when they used through fragment grenades into their officer's sleeping quarters a very high desertion rate 74 out of every thousand soldiers were deserting there were mutinies entire units refused to go out on patrol they just they disobeyed orders and of course there was massive drug abuse there a lot of pot smoking a lot of opioid this is the you know the Golden Triangle of opioids and Vietnam southeast Asia was a place where a lot of these people were just you know just killing themselves it's important to understand that American soldiers in World War uh too the average age was 26 and they came from every Walk of Life but in in the Vietnam War the soldiers were disproportionately young the average age was 19 as opposed to 26. they were disproportionately poor because a lot of the middle class and wealthy kids could get some excuse to stay out of the war either a student deferment or they could get a doctor to say that they had some malady like uh bone spurs to keep them out of the war African Americans were disproportionately represented in the war and draftees these are people who never wanted to join the Army in the first place so there's a lot of tension and they just don't want to be there you know that gung-ho spirit is just this doesn't exist foreign the Treaty of Paris was finally concluded on the 27th of January 1973 and you and you could read the full text it basically ends U.S involvement in Southeast Asia the United States agreed to remove its forces from Vietnam or South Vietnam it ended its military operations in Laos in Cambodia it got the North and South to agree to a ceasefire Richard Nixon called this Peace With Honor but what really ends up happening is the war eventually resumes not too long after the United States left and the north would overwhelm the South Saigon would fall on the 30th of April 1975. Vietnam would be United as one nation in one country a nation being different from a country and Saigon would be renamed Ho Chi Minh City privately prior to leaving the peace talks Henry Kissinger had turned to Lee duckto that those are the two men seen shaking hands at the image on the top of the screen he asked them to wait for a decent interval those are his words before resuming the war and that decent interval apparently turned out to be about you know a few months and there's uh images of the U.S abandoning the um the American Embassy in Saigon the famous picture of the helicopter on the roof the Vietnam War was very costly Affair uh 58 000 American Americans lost their lives over 300 000 U.S soldiers were wounded one half of them very seriously they they survived wounds that would have killed soldiers in earlier Wars many came home addicted to drugs many of them had post-traumatic stress disorder many of them had cancer caused by the defoliant agent orange three to four million Vietnamese civilians and soldiers were killed it's impossible to measure the number of non-combatants religious missionaries Red Cross nurses U.S government agency officials the war was very costly it cost about 260 billion dollars which back then was a lot more uh it's it contributed did substantially to inflation which you know we'll see about when we talk about the 1970s and the war would divide the United States for decades in fact in the election of 2004 the two candidates George Bush and John Kerry talked almost as much about the war in Vietnam as they did about the war in Iraq which had begun just one year earlier um it led to what's called um the um the uh Rambo syndrome that's a poster from the second uh Rambo movie the first one being first blood but in the second movie John Rambo um goes off and and and tries to uh save men who had been left behind in Vietnam and the whole argument of the the so-called Rambo syndrome is that we lost the war because weak liberal politicians were unwilling to do all that needed to be done to win the war and so um Americans continue to argue about how we should have gone about conducting this war and whether or not we lost because we simply couldn't beat the Vietnamese or the North Vietnamese and their their Viet Cong allies or because we were just too weak and to Namby pamby to get it done sin was an incredibly complex man he had a very high IQ and he's often described as our King Lear uh tragic paranoid plagued by feelings of inferiority and and it was this paranoia that proved to be his downfall his downfall ultimately came because of a political Scandal that we call Watergate it began with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee on the 17th of June 1972 but water Kate really encompasses an a whole series of crimes acts of corruption cover-up that are collectively known as the Watergate scandal now we learned about these scandals through investigations televised Congressional hearings investigations by law enforcement officials would expose crimes and serious acts of corruption including obstruction of justice by not only the attorney general and high-ranking members of the Nixon Administration but the president himself Richard Nixon was guilty and ultimately he resigned on the 9th of August 1974 the day after Senator Barry Goldwater who was back in the Senate after his failed bid for the presidency the day after Barry Goldwater came to the White House and said Mr Nixon there are enough votes not just to impeach you in the house but to remove you unlike the the impeachments of Andrew Johnson um Bill Clinton or the two Trump impeachments this one would have resulted in removal it was clear to everyone involved that Richard Nixon was guilty the effects of Watergate we still feel to this day it is one of my arguments that after Watergate public cynicism toward politicians intensified the cynicism this notion that everybody is selfish everybody is corrupt really had been growing since the Vietnam War at least cynicism about politics and public affairs you remember the credibility gap where where we were told one thing by the president and by the military and the the uh the opposite was true many people came to see that quote unquote all politicians are corrupt this is not a phrase that should surprise you in fact I I wouldn't be surprised if all of you believe this to be true that all politicians are corrupt Nixon was just the one who got caught I hear today when people are attacking president Trump for his the indictments or the crimes he's been charged with they say well Biden's doing it too without any evidence it doesn't matter we're all certain that everybody's corrupt for the first time or not not for the first time but the majority of Americans no longer trusted their government remember in 1964 the University of Michigan polls said that 75 percent of Americans trusted their government to do the right thing all or most of the time by 1974 that number was down to 15 75 to 15 percent in 30 years and by the way this played right into the hands of conservatives you would think the Republican Nixon would be the person most hurt by this but over the long run it were the Liberals and the people who trusted government that were hurt because conservatives had been telling Americans all along you can't trust government well guess what they've demonstrated you can't trust government the other thing that this leads to is Nixon's criminal Behavior helped Foster a very popular popular belief in the United States that exists to this day that Outsiders make the best political leaders that non-politicians should be running the government only in American politics is the utter lack of experience considered an asset today politicians boast about being Washington Outsiders they don't want to be associated with government having a resume that says yeah look at all the experience I have no we don't want that we want guys like Jesse Ventura a professional wrestler who served for a short time as mayor of a small town we made them uh or the voters of Minnesota made him governor for a term Arnold Schwarzenegger a movie action hero goes from being the Terminator to the governator and Donald Trump who not only never served as in in government before he's the first person with zero zero Public Service experience he never served in the middle there were many people who became president without without serving in politics but they served in the military which is public service he didn't do any of that over time more and more Americans would come to question all authority and there's multiple reasons for this but this is something I'm not I'm not telling anything you don't already know people no longer trust experts they no longer trust the elite people reject science global warming is a hoax Evolution shouldn't be taught in school the number of people who believe that the Earth is flat has been going up steadily in the last 10 years the anti-vaxx movement people we were told wear masks to protect yourself from covet no the scientists the doctors tell them no Keynesian economics a proven economic theory is rejected if I want to lose an argument in public about history all I need to tell somebody is I have a PhD in history and they'll go oh well who cares what you think we're all experts we can't trust the media we can't trust Academia we can't trust science we can't trust the government because all I got to do is go on Wikipedia and you'll see that everything I've taught you today is a lie okay let's move on to Ronald Reagan foreign the unsettling events of the 1970s produced a severe loss of confidence in the American people I'm about to put a list of things on the board I do you don't need to write them down you can take a picture of them you can write them down pause the video if you want but it's more important that you read about these things in your textbook because I'm just going to kind of give you a basically a nice thumbnail history of the the the bad things that were happening in the 1970s we're also we already talked about Watergate but the economy was fragile we were gripped by what was called stagflation which is a rare combination of high inflation and high unemployment we were in the midst of an energy crisis with Rising oil prices an OPEC nations withholding oil and gas or oil rather and there were long gas lines in 1973 and 1974 and then in 1979 and 1980 in 1980 um the price of oil hit 30 dollars a barrel which was 10 times what it was in 1973 and um in 1980 or 79 or 80 the price of gas reached for the first time one dollar a gallon which was unimaginable when we first started selling automobiles um the we witnessed the decline of American industry it was less productive less Innovative major in Industries faltered in the face of foreign competition the United States was in the midst of what historian Paul Kennedy called relative economic decline meaning our growth had slowed and our competitors were were catching up and American companies were starting to move jobs overseas 30 million jobs left the United States in the 1970s cities were in Decay there was crime and poverty in 1975 New York City almost went bankrupt and we talked about Urban Decay before South Vietnamese uh South Vietnam lost the war and our allies had been let down and finally there was the Iranian hostage crisis which you will read about in your textbook the two presidents who followed and you'll also read about these guys they didn't really do anything to restore our confidence they were good guys Gerald Ford of Michigan the only person Not Elected either president or vice president and the only Eagle Scout which is probably the the the the epitome of good and honorable guys um and Democrat Jimmy Carter James Earl Carter of Georgia both of these men served briefly Ford filled out Nixon's term when Nixon resigned and Carter served a single term they were both and by the way Carter was a devout Born Again Evangelical Baptist Deacon you don't get more whole wholesome than that right Southerner he was everything the Democrats thought the American voters wanted they were both men of decency they were both Men of Integrity but neither established reputations as strong Dynamic leaders neither inspired confidence neither seemed to have a clear sense of direction they seemed to Waffle on the major issues of public policies and they were regarded as unsure vacillating politicians well America knew what it wanted and that was in 1980. in the presidential election of 1980 Republican nominee Ronald Reagan of California capitalized on Pub on the Public's frustration he asked Americans are you better off now than you were four years ago running against incumbent Jimmy Carter was seeking a second term and with an annual inflation rate of 18 percent the resounding answer was no Reagan won in an electoral college Landslide 489 to 49. he carried 44 States and almost 51 percent of the vote in a in a three-way race in which the Third Party candidate a congressman John Anderson of Illinois uh siphoned off a number of votes from um the the from the Democrat the Republicans in this election would lose the senate for the first time since 1954. and so you have Ronald Reagan entering the White House it is very important for you to understand that Ronald Reagan owed some of his success to The Growing Power of the Christian right these are Conservative Christian Evangelical voters who helped democratize conservatism by giving it Mass Appeal now these people started or or helped Reagan they are now almost the the the center of the Republican party and they really started get behind Reagan uh late in his campaign over an issue that I'll talk about in a second they claimed to lament the breakdown of what they called Traditional Values think of this as a reaction to The Counter Culture and the rights Revolution they were reacting to feminism to sex drugs and rock and roll they were fighting what came to be called the culture wars now this is a new term to describe an old concept I talked about it when I lectured on the 1920s these voters defined problems in terms of Good and Evil and this is a very important thing for you to understand if something is right or wrong or bad or good you can discuss that with your opponent but if something's evil you cannot compromise you can't compromise with evil if you're if you regard your enemies as evil the discussion's over it's you're not going to compromise so this is rejecting the liberal approach to government that emphasize the the complex social and economic factors behind issues and they must be treated uh you know with intelligence by the late 1970s Republican politicians had discovered the issue that would bring people to the polls and that was abortion now I want you to read about the Roe v Wade decision that was handed down in 1973 but when that decision was handed down leading evangelicals in the country did not think that this was a potent political issue it wasn't until 1978 that the leader of the Moral Majority Jerry Falwell the guy pictured with Richard with Ronald Reagan and he didn't in in the Oval Office in the previous slide he didn't even mention abortion publicly until 1978. so it took a while for this to become the issue in fact abortion was always considered kind of a Catholic issue and evangelicals said well you know there's debates about whether or not it's it's something we should concern ourselves as you recall Roe v Wade overturned State bans on abortion this was a victory for women but it gave Republicans an issue for fundraising for mobilizing voters Reagan won on goldwater's platform by adding a pro-life Plank and the new the new chant for the conservative movement was it's about the judges so let's Overlook the personal flaws of the candidates it doesn't really matter what those candidates do as long as they appoint the right judges to office and so America would elect its first divorced president Ronald Wilson Reagan the 40th President of the United States a republican from California he was the oldest person to that time to be elected president a former movie actor and governor of California he's the only Union president to become a president of the United States he was president of the Screen Actors Guild Reagan did restore some respect to the presidency he was a likable man he had strong convictions he had a good sense of humor he was in the words of his supporters the great communicator who had a talent for reading speeches he had a kind of warm grandfatherly style to him that a lot of Americans really really got behind good with a teleprompter not so good off the cuff but he had that verbal tick you know when he spoke he was on well and whale and the kind of comma there kind of gave him that kind of wholesome stuff uh that that people like during his two terms in office he practiced an economic policy that came to be called Reaganomics this was a popular name for supply-side economics an economic theory associated with a an economist named Arthur Laffer now according to this theory if you cut taxes you will raise revenue because cutting taxes will encourage people to spend money consumers would spend money businesses would invest in new plants new technology and that would actually increase Revenue so it meant cutting taxes and deregulation deregulating businesses and Banks allowing businesses and Banks to do things without the government overlooking it all the time but it also meant cutting environmental regulations and safety regulations he cut Federal support for labor unions all of this was done to lower the cost of doing business this is known as neoliberalism which we're hearkening back to kind of 19th century laissez-faire economics liberals would criticize it as trickle-down economics the idea that the if you cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans the benefits would flow down to the poorest Americans but in reality the benefits of the Reagan policies tended to stay with the wealthy this is the beginning of the end of what I identified as the great compression the gap between the wealthiest Americans and the poorest Americans would grow but in the mid-1980s it seemed as if his policies were working the inflation rate was at 13.5 percent one in 1980 but by 1986 is it it was at 1.9 percent in November of 1982 the stock market began a meteoric five-year rise unemployment declined during the 1980s and in 1984 the American voters re-elected Reagan in a landslide that was comparable to the one won by FDR in 36 and LBJ in 1990 1964. I had this on the screen here just to kind of point a little bit of trivia and a very important moment in American history um the on the right hand side you see the PIN for Mondale and Ferraro um don't be confused Mondale was this guy the guy here he ran for president but Geraldine Ferraro was nominated to be Vice President of the United States it's the first woman on a national ticket of a major political party in American history now like every president since Truman Reagan was a cold warrior initially during his first term he took a very hard line stand against the Soviet Union in 1983 he referred to them as the evil empire and he often talked or at least once often at least once same thing he talked about winning a nuclear war now since the 1950s most people understood that uh mad meant that if one person started it one side started a war it would mean obliteration mutually assured destruction but he's privately talking about or he talked about winning a nuclear war he oversaw a massive Indus increase in defense spending during his administration he supported the development of the so-called uh Star Wars or space-based defensive Shield now this would this was Platforms in space that would shoot down incoming missiles despite the fact that the United States did not have the technology to build it despite the fact that it probably violated arms treaties so the United States was building up its military talking about expanding the Cold War into space referring to the Soviet Union as an evil empire with this in his first term Americans were shocked that in his second term he improved relations with the Soviet Union he took a more conciliatory approach with the new premier Mikhail Gorbachev they genuinely liked one another Reagan did have the Good Fortune of of being president at a time when the leader of the Soviet unions or the leaders of the Soviet Union were dying pretty quickly Elena Brezhnev died in November of 82 then his successor yorian tropov died in February of 84 and his successor Constantine chernenko lasted just over a year dying in March of 85. so this new younger man comes in and the two guys genuinely liked each other they agreed to remove 25 000 missiles from Europe they eliminated an entire category of weapons and they visited each other's capitals to sign treaties I love this Photograph on the screen because you could see Reagan's warmth and Gorbachev's work these guys liked one another and that's always important when it comes to foreign policy foreign was a hands-off style of leader he really admired Calvin Coolidge who slept nine hours at night and two and took a two hour nap during the day he thought that he should be kind of CEO and that he should allow the the guys that he appoints to run things but that hands-off style of leadership led to many scandals during his administration I need you to read about the most notorious and one of the more complex scandals at least in describing it's really not that complex once you find out what's going on there were major scandals the most notorious was Iran Contra 32 members of his administration were convictive crimes I often compare him to Ulysses Grant I don't think Reagan was personally corrupt but he did tend to surround himself with people who were quick to take things out of the public coffers so you can see in his administration one historian or journalist rather referred to Reagan as quote sleep walking through history arguing that Reagan's lack of hands-off leadership allowed for this kind of stuff to happen by the time Reagan left office most Americans were feeling the impact of our right word conservative term middle class had stagnated real wages has stagnated paychecks are bigger but purchasing power has hardly budged since 1978. the legacy of Reaganomics the impact of this new conservatism was extreme budget deficits we increased spending especially military spending while cutting taxes George H.W bush who was running against Reagan for the nomination in 1980 called it voodoo economics until he was put on the ticket and then he remained silent as to his opinions of that there was an upward redistribution of wealth in other words a reversing of the great compression there were cuts to social welfare programs in other words we're reversing the Great Society and then there was a growing gap between rich and poor growing income inequality which continues into the 21st century we entered into what a lot of historians call a second Gilded Age so we have the robber barons of the 1890s and the yuppies and hedge fund managers of the second Gilded Age we have a pop culture that celebrates inequality or at least excuses inequality and greed in the 1890s and if you look at the self uh the the popular culture of the 1980s it's about self-indulgence it's about materialism it's about it's about ego it's about individualism and selfishness and so we've we've come to a new place that is a lot like the old place well I hope you got something out of this lecture um and I hope I insist that you read the textbook so that you can fill in the blanks as it were until next time peace