hey there and welcome back to heimlich's history and furthermore welcome to the last topic video of unit 8 of the ap us history curriculum all through this period we've been seeing the rising tides of liberalism take hold in america and now it's time to hear from the conservatives so if you're ready to get them brain cows milk focus on the family style let's get to it oh it's got me cracked up i can't i can't keep going okay you know what we're just going to leave it in so during the period we've been considering from 1945 to 1980 many gains had been made for the liberal cause especially lyndon johnson's great society program and the women's liberation movement but all of that as you can imagine made the conservatives of this age pretty dang twitchy and now we need to see what's happening on the other side of the aisle now the crowning achievement of conservatism in this period really came in the election of ronald reagan in 1980 but we're gonna deal with that more in the next unit for now let's consider the roots of the conservative backlash in the 60s and the 70s if you were conservative during that time then you would have been pooping your modest pants at the seismic cultural shifts happening street protests against the vietnam war were happening outside the structure of the traditional american family was changing due to the women's movement and if you were southern and white which most conservatives were in the south then the gains made by the civil rights movement further evacuated your bowels so what did the conservatives do about all this well in a previous video i mentioned the young americans for freedom group that was a movement of conservative college students and they were instrumental in the campaign of barry goldwater for president in 1964. in this campaign he coined the phrase the new right which was a coalition of conservatives who resisted the onslaught of liberalism were proud of their religious values were openly populist and anti-egalitarian which is to say they believed men and women had their designated spheres another manifestation of this movement was the creation of the john birch society this was a group of conservatives who opposed communism and advocated for limited government and spun out right-wing conspiracy theories about the issues of the day for example they opposed the government's effort to put fluoride into the water supply because it was some kind of mass medicine designed to keep us subservient now to be fair the two examples i just used were part of a more radical conservatism growing up during this period but a more moderate conservatism also gained strength representing this stripe is william f buckley in his influential magazine called the national review he denounced folks like the john birch society as cranks because he feared that the whole conservative movement will be radicalized by their efforts now all bound up with this conservative movement was the rapid growth of the religious right this group included a large group of conservative christians who organized to oppose liberal and progressive trends but the issue that really cranked their engine up was the roe v wade decision in 1973 which legalized abortion this had the effect of helping protestant christians drop their long-held suspicion of catholic christians and unite on an issue that they all agreed upon in 1979 a pastor and evangelist named jerry falwell founded the moral majority which so closely melded christianity with conservative politics that it was difficult to know where one started and the other ended falwell held i love america rallies which was a significant departure from his southern baptist conviction on the separation between church and state in fact he argued that it was this very separation of church and state that was the cause of the moral decay all around them along these same lines you had the rise of james dobson's focus on the family radio program dobson's program wasn't as blatantly political as falwell's efforts but that's only because he was more adept at hiding it dobson argued passionately for the reintroduction of prayer into schools and to resist the expansion of gay rights and much much more now all mixed up in this conservative backlash in america were some pretty significant national events first there was economic turmoil and if you remember in the last video i mentioned that in the 1970s america had an oil crisis on its hands so take the oil crisis and add some stagflation to the pot stagflation is an economic mess in which inflation is running rampant but the economy is very stagnant and all that combined into a pot led to a nasty recession stew in the 1970s president nixon attempted to remedy this problem by cutting federal spending but that only made things worse and now people's confidence in the government to fix our problems began to wane and if the people needed even more reasons to lose faith in the government then they got one the watergate scandal so richard nixon was reelected in 1972 but men hired by his re-election committee were caught breaking into the watergate office complex which housed the democratic party's headquarters attempted to bug phones and steal documents now nixon denied any knowledge of this blatant illegality but after months of investigation it became clear that he did in fact know about the activity and worse he endorsed it and then to make things even worse he lied about it on multiple occasions and so as the impeachment resolution seemed imminent nixon resigned and went ahead and flushed whatever remaining confidence the people had left in their government right down the toilet okay so all of that is going on while this new conservative moment is arising and conservatives are clashing with liberals all over the dang place in another video on the women's rights movement i mentioned the equal rights amendment which proposed a constitutional amendment to make sure that women were on equal footing with men however thanks largely to the efforts of conservatives like phyllis schlafly the era was never ratified conservatives also clashed with liberals over affirmative action now this was a program that arose out of the civil rights movement and not only did activists want to get rid of the oppressive structures of systemic racism they also wanted to take affirmative action to make sure those wrongs were now made right and this basically meant that race would be a factor in hiring decisions and college admission in some cases this meant that a certain number of positions or a certain number of applicants had to be of a certain race now as you can imagine this led to a great deal of conservative white resentment a white person could now be passed over for a job for which he or she had sterling qualifications just because that job was reserved for a black person or in some cases other minorities and this resentment came to a head when a student named alan bakke was denied admission to the university of california he argued that he was being discriminated against for being white since the admissions department set aside 16 spots for minority applicants and so this case wound up before the supreme court in baki versus the university of california in 1978. the court handed down a decision that such minority quotas were unconstitutional and violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment even so the decision didn't rule out race as a factor for admission only that it ought not be the only determinant so all of this growth of the conservative movement is really going to reach its peak in the next period so i will see you there okay that's what you need to know about unit 8 topic 14 and if you need more help getting an a in your class and a five on your exam in may then click right here and go review packet if you want me to keep making these videos you can tell me that by subscribing heimler out