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    All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s
    Unavailable
    All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s
    Unavailable
    All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s
    Ebook810 pages12 hours

    All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s

    By Robert O. Self

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    About this ebook

    In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty promised an array of federal programs to assist working-class families. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan declared the GOP the party of "family values" and promised to keep government out of Americans' lives. Again and again, historians have sought to explain the nation's profound political realignment from the 1960s to the 2000s, five decades that witnessed the fracturing of liberalism and the rise of the conservative right. The award-winning historian Robert O. Self is the first to argue that the separate threads of that realignment—from civil rights to women's rights, from the antiwar movement to Nixon's "silent majority," from the abortion wars to gay marriage, from the welfare state to neoliberal economic policies—all ran through the politicized American family.

    Based on an astonishing range of sources, All in the Family rethinks an entire era. Self opens his narrative with the Great Society and its assumption of a white, patriotic, heterosexual man at the head of each family. Soon enough, civil rights activists, feminists, and gay rights activists, animated by broader visions of citizenship, began to fight for equal rights, protections, and opportunities. Led by Pauli Murray, Gloria Steinem, Harvey Milk, and Shirley Chisholm, among many others, they achieved lasting successes, including Roe v. Wade, antidiscrimination protections in the workplace, and a more inclusive idea of the American family.

    Yet the establishment of new rights and the visibility of alternative families provoked, beginning in the 1970s, a furious conservative backlash. Politicians and activists on the right, most notably George Wallace, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, and Jerry Falwell, built a political movement based on the perceived moral threat to the traditional family. Self writes that "family values" conservatives in fact "paved the way" for fiscal conservatives, who shared a belief in liberalism's invasiveness but lacked a populist message. Reagan's presidency united the two constituencies, which remain, even in these tumultuous times, the base of the Republican Party. All in the Family, an erudite, passionate, and persuasive explanation of our current political situation and how we arrived in it, will allow us to think anew about the last fifty years of American politics.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781429955560
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    All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s
    Author

    Robert O. Self

    ROBERT O. SELF is an Associate Professor of History at Brown University. His research focuses on urban history, the history of race and American political culture, post-1945 U.S. society and culture, and gender and sexuality in American politics. His first book, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, won four professional prizes, including the James A. Rawley prize from the Organization of American Historians (OAH). He is currently at work on a book about gender, sexuality, and political culture in the United States from 1964 to 2004.

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    • 4/5

      Jul 19, 2018

      In All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, Robert O. Self argues, “If ‘equal rights’ had been the driving force of American politics in one era, three decades on, ‘family values’ had usurped that position” (pg. 3). The developed from the creation of what Self defines as breadwinner conservatism, in which conservatives portrayed the ideal family and society as a patriarchal one in which men worked and women raised children. Self writes of his monograph, “The history recounted here shows that Americans rarely fought about equality, power, and money without invoking one idealized version of family or another” (pg. 6). To this end, Self argues, “The question is not whether gender, sex, and family are structured and regulated by the state; the question is what kinds of regulations exist and to what end” (pg. 12). Self organizes his book into four sections, tracing postwar masculinity, women’s responses through the mid 1970s, the place of sex in society in the late sixties through 1980, and the conservative pushback from the early 1970s through 2011.Self argues that ideas of breadwinning and independence defined middleclass identity from the nineteenth century and that, “if men failed to become breadwinners and support families…it was a personal failure, not a social one” (pg. 19). While African Americans attempted to use masculinity to validate the black power movement, whites found black masculinity threatening. Echoing K.A. Curodileone’s discussion of Cold War masculinity, Self writes, “The Cold War draft was fraught with anxiety for many American men, not least because it entailed an encounter with the military’s sexual regime” (pg. 75). The military represented a force for heteronormative masculinity. Worse, the troubles in Vietnam threatened the masculinity of the military. Later, women responded to this archaic masculinity by casting “the female body as the site of political struggle, the place where the intimate and personal became the legal and public, where the personal became the political” (pg. 134). Feminists placed birth control and control of one’s body at the forefront of the political battle in order to claim their power in the public sphere. Alongside all of this, questions arose over “what role should the government play in the regulation of sexual knowledge and who ought to set the terms of sex itself – men or women” (pg. 190). New publications disseminated information about sex and the body. In response, “the anti-sex-education activists viewed the family, not the government, as the natural site of morality, ethics, and responsibility” (pg. 200). Self approaches the neoconservative revolution, arguing, “Only by considering the politics of gender, sex, and sexuality in tandem with – and just embedded in – the politics of race can we understand how breadwinner conservatism. For some whites, racial animosity fueled their breadwinner politics…For others, struggles over gender, sex, and family were enough to propel them rightward” (pg. 275). In the 1976 campaign, “‘Family’ had quite suddenly and powerfully joined communism and civil rights as the battlegrounds on which conservatives would wage war against liberalism” (pg. 309-310). Conservative evangelicalism helped to bind these traditionally conservative, yet disparate thoughts together. When Self writes of Reagan, he argues, “The gushy nostalgia among conservatives for Reagan in the twenty-first century has obscured the reality of that era’s conservatism, which met success and failure in equal measure” (pg. 367). Self argues that the greatest success of Reagan was to shift “the political debate about American citizenship away from rights toward government provision – what government ought to provide” (pg. 398). Further, “it recast liberalism for large numbers of Americans as a moral threat rather than as a lift up” (pg. 398). While there were other victories for the left into the early 2000s, the conservatives successfully changed the terms of the debate.