Another Good Day for the Conservative Backlash

It’s been almost fifty years since Richard Nixon settled on his “Southern strategy” of mobilizing white voters alienated by civil-rights reforms. Almost the same amount of time has elapsed since the John Olin Foundation and other conservative groups set out to rein in the nation’s courts, and, in particular, the Supreme Court, which had played a key role in expanding the civil-rights agenda.

Both of these efforts reflected a broad-based backlash, overwhelmingly white, that Lyndon Johnson, Patrick Moynihan, and others foresaw quite clearly during the nineteen-sixties. Partly for demographic reasons, however, the political backlash eventually ran out of steam. After winning five elections out of six between 1968 and 1988, Nixon’s Republican party lost the popular vote in five out of the six subsequent elections, and it might well lose the next one, too. At the level of national politics, the old cry that whites are being treated unfairly seems to have lost some of its potency.

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