many goals of postwar American liberalism, notably the dismantling of Jim Crow and the rise of federal standards in social policy, especially for the disabled and the elderly, were far closer to realization in 1974 than they had been in 1945, and they endured thereafter in a political culture that, while more conservative than it had been in the mid-1960s, continued to support social programs. These standards were considerably more generous than people in the 1940s and 1950s might have imagined possible. Backlash did not kill everything.
