Reagan’s election owed less to the triumph of antiliberal conservatism, however, than to a collapse within liberalism. The Vietnam War fractured the liberal establishment of both parties, and there was general public disenchantment with the Great Society programs and the “welfare state” as it had evolved by the late 1970s. This disenchantment had a potent racial component, which Reagan and other Republican politicians exploited—brandishing the racially loaded stereotype of the “welfare queen.”
