I think that misses something.
The key thing, in my mind, was that the Pentagon Papers revealed that the American public had been lied to by the Government about the war’s cause. And the truth was ugly.
That the war ultimately became a “failure” is less relevant.
But the social safety net, beginning back with the New Deal programs, was supposed to have been fundamentally for white people. We’ve discussed not so long ago, for example, how the Federal Housing Authority “financed Levittown, the emblem of postwar suburbanization, on the condition that none of its 17,500 homes be sold to blacks”, and similar institutionalized racism in other social programs.
That segregated “racial order”, as we’ve also discussed recently, was itself originally a bait offered to the white working class by white elites in order to win their support for laws that favored elites:
So yes, there’s a lot of truth to the statement that civil rights legislation, and antipoverty legislation that was widely perceived as helping black people, made a lot of white voters feel betrayed on some level. They had bought into the concept of “white solidarity” and “white supremacy” that white elites worked so hard to sell them, and the realization that after all that they didn’t even get to keep their status of being automatically “better” than black people was infuriating.
This attitude is by no means extinct among white Americans, as, for example the rising support for “white nationalism” under Trump attests.
I had an Anthro professor who had led an interesting life. He was a Marine in the Pacific during WWII, then an honet-to-God hippie in the '60s. Died in an ultralight accident in the '90s. I still recall him telling us the mistrust with government stemmed from WWII. He said before the war, you could take to the bank just about anything the government said, but then with the war came all these programs aimed at duplicity and secrecy in a bid to confuse and deceive the enemy, and it never got straightened out.
That’s probably oversimplified, but I think there’s a grain of truth there.
This is the opposite of what actually happened. The 20 years between the end of WW2 and the start of the Great Society had seen the largest drop in the black poverty rate in history. It went from about 68% in 1947 to 39% in 1967. This progress stagnated in the 1970s only going down to 32.5% in 1980.
Meanwhile skyrocketing crime rates hit black people the hardest. In 1980 black people were 64% more likely to be a victim of a homicide than they were in 1960.
Because of this trust in the federal government has been lower than whites since the mid 60s.
Hey, c’mon, you just can’t have a thread mentioning Reagan without one of Shodan’s revisionist hagiographies about The Gipper. :rolleyes:
So it’s a well - documented fact that racial resentment played a hugely disruptive role in party politics and basically cast the Republicans into the demographic set they now represent. I see most of the posts here citing Vietnam, and other malicious things like Watergate. Those are the ‘big issues’ that I read about most often.
Aside from these three things, to what extent did other events shape people’s thinking? The Kennedy assassination? Bay of Pigs? Intelligence oversight committees? McCarthyism?
The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Yes, the post-WWII economic boom had a beneficial effect for blacks as well as others in the US. But that doesn’t in any way contradict the fact that civil rights and welfare legislation starting in the 1960s angered many white voters and made them more mistrustful of government.
I don’t know what you actually meant to say in this sentence nor where you got your information, but if your intent was to claim something along the lines of “levels of trust in the federal government have been lower among blacks than whites since the mid-60s”, that is patently false.
As this Pew Research Center study on “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2017” shows, governmental trust levels among blacks actually rose to equal white levels during the mid-1960s, dropped below white levels in the 1970s through 1980s, equaled white levels again in the 1990s, dropped again in the 2000s and consistently exceeded white levels from about 2010 to 2016.
I prefer to call him Open-Carry-Banner. 'Cuz those black people with guns are scary or someshit.
None of this supports your conclusion that Reagan supporters were a result of a backlash again black civil rights or social programs that helped blacks.
That’s one of the benefits of growing up in West Virginia. We have very few black people here. So when we complain about people in the community mooching, it’s not about blacks. When police pull someone over because they were acting stupid, not because they are black, but because they showed signs of lawbreaking.
I get many out of state clients who complain that they were pulled over simply because they are black. I look at the paperwork and pretty quickly conclude that, nope, you were driving at 85mph with weed smoke rolling out your windows and your music blasting and a dead tag. I get a whole bunch of white boys pulled over for that.
Racism had come a long way from 1964 to 1980. It is even better now. Most white people don’t care at all about race and these types of posts and arguments are without support and continue to try to keep the racial divide alive for political purposes.
And despite your anecdata, statistics agree that you are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated if you have skin darker than a Starbucks coffee than if you burn if you even look outside at the sun. CRAZY!
Hell, there was a feeling that EVERYTHING the government touched wound up broken.
We didn’t just get a 1973 oil embargo and higher gas prices, we got EPA clean air regulations for cars. Detroit reacted with emission control systems that made every car run badly. And a 55 mph speed limit. (And just to cap things, automakers had to add those ugly crash-resistant bumpers!) That led to the rise in popularity of foreign cars, which somehow led to the resentment that government crippled the car industry.
Nixon’s agricultural policy, which emphasized maximum production and foreign exports, happened to coincide with a drought that cut crop yields and led to a sharp increase in food prices in the mid-70s, so government was blamed for killing family farms AND making food more expensive.
New York City ran out of money. Many saw it as a failure of big government welfare state, while others were mad at Gerald Ford’s seemingly cold-hearted response.
The Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress in 1972, but was turned into a wedge issue by conservatives (Unisex bathrooms!)
It’s no wonder Doonesbury summed up the 70s by calling it “a kidney stone of a decade.”
I call bullshit.
From Table 9:
In 1960, 22.2% of Americans lived in poverty. By 1969, it was 12.1%. Since then, the poverty rate has never exceeded 15%. In the south, 35.4% were in poverty in 1959, 17.9% in 1969.
Every time someone gets the urge to praise Saint Ronald of Reagan, remember these quotes:
Medicare is a great success story, people who have it like it, but if we had listened to Saint Ronnie, the mortality and poverty rates of the elderly would be much higher than it is today
The Great Society’s war on poverty started in 1964. The percentage of people in poverty in 1954 before was about 26%. Before the war on poverty it fell 7% to 19% in 1964 and then another 7% to 12% in 1969. It then stagnated for the entire decade of the seventies and was higher in 1980 than in 1970 despite the billions of dollars that had been spent.
A Stanford studyfound that Medicare had no impact on the mortality rates of those covered.
The study you linked to only covered the first ten years of Medicare, from 1965 to 1975. Your data is therefore forty years out of date. :dubious:
Cite.So Carter inherited a poverty rate that was high, and it got worse. Reagan inherited a poverty rate that was high, and it got better (after a spike early in his first term).
Regards,
Shodan
Piffle. Poverty rates go up when the economy goes down. Reagan was the beneficiary of an economy that was due for a rebound, Carter the victim of an economy that was due for a downturn (also made worse by the huge increase in oil prices which were beyond our control and had to wind its way through the economy).
Nobody’s saying that white backlash against racial equality was the only factor contributing to Reagan-era governmental mistrust. But to claim that it wasn’t a significant factor at all is just willful blindness to a lot of well-documented research, as described, for instance, here.
Dude. I know you didn’t mean either of these statements the way they initially come across. But seriously, can you really be a lawyer and be that oblivious to what your wording sounds like?
The only way to study a program like Medicare is to compare those who are on it with comparable people who are not. Since all seniors in the country are now on it the only way to study is to compare mortality pre and post passage. This is what the study does and why it only covers 10 years.
Right. I’m still going to wait a while before I declare Medicare a failure in lengthening human life, if you don’t mind. 
So some guy named Higgins who writes a personal opinion with no citations is your authority? It is just convenient fodder to pin everything to racism.
Again, enough with the “you can’t be a lawyer if you do X” personal fucking insult. This is not a court and nobody here is my client. I don’t feel the need to proofread each of my posts as if I am drafting a legal brief to the United States Supreme Court.
I am not giving a formal oral argument. I am simply a poster here, and say what is on my mind. I am not here in my capacity as an attorney.