Atlantic
(Opinion)
By Peter Beinart
July 10, 2015
What
do NBC and ESPN’s decision to cut ties with Donald Trump in retaliation
for his comments about Mexican immigrants, the South Carolina House’s
vote to take down the
Confederate flag, and a Harrisburg newspaper’s decision to “very
strictly limit” letters and op-eds opposing same-sex marriage have in
common? They’re all signs of a historic shift: Political views that were
once controversial are now unacceptable.
We’ve
seen such shifts before. Until the 1960s, supporting legal segregation
of the races was a respectable position among both conservative
Democrats and Republicans,
and was championed by such intellectual eminences as William F.
Buckley. After Congress passed the civil- and voting-rights acts, it no
longer was. Until the 1980s, prominent conservatives defended apartheid
South Africa as a staunch U.S. ally besieged by
Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, which the Reagan
administration classified as a terrorist group. After apartheid ended,
Mandela became the equivalent of Martin Luther King, a man revered by
left and right alike.
It’s
not just conservatives who have been forced to abandon once mainstream
opinions in the wake of political and cultural change. In the 1930s,
prominent progressive
intellectuals and artists spoke admiringly about communism and the
Soviet Union. Once the Cold War dawned in the late 1940s, such views
cost some of them their jobs. In the 1960s, some New Left thinkers and
activists denounced monogamy and organized religion—and
condemned not just the Vietnam War, but anti-communism itself. By the
more culturally conservative 1980s, such views were confined to an
academic fringe.
Political views that were once controversial are now unacceptable.
What
creates such change? Obviously, part of it is electoral reality. In
1948, Henry Wallace tested the proposition that a candidate who had
accepted the Communist Party’s
endorsement could attract widespread support. He won 2.4 percent of the
vote. In 1972, George McGovern tested the proposition that America
would embrace a candidate who called for ending not merely the Vietnam
War, but the Cold War itself. He won a single
state.
That’s
part of what’s happening in the Republican Party now. GOP elites are
pushing back against Donald Trump because the 2008 and 2012 elections
taught them that demonizing
Mexican immigrants is political death.
But
such shifts aren’t only political. The Republican South Carolina
legislators voting to take down the Confederate flag aren’t doing so
because they fear losing their
seats. NASCAR and the PGA aren’t cutting ties with Trump because
they’re worried about the GOP’s fortunes in 2016.
Politicians
alone can’t render a once-acceptable opinion beyond the pale. They need
allies in the cultural and economic sphere. It wasn’t only Harry Truman
who defeated
Henry Wallace and the pro-Soviet left. In the late 1940s, some of
America’s most important intellectuals—men like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
and Reinhold Niebuhr—began arguing that communism was as anathema to
liberalism as was fascism. In the early 1970s, it
wasn’t only Democratic bosses like Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley who
loathed McGovern. An entire community of intellectuals—the early
“neoconservatives”—revolted against McGovernism. Some of these
intellectuals, like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, migrated
to the political right. But others, like Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, and Nathan Glazer, remained on the left. In the 1980s, they
were joined by The New Republic and the Democratic Leadership Council,
institutions that waged a successful intellectual
campaign to make McGovernism unacceptable on the mainstream left.
If
cultural elites helped render certain left-wing views unacceptable in
the 1940s, 1970s, and 1980s, economic elites are helping render certain
right-wing views unacceptable
today. David Brooks foresaw this phenomenon fifteen years ago when he
wrote Bobos in Paradise, arguing that corporate America was embracing
the liberal-cultural ethos of the 1960s. In 2003, Intel, Merck, and
Boeing all filed briefs urging the Supreme Court
to uphold affirmative action in college admissions. Earlier this year,
Goldman Sachs, Google, and Coca-Cola urged the Court to legalize
same-sex marriage. In South Carolina, the state’s chamber of commerce
and manufacturer’s association lobbied Governor Nikki
Haley to remove the Confederate flag. And since Trump’s comments about
undocumented Mexican immigrants, he’s faced harsher retribution from
many of the corporations he does business with than from the Republicans
he’s running against. If Democratic Party leaders
once needed liberal intellectuals to marginalize Wallace and McGovern’s
views about communism, Republican leaders need corporate America to
marginalize the anti-gay rights, anti-Mexican, pro-Confederate flag wing
of their party today.
Eventually,
they’ll probably succeed. By 2020, it’s hard to imagine a Republican
nominee who doesn’t back gay marriage, comprehensive immigration reform,
and an end to
government displays of the Confederate flag.
So
what happens to the millions of Americans who have suddenly found their
views deemed beyond the pale by America’s political, economic, and
cultural elites? If history
is any guide, they’ll go underground. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the
Old Left that had sympathized with the USSR crumbled. But a
clandestine-radical tradition remained. And when the New Left erupted
during Vietnam, it included many “red-diaper” babies—children
from families that, quietly, had always opposed the Cold War. Something
similar happened after the invasion of Iraq, when a new generation of
progressive “netroots” activists began looking admiringly at the
McGovernites who had turned the Democratic Party
against the Vietnam War.
Opposition
to same-sex marriage, crude attacks on Mexican immigrants, and support
for the Confederate flag may be growing less acceptable. But the
political tradition
that underpins those views will remain, and in unpredictable ways, it
will adapt to 21st-century demographics. For a glimpse into that future,
just look at Bobby Jindal, an Indian American, Hindu-born Rhodes
Scholar who is running against hyphenated Americanism
and suggesting that the Supreme Court be abolished for contradicting
the Bible.
Sooner
or later, political upheaval will spark new movements aimed at
distinguishing between those Americans who deserve equal citizenship and
those who don’t. And as
Jindal’s career suggests, these movements may prove more multicultural
than we can today imagine. I don’t look forward to the return to
political acceptability of forces aimed at denying certain Americans the
same rights and dignity as everyone else. But the
tradition is too deeply rooted in our national character to ever truly
die.
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