by Bill Bishop
Contrary to today, there was no relationship between church attendance and party. Regular churchgoers voted both Democratic and Republican. Liberal churchgoers tended to vote Democratic, it's true, and conservative churchgoers tended to vote Republican. But politics weren't defined in moral terms. In 1962, a review of political ideology could conclude that "one reason for the low political tension ... in the United States [is that] politics has not been moralized; the parties have not been invested with strong moral feeling; the issues are not seen as moral issues; the political leaders have not been made moral heroes or villains."8
In Congress, members visited, talked across party boundaries. They hung out at the gym, socialized at receptions, and formed friendships that had nothing to do with party or ideology. (After all, members had been elected more on their personal connections at home—what V. O. Key called "friends and neighbors" politics—than by the force of party or policy.)9 The national calm was pervasive, and so in Congress, "this era, from roughly 1948 to the mid 1960s, was the most bi-partisan period in the history of the modern Congress."10 Bipartisanship to this degree, some thought, had put the nation into a dangerous kind of democratic coma. (The parties were weak. They had only opened permanent national headquarters in the late 1930s and early 1940s.) Concerned about electoral torpor and meaningless political debate, the American Political Science Association in 1946 appointed a committee to examine the role of parties in the American system. Four years later, the committee published a lengthy (and alarmed) report calling for the return of ideologically distinct and powerful political parties. Parties ought to stand for distinct sets of policies, the political scientists urged. Voters should be presented with clear choices. And after an election, the winning party should be held responsible for enacting its platform. The political scientists' hope was that the parties would become more ideological, so that voters could have a "true choice in reaching public decisions." The committee of political scientists issued a list of recommendations: House terms should be longer, there should be more frequent national conventions, and party platforms and caucuses should be more powerful.11
A call for greater partisanship appeared to be a grand lesson in the downside of wish fulfillment during the presidential campaign of 2004. Somehow, Americans went from an indifferent society whose greatest concern was an epidemic of conformity to one with political parties so ideological that Republicans and Democrats in Congress can barely speak to one another. We've gone from lacking ideology to lacking moderation—from a period when people from different parties mixed to thirty years of increasing political segregation.
The events of the 1960s were so vivid and so dramatic (at least for those Americans who had lived through them) that they became the common explanation for everything that came after. We all like a nice narrative—a beginning, middle, and end—and chronologically the sixties provided the perfect rationale for what came after. But life doesn't always move linearly, A to B to C. Although the events of the sixties appeared to have knocked the country out of its heterogeneous complacency, underneath these events—the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy—a slower, deeper, and largely invisible shift was changing how people went about their lives. The lasting imprint of the fifties wasn't the conformity of men in gray flannel suits, but a new and widespread economic prosperity. Abundance changed the culture in ways less evident than the upheaval of the sixties, but in a manner more profound.
The Silent Revolution
In the early 1970s, Professor Ronald Inglehart at the University of Michigan proposed a theory for why all industrialized countries appeared to be undergoing similar changes in their cultures and politics. Inglehart hypothesized that when people grew up in relative abundance, their social values—what they wanted out of life—changed. People who knew that their basic needs were satisfied would gradually adopt different values from those who lived with scarcity. Hungry people cared about survival, Inglehart said. But those who grew up in abundance would be more concerned with self-expression.12 Those who lived in times of depression or joblessness esteemed economic growth. Those who knew plenty were more concerned about the environment and individual choice.
Inglehart's theory of social change rested on psychiatrist Abraham Maslow's theory that people act according to a "hierarchy of needs."13 Maslow's list was specific—individuals seek to satisfy thirst before hunger, for example. In his model of human behavior, after basic physical demands are satisfied, new needs arise: survival is followed by security, then social connections, and eventually self-fulfillment. Inglehart applied Maslow's concepts about individual psychology to society and culture. He theorized that rapid economic development had produced a "new worldview" that was "gradually replacing the outlook that has dominated industrializing societies since the Industrial Revolution." The fulfillment of material needs would generally be taken for granted, and education levels would rise along with incomes, he surmised. And all that material progress, he found, "brings unforeseen changes—change in gender roles, attitudes toward authority and sexual norms; declining fertility rates; broader political participation; and less easily led publics."14
Inglehart's theory made predictions for these "post-materialist" societies: People would lose interest in traditional religion. They would become increasingly involved with notions of personal spirituality. Class, economic growth, and military security would decline in political importance, replaced by issues of personal freedom, abortion rights, gay rights, and the environment. Material goods would lose cachet as people sought to fill their lives with unique experiences. People would be less inclined to obey central authority and would lose trust in traditional hierarchical institutions—the big organizations that had created America's modern, industrial society: the federal government, broad-based civic groups, and traditional church denominations.
Furthermore, people wouldn't participate in politics in the same old ways, Inglehart hypothesized. Instead of being "elite-directed," they would engage in "elite-challenging" activities. They would vote less but be more likely to join a boycott or sign a petition. People wouldn't become disengaged from politics, even though voting percentages would decline. Rather, they would adopt a politics of self-expression. Postmaterialists wouldn't settle for picking between two candidates. They would want to make decisions themselves, acting more directly on their political choices instead of following the orders of leaders.15
Inglehart predicted one more aspect of this post-materialist phenomenon: since the cultural transformation would happen at a generational pace, it would be in a sense a "silent revolution."16 People would assume that the "erosion of confidence" in government, religion, and social institutions was because these institutions were singularly corrupt or inefficient. But the decline of trust wouldn't be peculiar to a place or government, Inglehart wrote. "We are witnessing a downward trend in trust in government and confidence in leaders across most industrial societies."17
Inglehart then tested his theory. Beginning in 1970, he conducted surveys around the globe, looking for signs of a culture shift. His first poll studied a half-dozen countries. Now his World Values Survey includes eighty societies that encompass more than 75 percent of the world's population. Inglehart has found that not all cultures change as fast or as much as others. The Nordic cultures are the most "post-materialist," while Americans are stubbornly traditional. (Here Inglehart diverges somewhat from Maslow, who proposed that his hierarchy of needs would operate cross-culturally. Inglehart has found that local culture alters the order of importance of social needs—a fact, as we will see, that is particularly evident in the United States.) But Inglehart's post-materialist trend has been true for every country: the higher the level of economic development, the more widespread the values of self-expression. In 2005, Inglehart wrote, "One rarely finds such a consistent pattern in social science data: there are no exceptions to this pattern among the eighty societies for w
hich we have data."18
The politics of industrialized countries demonstrate Inglehart's post-materialist shift. For American voters, concerns over economic growth have been equaled (sometimes surpassed) by issues of self-expression, such as abortion, gay rights, and a personal concern for the environment. People have sought to take control of political systems directly, through recalls and ballot initiatives. Abortion, divorce, and gay relationships are more accepted, especially among younger people.19 In 2007, fewer than half of Americans under age thirty believed it was their "duty as a citizen" always to vote.20 In the United States, participation in traditional religious denominations declined even as nondenominational churches boomed and people explored every back road to individual spirituality. And, as Inglehart predicted more than thirty years ago, trust in government has continued to decline.21 Inglehart contended that the change to a post-materialist culture would become more entrenched with each generation. Just as he predicted in the 1970s, each succeeding generation of Americans has been more accepting of homosexuality, more secular, and less likely to want women to play traditional roles.*22 But the post-materialist culture shift has also been filtered through America's unusually strong religious traditions. So while some Americans have adopted more European styles of self-expression, others have found new meaning—what has eventually become political meaning—in fundamentalist or Evangelical Christianity. Once free from the discipline demanded by economic scarcity, people began to define themselves by their values, and that altered what it meant to be either a Democrat or a Republican.
Looking back, we can see when post-materialist politics in the United States reached a point of no return. It was in the summer of 1965, when the silent revolution made quite a bit of noise.
1965: The Unraveling
Philip Converse, the grand political scientist at the University of Michigan, long puzzled over a curiosity of public opinion, an unexplained shift in the way Americans thought about themselves and political parties—all happening suddenly in 1965. Converse knew that beginning in 1945, American politics had entered an almost steady state of partisanship. People were loyal to their political party, even if neither party was particularly ideological. (Both Democrats and Republicans, after all, tried to recruit Eisenhower as a presidential candidate in 1952.) But the percentage of people saying they were Republicans or Democrats, not independents, remained high and stable. A Gallup poll taken in January and February 1965 showed levels of party loyalty among the highest since the question was first asked in 1945. Party allegiance was slightly lower in a poll taken in June 1965. But when Gallup published its poll in October 1965, the percentage of Americans who identified themselves as Republican or Democrat had "moved sharply downward."23 More accurately, it had dropped like a rock. Many Americans were abandoning political allegiances that had remained steady for two decades. And it had all happened over that summer. There's often talk about realignment of political parties. In 1965, there was a sudden dealignment, a mass withdrawal of support for both parties.
Converse hunted for demographic clues for why Americans were suddenly abandoning their old allegiances. Were new, younger voters accounting for the shift away from party identification? No, the change appeared in all generations. In fact, even if all the young people new to the voting rolls had declared themselves to be independents, it wouldn't explain the drop. The Democrats were losing control of the previously solid South, but the abandonment of party affiliation was a national phenomenon. The decline was marginally worse among Democrats, but both Democrats and Republicans were declaring themselves free of party attachment. Nor was this political shift a fad. The number of self-declared independents increased in 1966, and the trend "proceeded almost majestically" through the mid-1970s.24
Converse focused on party allegiance, but he could have easily expanded his examination. Scholars found the disruption Converse discovered in politics occurring across American society. The mid-1960s were a time when society began to unwind and fall about in loose coils, like fishing line spilled from a broken reel. Institutions that had been gaining members for hundreds of years suddenly stopped their advance and began to decline. Relationships and attitudes that had remained unchanged for generations became unhinged. And it all happened at the same time.
Harvard University's Robert Putnam wrote about the shrinking of longtime civic organizations in his 2000 book Bowling Alone. Putnam averaged the membership in thirty-two national groups, from the Moose to the League of Women Voters. He determined that the "two decades following 1945 witnessed one of the most vital periods of community involvement in American history." Then society swerved. The rates of membership in these groups "peaked in the early 1960s, and began the period of sustained decline by 1969." Putnam's iconic example of civic engagement was the bowling league, the communal beer and tenpin contests that mixed people from different neighborhoods and of different political leanings. In 1964, 8 percent of all American men and 5 percent of women were bowling league members. After the mid-1960s, people began to bowl alone.25 A daily newspaper was the most common source of information for eight out of ten households in 1964, a degree of market penetration that newspapers would never see again.26 At the same time, crime rates and divorce rates started to rise. "Beginning in about 1965," Francis Fukuyama wrote in The Great Disruption, "a large number of indicators that can serve as negative measures of social capital all started moving upward rapidly at the same time."27
Most mainline religious denominations had grown uninterrupted from colonial times, a two-hundred-year record of orderly expansion. That growth ended in 1965. Martin Marty, former dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School, described the year as the epicenter of a "seismic shift" in religious life. "From the birth of the republic until around 1965, as is well known, the churches now called mainline Protestant* tended to grow with every census or survey," Marty wrote.28 After 1965, the mainline denominations stopped growing or began to shrink as people turned to independent or Evangelical congregations. The six largest Protestant denominations together lost 5.6 million members between 1965 and 1990.29 "At least ten of the largest (and theologically more liberal) denominations have had membership losses in every year after 1966," religious historians David Roozen and Jackson Carroll wrote in 1979.30
The decline of traditional mainline denominations wasn't the result of a political movement. There was no "religious right" in 1965 that called people out of these churches. Evangelical ministers concentrated on "otherworldly" concerns. In 1965, the Reverend Jerry Falwell was a Virginia preacher who professed to "have few ties to this earth ... Believing in the Bible as I do, I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving Gospel of Jesus Christ and begin doing anything else, including fighting communism or participating in civil rights reforms ... Preachers are not called upon to be politicians but to be soul winners. Nowhere are we commissioned to reform the externals."31 Nobody led Americans out of mainline churches. They left on their own, and they began their decampment in 1965.
Everywhere, it seemed, Americans were abandoning traditional institutions. Polling firms soon discovered that underlying this social disruption was a concomitant decline in trust: 1965 was the year Americans lost their faith. In the two decades after World War II, people maintained a remarkable trust in government. Maybe this confidence was a defensive reaction to the pressures of the cold war or psychic residue from Great Depression solidarity and World War II success.32 In the late 1950s, eight out of ten Americans said that they could trust government to do the right thing most of the time, a level of faith maintained through 1964.33 By 1966, however, Americans' faith in government had been replaced with doubt. "From 1964 to 1970, there was a virtual explosion of anti-government feeling," Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider wrote. The 80 percent of Americans who had approved of government in the late 1950s had dropped to 33 percent by 1976.34 The lack of confidence spread beyond government. Faith in universities, medicine, major companies, and journalism all dropped duri
ng this period. People came to believe that government was run by the few. The percentage of Americans who trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time dropped from 75 percent of the population in 1964 to 25 percent just a few years later.35 The sense that government had gotten out of hand was entirely bipartisan. In 1964, a quarter of self-described liberals and three-quarters of conservatives said that government was too large. By 1972, however, a majority of both liberals and conservatives said that government was overgrown. They may have disagreed about other things, but on the question of whether government was thick and stupid, left and right found common ground.36
