The Big Sort

by Bill Bishop

  The Sound of Music and Repulsion; Selma and Watts

  When Philip Converse had exhausted all the possible demographic reasons for America's sudden rejection of political party affiliation in 1965, he turned to the historical causes. Converse was skeptical that the events of the spring and summer of 1965 were "epochal" enough to cause such a massive shift in public opinion, but when he began reviewing the year, he was "somewhat mollified." He discovered the "density of events surrounding both Vietnam and race relations which was indeed almost overwhelming, and which I suspect might be shown more objectively to have stood out on the record even against the backdrop of a generally troubled time."37

  Nineteen sixty-five was a hell of a year, and Vietnam and race relations were just part of it. The front pages chronicle a year that began with incredible ambition and triumph, only to end with riots, war, and the beginnings of deep cultural discord. At the movies, people could see both The Sound of Music and Roman Polanski's Repulsion. In short, the year held all the good that government could achieve as well as all the ways that American society had sundered.

  President Lyndon Johnson's reach was unlimited. A compliant Congress followed his instructions to remake the country, from filling symphony halls to rebuilding broken highways in Appalachia. On January 8, Johnson considered the creation of a new health care program for the aged and for poor children of the "utmost urgency." The bill creating Medicare and Medicaid passed both houses of Congress by July, with half of the Republican senators voting for it. On January 9, Johnson announced he was "determined to eliminate barriers to the right to vote..." (At the time, the percentage of blacks registered to vote in Mississippi was smaller than it had been in 1899.) He signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act in August and immediately dispatched forty-five federal agents to the South to register black voters.

  Earlier that year, in March, Johnson's Justice Department ordered all schools to desegregate, threatening to withhold federal funds from any district that didn't integrate its schools by the fall of 1967. On the first day of school in the fall of 1965, Gene Roberts of the New York Times reported that southern educators "said it was the biggest day of integration in the Souths history."38

  On January 25, LBJ proposed a budget containing what the New York Times described as the "biggest expansion of domestic welfare and educational programs since the New Deal of the nineteen thirties."39 Two months later, Johnson signed the bill creating the Appalachian Regional Commission, the first, but certainly not the last, War on Poverty bill to reach the president that year. The first children entered Head Start in May. In 1965, "for the first time since the Great Depression, the federal government began to exert a strong and direct influence on the arts," wrote Julia Ardery, as Congress created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.40

  Johnson could control Congress, but he couldn't contain the conflict in Vietnam or the American South. At the beginning of the year, fewer than 20,000 American troops were in South Vietnam. Every month brought an escalation in the war. In February 1965, U.S. planes attacked North Vietnam, and in June B-52S based in Guam began to carpet-bomb Vietcong positions. (In the first raid of the war, two B-52S collided in midair and crashed.) Johnson called up U.S. Army reserves in July and told the country it would assume the "main burden" of the war.41

  Opposition to the escalating conflict stirred in 1965. The first "teachin" on college campuses took place that May. Poet Robert Lowell refused an invitation to the White House in June because of his "dismay and distrust" of U.S. foreign policy.42 In August, the New York Times reported "the burning of village huts at the hands of United States marines."43 Antiwar protests flared across the country in October; 10,000 people paraded in New York City. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach said that the Justice Department would investigate the march because "there are some Communists involved in it."44 (William F. Buckley, running for mayor of New York, called the protesters "young slobs," mocking "their epicene resentment over a gallant national effort to keep an entire section of the globe from sinking into the subhuman wretchedness of Asiatic Communism." The New York Times helpfully turned to Webster's to inform readers that "epicene" was defined as "sexless" or "effeminate."45) A few days later, twenty-two-year-old David J. Miller became the first person to be arrested for burning a draft card. A draft counselor at Yale University told the New York Times in November that he had had appointments booked "every 20 minutes every day for the last month."46 During one week in late November, 240 American GIs died in Vietnam, and 25,000 people—"more babies than beatniks," according to the New York Times—demonstrated in the "March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam."47 The December military draft enrolled more than 45,000 men, the largest monthly total since the Korean War. By the end of 1965, more than 200,000 American troops were fighting in Vietnam.*

  The civil rights movement was both brutal and triumphant in March 1965, as Alabama state police assaulted protesters crossing Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge on what became known as Bloody Sunday. Three days later, Martin Luther King Jr. led a larger march across Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery. There were dozens of marches across the country made in concert with King's trek; for instance, 10,000 people joined Governor George Romney in a demonstration in Detroit. At the end of the month, Johnson "declared war on the Ku Klux Klan."48 In August, however, the shoulder-to-shoulder success of the Selma-to-Montgomery march was lost in the anarchy of the Watts riots. South Los Angeles was ablaze for days. The New York Times carried headlines about "gangs of negroes" and "youths run wild."49 There were more riots in Chicago and Long Beach, California. In November, Gene Roberts wrote a story headlined "Negroes Still Angry and Jobless Three Months After Watts Riot."50

  That was 1965. Within every event were the beginnings of political alignments that would extend for the next forty years. Days after troops subdued the Watts rioters, the New York Times reported that "California candidates of both parties, openly or warily, viewed the Los Angeles riots today as providing a ready-made issue for next year's important campaign for Governor." Ronald Reagan was considered the front-runner and the primary beneficiary of the riots.51 Earlier, in June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law that officials had used to close and fine a Planned Parenthood birth control clinic. In Griswold v. Connecticut, the Court ruled for the first time that there was a limited constitutional "right to privacy." (It would base its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion on reasoning used in the earlier decision.) The American Catholic Church was still debating its stand on birth control in 1965. By the end of the year, however, Pope Paul VI had reaffirmed the church's prohibition against all chemical or mechanical methods of birth control.

  The religious news of 1965 was largely about ecumenicism and re-form. In March, U.S. Catholic churches began changing their services to conform to the calls from the Second Vatican Council for more active participation by congregants. The World Council of Churches and Pope Paul VI called for greater Christian unity. Also in March, the World Council asked the United States to pull out of Vietnam, and ministers led the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. We know in retrospect that just as Catholics and the traditional Protestant denominations were promoting racial reform and world religious cooperation, members of most of these churches had begun to leave. They were headed to independent Evangelical and fundamentalist churches that distrusted ecumenical religious organizations.

  Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City on February 21. Bob Dylan drew a huge crowd to the Newport Folk Festival in July, but he enraged the folkie faithful when he plugged in his electric guitar and ripped into "Maggie's Farm." Sociologist Todd Gitlin called the Selma-to-Montgomery march the "high water mark of inte-grationism" and noted that by the fall of 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had begun forcing out all its white staff members.52 On the same day in November that a blackout cut power to nine northeastern states, stranding 800,000 people in subways, a
twenty-two-year-old Vietnam War protester named Roger Allen LaPorte, a member of the Catholic Worker movement, sat down in front of the United Nations and set himself on fire.

  When Change Is Not a Noun

  Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and the Watts riots were powerful enough shocks to Americans' sense of themselves that they could well explain the decline in trust that began in the mid-1960s—a decline that political scientist Walter Dean Burnham described as "among the largest ever recorded in opinion surveys."53 But there's a post-materialist catch. Measures of trust declined for almost all professions and institutions, not just politicians and government. And such a widespread, near universal change in attitude raises some questions. Why would a riot in Watts cause trust in doctors to decline? And how would a war in Southeast Asia lead to increasing distrust in educators? And why would a bloody confrontation between police and demonstrators at the end of a bridge in Selma, Alabama, lead to a decline in trust in businessmen among the Japanese?

  In 1981, Gallup took the questions about trust and confidence that had been part of its polls in the United States and asked them simultaneously in eleven advanced industrial societies. The polling firm found that levels of institutional trust were low everywhere. Compared with the other ten nations, in fact, trust levels in the United States were fairly robust. Gallup found the highest levels of trust in Ireland. U.S. citizens ranked second behind the Irish in their confidence in their country's leadership, followed by people in Britain, Denmark, Spain, West Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Japan, and Italy.54 Political scientist Russell Dalton compiled polls for sixteen economically advanced countries between 1971 and 1994 and found that measures of trust had declined in all of them. (The sturdy Dutch were an aberration, showing here and there some increases in trust.)55

  Americans have normally explained the decline in trust in this country with American experiences. Scholars have compared levels of trust with U.S. crime rates, U.S. inflation statistics, U.S. child poverty numbers, and U.S. measures of unemployment. One thing they have found is that Americans' trust was related to national political scandals.56 (Trust levels dipped sharply after Watergate in the mid-1970s, for example.) Also, if the economy hit a bad patch or if government seemed overly prone to bungle, trust declined. One political scientist declared that the country wasn't suffering from a crisis in confidence, but a "crisis of competence."*57 The problem with these particularized explanations, however, was that they failed to account for the universality of the phenomenon. Researchers were asking similar questions around the world—and coming up with similar findings. After World War II, trust in the political systems of Japan and Italy soared, then, after peaking in the 1970s, began to fall. Just as in the United States, people in West Germany grew more allegiant to their political parties and more trusting of their leaders during the 1950s. Then the Germans detached from their parties and lost faith in their government, on roughly the same schedule as the Americans.58

  The decline in public trust spread across the industrialized world. The response to it was similarly uniform. President Jimmy Carter warned of "a fundamental threat to American democracy," which was a "crisis of confidence ... a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media and other institutions."59 Carter continues to be mocked for his televised speech about Americans' malaise, but other countries were reacting the same way to the same malady.* After a series of government scandals, the British Parliament formed the Committee on Standards in Public Life in the mid-1990s. Professor Ivor Crewe was Carteresque when he testified that "there is no doubt that distrust and alienation has risen to a higher level than ever before."60

  When Americans looked within their own history to explain this change in the national psyche, they latched on to nouns: Watts, My Lai, Watergate, Stagflation, Monica, Enron, Katrina. But, as Dalton explained, nouns don't tell the story. People, places, and events familiar to Americans wouldn't cause trust to decline in countries with wildly different political histories.

  Why Bill Clinton Didn't Declare a War on Poverty

  The loss of faith in public institutions has been the "key change in American public opinion over the last 40 years," Vanderbilt University political scientist Marc Hetherington concludes. The decline in trust placed Democrats at a permanent disadvantage, one that both diminished their chances for winning elections and hogtied their efforts to govern.61 President John Kennedy had been able to proclaim a "New Frontier" and President Lyndon Johnson could declare a "Great Society" because Americans trusted government. After 1965, however, Democrats were forced to become ideological contortionists. In the new political climate, they proposed solutions to public problems that were to be carried out by a government that most people—even Democrats—no longer trusted to act in society's best interest. Hetherington points out that Bill Clinton was not so different from Johnson in his background or his politics. Both had grown up poor in the South. Both were presidents during economic expansions. Both had partisan advantages in Congress. But whereas Johnson declared the War on Poverty, Clinton announced that the "era of big government is over." What separated Johnson's administration from Clinton's wasn't the power of the right wing, the reticence of business, or Democratic perfidy, Hetherington argues. The difference was that people trusted government in 1965 and they didn't in 1993.62

  Hetherington found the perfect example of the Democrats' dilemma. In 1964, 41 percent of Americans wanted the federal government to integrate schools. The demand for integrated schools was nearly universal by the early 1990s—95 percent of Americans wanted their schools integrated—but the support for federal intervention to enforce desegregation laws had dropped to 34 percent. It's possible, of course, that Americans felt there was no longer a need for the government to desegregate schools—a reasonable response if schools were already integrated. But by the early 2000s, America's public schools were resegregating; they were less integrated than they had been in the 1970s.63 Something more fundamental had changed in the way Americans thought about government.

  What happened? It's simple, according to Hetherington, even if Democrats have been painfully slow to catch on. The plummeting levels of trust changed what's possible for politicians to say and for government to do. The incredible national ambitions of the early 1960s were built on a consensus cemented by overwhelming trust in government. As trust declined, the reach of the federal government shortened, and its potential was reined in. Americans found it hard to reach a consensus—on anything. The reason Bill Clinton didn't declare his own "war on poverty" was that so few people trusted government to engage in such an ambitious campaign—fewer than in the era before 1965, when Americans would lose their trust in government to do much of anything at all.64

  Where Are All the "Good" Men?

  Ron Inglehart's theory of post-materialism has engendered surprisingly little interest among observers of American politics.* Harold Wilensky, an esteemed political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, has called the post-materialist culture shift a "myth." Wilensky has written that the surveys Inglehart used have technical problems and their results show little significant change. Besides, Wilensky has argued, most of the trends identified by the post-materialists (women's rights, environmentalism) were in motion during the heyday of the industrial economy. Wilensky suggests that we "drop" terms such as "post-materialism" "from our vocabulary."65

  Other scholars, however, acknowledge that society has changed focus. Daniel Bell announced the "coming of post-industrial society" in the title of his 1973 book. Working with Ronald Inglehart, the University of Chicago's Terry Nichols Clark has described a "new political culture" born of economic prosperity and a more democratic workplace.*66 Market researchers Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson have described a growing number of "cultural creatives," people who have many of the same interests and sociabilities as Inglehart's post-materialists and those Clark has identified in his new political culture.67 Ruy Teixeira and John Judis have predicted a new
constituency for the Democratic Party in the fast-growing tech cities. These new Democrats, they wrote, will be highly educated and affluent, "products of a new postindustrial capitalism, rooted in diversity and social equality, and emphasizing the production of ideas and services rather than goods."68

  All of these researchers were fishing in the same pond, and what they found explains much about the cultural shift in the United States. Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, for example, have an answer for that common question among young, single women: "Where are all the 'good' men?" Ray's polling has shown that his "cultural creatives" are seeking new experiences and deep relationships. The issues that are most important to them come straight from the post-materialist grocery list: individual rights, alternative medicine, and the environment. Ray and Anderson also have found that among the core group of "creatives," two-thirds are women.69 So where are all the "good" men? Well, there are as many men as there have always been, just fewer "cultural creatives" and more guys dropping out of college, watching mixed martial arts cage matches on television, and voting Republican.*

  Consider the following news items, which make more sense when viewed not as consequences of events that happened in the 1960s, but rather as the results of a long-term shift in the culture of industrialized societies.

  A fifth of all Americans say that they've read Rick Warren's book The Purpose-Driven Life, and Warren's Saddleback Church is one of the largest in the country. But how many people know that Warren and Saddleback are affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention?70 The connection just isn't mentioned. Post-materialists prefer local, nonhierarchical institutions, so churches now downplay their national affiliations. "Denominations just don't mean the same thing to people that they did in the past," Baylor University sociologist Kevin Dougherty told the Austin American-Statesman. "People don't think of themselves as a good Southern Baptist. They think of themselves as a good member of their congregation."71