All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s

About this book

In the 1960s Lyndon Johnsons Great Society and War on Poverty promised an array of federal programs to assist working-class families. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan declared the GOP the party of "family values" and promised to keep government out of Americans lives. Again and again historians have sought to explain the nations profound political realignment from the 1960s to the 2000s five decades that witnessed the fracturing of liberalism and the rise of the conservative right. The award-winning historian Robert O. Self is the first to argue that the separate threads of that realignmentfrom civil rights to womens rights from the antiwar movement to Nixons "silent majority " from the abortion wars to gay marriage from the welfare state to neoliberal economic policiesall ran through the politicized American family. Based on an astonishing range of sources All in the Family rethinks an entire era. Self opens his narrative with the Great Society and its assumption of a white patriotic heterosexual man at the head of each family. Soon enough civil rights activists feminists and gay rights activists animated by broader visions of citizenship began to fight for equal rights protections and opportunities. Led by Pauli Murray Gloria Steinem Harvey Milk and Shirley Chisholm among many others they achieved lasting successes including Roe v. Wade antidiscrimination protections in the workplace and a more inclusive idea of the American family. Yet the establishment of new rights and the visibility of alternative families provoked beginning in the 1970s a furious conservative backlash. Politicians and activists on the right most notably George Wallace Phyllis Schlafly Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell built a political movement based on the perceived moral threat to the traditional family. Self writes that "family values" conservatives in fact "paved the way" for fiscal conservatives who shared a belief in liberalisms invasiveness but lacked a populist message. Reagans presidency united the two constituencies which remain even in these tumultuous times the base of the Republican Party. All in the Family an erudite passionate and persuasive explanation of our current political situation and how we arrived in it will allow us to think anew about the last fifty years of American politics.