One of the most persistent truisms in politics is that America is a center-right nation. It’s as common as the idea that Ronald Reagan was the quintessential conservative president. And it’s equally untrue. America is a centrist country, but it’s also one in which the “right” is being constantly redefined.
Reagan: left, right and center
Ronald Reagan was a changeling. He was a labor organizer as head of the Screen Actors Guild, who as president broke the air traffic controllers union. He was all for gun control as California governor in the late 1960s, when it was Huey Newton and the Black Panthers who had the guns, and an ally of the NRA when he ran for president in 1980. He reverted back to being pro gun control after he and his aide, Jim Brady, were shot by a would-be assassin in 1981, and even helped President Bill Clinton get an assault weapons ban through congress in 1994.
Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign with a “states rights” speech near Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the infamous murder of three civil rights workers in 1967, blowing a clear dog whistle to southern racists. He made the term “welfare queen” common parlance. But he also made Gen. Colin Powell the first black national security adviser to an American president, and his term saw the rise of a generation of black Republicans that included Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
Reagan didn’t just do immigration reform: he did full-on amnesty for some 3 million undocumented immigrants.
He cut a deal with Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neil to preserve Social Security and strengthen Medicare — a program he had railed against as evil socialism in the 1960s. And he raised taxes — multiple times — increased the debt ceiling, and exploded the deficit.
He also did nothing, in two terms, to tamper with abortion.
So was Reagan a liberal? Certainly not. But clearly, “conservatism” during Reagan’s time was defined much differently than it is today. Even his tough foreign policy stance toward the Soviet Union, in which Reagan kept the threat of nuclear war on the table, was full of rhetoric about “peace” (through strength) and Reagan even pursued nuclear arms reduction with Moscow.
It’s a sign of how far to the right the modern Republican Party has drifted, that Reagan is both their hero, and a figure who would have been run out of the conservative movement had he been in politics today.
What Reagan did succeed in doing was leaving behind a confident, politically-ascendant group of conservatives who have aggressively, and successfully, driven the media conversation, and the terms of the political debate, to the right.
Because of Reagan’s political success, including his vice president getting elected president after him, Democrats like Bill Clinton scrambled to shake off the nuclear freeze/anti-war/bleeding heart image they feared had marginalized their party out of power.
And so it was Democratic President Bill Clinton who undid the New Deal prohibition on banks gambling in the financial markets, and who signed the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask, Don’t tell — which left in place the legal ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military. Clinton also signed welfare reform, in some ways codifying Reagan’s “welfare queen” myth into law.
George W. Bush scrambled the calculus even more — signing the “No Child Left Behind” Act co-authored by liberal Senator Ted Kennedy and adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, while allying himself with the neoconservatives, for whom “right” means “hawkish on war and national security policy” — and not much else. Bush’s social conservative rhetoric excited the religious right, but like Reagan, he did absolutely nothing to turn his evangelical beliefs into federal bans on abortion or gay marriage.
Which brings us to President Barack Obama, whose second inaugural address prompted howls of “liberal tyranny!” from Republicans.
Next: a liberal speech?
Obama’s inaugural address attempted to connect the high minded principles of America’s founding in the 18th century, to the gaping holes that had to be fix in the 20th: for women at Seneca Falls, for African-Americans at Selma and for gay Americans at Stonewall.
The speech was a strong defense of progressive values, to be sure, but those values have been entrenched for so long, it’s hard to argue that they’re anything other than mainstream.
When Obama said that “We the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it…” and that “we believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class,” that wasn’t some far-out Marxist vision, it was what the vast majority of Americans, who polls show care most about “strengthening the economy” and “improving jobs”, happen to believe.
When he said “we know that America thrives when every person can find independence and pride in their work; when the wages of honest labor liberate families from the brink of hardship. …” it was the restatement of a concept of work that has been standard since the early 20th century, when the country decided that a minimum wage, a weekend off, a safe workplace, and child labor laws, were fundamental American values.
Obama’s statement that “we the people still believe every citizen deserves a decent measure of security and dignity,” he was defending safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare, which even tea partiers would dare any politician to try and part them from.
And when he said that “we are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own,” he was simply taking the “self-evident” truths in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” and applying them to those left out of the “self-evidence” by the slave-owning men who wrote the country’s founding document.
Meanwhile, when it comes to fundamental questions like the economy, the safety net, women’s rights and civil rights, Obama was addressing a nation whose center of gravity has shifted away from the right.
Obama’s election itself, and his re-election, shows that.
And whether it’s the increased social acceptance of gay marriage, majority support for immigration reform, or what polls show is now supermajority support for keeping abortion legal, driven in part by increasing support from African-Americans and Hispanics, two groups commonly thought of as more socially conservative than the national average, it’s fair to say Obama is leading, and being driven by, a tide that’s drifting toward progressivism.
Even on the subject of national security, a decade of war post-9/11, the latest Pew Research survey finds that preventing terrorism ranks fourth on Americans’ list of priorities, roughly tying with strengthening Social Security and improving education. So when the president spoke of ending America’s state of “perpetual war” — he likely spoke for the majority.
In the wake of the Aurora and Newtown massacres, Americans are increasingly joining post-1981 Reagan in supporting some form of gun control.
If there’s one area where the country seems to be moving rightward, it’s on race, where anti-black sentiments are actually growing, according to a Pew Poll — ironic given that the country just re-elected its first black president. Still, generational divides in racial attitudes suggest that the remaining pockets of resistance to the idea that all men and women really are created equal, will only become more isolated over time.
To be sure, the U.S. is a country with deep veins of conservatism running through it, especially in certain regions, like the south, and rural parts of many states. But overall, it’s hard to describe the country as “center-right” when the gravitational pull on so many issues is in the other direction.
Fellow Joy Reid on Twitter at @thereidreport.