The demand for racial justice was viewed as infringing on traditions of white preference and superiority. Many men objected to the women's movement, too. Meanwhile, social conservatives hated the "counter-culture" and the sexual revolution.
As early as the 1950s, the pushback from the Right was evident in calls for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren and the physical assaults on blacks seeking to integrate schools, lunch counters and other public institutions. White segregationists denounced the press as "liberal" for its coverage of the civil rights struggle. The federal government was viewed as infringing on states' rights.
The resistance grew in the 1960s as Alabama Gov. George Wallace and other right-wingers rallied blue-collar whites against "hippies," feminists, "uppity" blacks, academics, environmentalists and "unpatriotic" journalists. These Americans saw their traditional way of life under siege, and they were backed by wealthy businessmen who worried that their dominance of the economy might be threatened.
Though the Right decried the national press corps as "liberal," it actually was run by businessmen who were mostly conservative and protective of the establishment. Many top news executives chafed against the era's progressivism and the anti-establishment tone of reporters as much as other businessmen did.
By the 1970s, the American Great Backlash was gaining strength. Well-placed conservatives, such as Lewis Powell (who later became a Supreme Court justice) and William Simon (who was Nixon's Treasury Secretary), were calling for massive investments in a right-wing infrastructure of media, think tanks and attack groups to reverse the nation's progressive trends.
Simultaneously, as the Vietnam War was winding down, the Left largely dismantled its own media infrastructure that had become a powerful grassroots force in the 1960s and early 1970s but was deemed too expensive.
In a short time, the vibrant "underground press" of the Vietnam era disappeared; flagship publications, like Ramparts and Dispatch News, were closed; popular radio outlets, like WBCN in Boston, were bought up by media conglomerates; key liberal outlets, like The New Republic, fell into the hands of neoconservatives.
Much of the Left bought into the notions that media was not essential; that working inside the Washington system was corrupting; and that "local organizing" was the key to the future. Other leftists fell victim to the vanity of perfectionism, putting their own political purity ahead of any practical idea for improving the lives of average citizens.
Competing Trends
So, in the mid-to-late 1970s as the Right was shifting its focus to national battles and investing more and more in getting its messages out to every corner of the country, the Left was dismantling its media, decamping from Washington, and dreaming that somehow "organizing" around local issues would create a grassroots movement for revolutionary change.
These two trends -- the rise of the Right's national propaganda machine and the collapse of the Left's ability to reach the broad public -- consolidated with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Though now viewed through the gauzy mythology that surrounds his legacy, the real Reagan was a rigid right-winger who had opposed many of the social advancements of the era.
Reagan denounced Medicare as socialist tyranny; he cracked down on the anti-war movement while governor of California; he aided and abetted right-wing death squads in Latin America; he opposed environmentalism and other government regulations; he worked to roll back civil rights, especially affirmative action aimed at ameliorating the legacy of discrimination against minorities and women.
Upon taking office in 1981, with the Senate under Republican control, Reagan and his team began systematically deconstructing the institutional safeguards that had defined the New Deal and post-World War II-era.
The Reagan administration took special aim at the federal appeals courts, especially the most influential one in the District of Columbia, installing right-wing and neocon ideologues as judges, the likes of Laurence Silberman. Reagan also appointed environmental "regulators" who detested regulations and civil rights attorneys who opposed efforts to improve the lot of blacks and other minorities.
Reagan emphasized, too, expanding the Right's propaganda capabilities, coordinating with the growing network of right-wing media and attack groups that went after troublesome journalists and intimidated political critics.
Meanwhile, without the competitive pressure from the "underground press," the mainstream media charted its own rightward course following the prevailing winds, often with a conservative or neoconservative at the helm.
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