Polity

. Volume 41, Number 2 . April 2009

r 2009 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/09 www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/

REVIEW ESSAY Backlash: Race, Sexuality, and American Conservatism Joseph E. Lowndes. Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism from the New Deal to the New Right. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Richard J. Meagher, Marymount Manhattan College

Polity (2009) 41, 256–266. doi:10.1057/pol.2008.33; published online 9 February 2009

Keywords race; gender; Republican Party; American conservatism; backlash; feminism Richard J. Meagher is an assistant professor of Political Science at Marymount Manhattan College, and will join the faculty at Randolph–Macon College in the fall of 2009. He is writing a book on conservatism. He can be reached at [email protected].

At the 2008 Republican National Convention, at least one vendor sold buttons asking, ‘‘If Obama is President. . . will we still call it the White House?’’1 For critics of conservatism, the button was just one more reminder that the Republicans are the party of white racism. Starting with the 1964 Presidential campaign and continuing with the campaigns and administrations of Nixon and Reagan, Republicans have ridden a racial backlash among Southern voters to political dominance. According to Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Democratic Party support for civil rights was the chief factor that drove Southern Democratic voters into the Republican column and smashed the New Deal.2 Without white 1. Ali Frick, ‘‘GOP Convention Button Asks, ‘If Obama is President. . .Will We Still Call It the White House?’’’, http://thinkprogress.org/2008/06/17/gop-convention-button-asks-if-obama-is-presidentwill-we-stillcall-it-the-white-house/, accessed 15 November 2008. 2. Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991).

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racism, the GOP would have remained the minority party it had been since before the war. Or so the story goes. As Joseph E. Lowndes points out, it was the work of conservative and Republican activists and political operatives that drove the growth of Southern Republicanism, not a ‘‘natural’’ process of reaction against civil rights for blacks. The ‘‘Southern strategy’’ famously mapped out in Kevin Phillips’s 1968 book, The Emerging Republican Majority,3 certainly took advantage of existing anger at the perceived gains of American blacks. Yet, Phillips and other Republican strategists also helped to shape, direct, and, in some ways, create this anger among whites. Moreover, the construction of the conservative movement entailed more than just racial appeals. Rightward Bound, a new volume of historical work on the 1970s, warns that gender and sexuality issues were equally as important, if not more so, to the social conservatives who now make up the base of the Republican Party. Not only do racial backlash accounts of the right lose sight of the work that was necessary to create the Republican, conservative coalition, but these accounts also obscure the crucial role of the perceived breakdown of the family and the accompanying attack on traditional social roles and mores. The resulting misunderstandings are not minor oversights. As Lowndes explains, backlash accounts pushed Democratic Party leaders like Bill Clinton to ‘‘disown prior commitments to racial equality and the ‘special rights’ of other marginalized groups’’ (3). Clinton paid close attention to books such as the Edsalls’ 1991 Chain Reaction, which seemed to blame the political and social gains blacks made in the 1960s for driving Southern whites—as well as whites elsewhere—away from the party. The Edsalls’ argument ironically helped spur Democratic leaders to eschew their obligations to minorities. Winning back the white vote needed for a national electoral majority, the Edsalls’ implied, meant abandoning blacks. Lowndes expressly argues against this perspective. The civil rights movement, he claims, should not be blamed for spawning conservatism; backlash requires political organization if it is to manifest itself in electoral politics. The success of the conservative movement is a political achievement brought about by activism and organizing on the right rather than a spontaneous reaction to activity on the left, whether in promoting change in race relations or, as the historians who contribute to Rightward Bound note, gender roles. Still, while both of these accounts provide an important contribution to understanding modern American conservatism, neither book seems to recognize the factor that most often trumps these racial and gender concerns: the interests of business elites and other economic conservatives who have controlled the conservative coalition and 3. Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969).

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advanced a policy agenda that differs dramatically from New Deal liberalism. More importantly, the authors of both accounts seem unable to grasp the success of this economic agenda, particularly the historians who argue, puzzlingly, that conservatism’s effects on American politics are not as dramatic as they may seem.

Race and Southern Conservatism Lowndes makes a significant contribution to our understanding of modern conservatism by calling attention to the discursive aspects of building the modern right. He traces the development of a conservative racial discourse from the mobilization of Goldwaterites through the maverick campaigns of George Wallace to Nixon’s ‘‘silent majority.’’ Wallace coded his visceral appeals to Southern racist sentiment as a support for a state’s rights and opposition to communism.4 But it was Nixon, Lowndes notes, who found a way to combine coded racism, a muscular populism, and economic conservatism into a ‘‘rhetorical constituency’’ (9) that could be claimed as majoritarian. Armed with insights such as these, Lowndes’s chief aim is to demand that we look beyond the simple backlash account of the right. Labeling southern conservatives as racist, he cautions, does not do enough to explain how the Republican coalition was constructed. Lowndes instead asks us to remember that the success of conservatism, and even its very makeup, were contingent; the coalition could have looked different or even fallen apart if it were not for the political work of intellectuals, politicians, and activists. Nixon didn’t just find the Silent Majority languishing in the heartland of America; in effect, he conjured it into being by the very act of naming it. Moreover, he tied whites’ insecurities about race and civil rights to other issues like crime, welfare, and the economy. In making his case, Lowndes offers novel contributions to the literature about southern conservatism. He shows that segregationist Charles Wallace Collins provided the first clear discursive and intellectual links between white supremacy and economic conservatism; Collins also tied civil rights to what conservatives believed to be the New Deal’s neosocialist statism. Equally significant links were made, Lowndes reveals, between southern intellectuals and the central journal of American conservatism, William F. Buckley’s National Review.5 4. Dan T. Carter, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and the Transformation of American Politics, Charles Edmondson Historical Lectures (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 1992), 13. 5. Commentators on Buckley’s recent passing often celebrated his mostly successful efforts to purge anti-Semites from the conservative coalition. But lost in these recent encomiums was Buckley’s less tolerant, more pragmatic side; the electoral logic of building a majority party drove him to welcome segregationists with open arms, as Lowndes makes plain.

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Overall, Lowndes effectively demonstrates how conservatives’ success lay not just in control of governing institutions, but also in ‘‘the ability to define the very horizon of credible politics’’ (155). Here, Lowndes uses his discursive focus to take a friendly swipe at the view of American political development advanced by Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek.6 Although it is important to examine the durable shifts in governing authority that Orren and Skowronek identify as the core of political development, one can miss the forest by focusing too much on the institutional trees. The conservative coalition is one case, Lowndes suggests, where most of the ‘‘real work of change’’ goes on before there are any shifts in governing institutions (156). By the time Reagan came to power in 1981, the vital discursive and political groundwork had already been laid years earlier by Collins, Buckley, and others. Lowndes occasionally gets sidetracked from his argument, to the detriment of an otherwise engaging and cogent book. A chapter on segregationist Asa Earl Carter and his fictional Western, The Outlaw Josey Wales, is an interesting diversion but not much more. Also, Lowndes’s focus on the South occasionally leads to overstatement, as when he describes the movement for Goldwater as ‘‘Southern-driven’’ (8); Midwestern supporters of Robert Taft and Clarence Manion were a major source of both financial and electoral support for Goldwater, especially in the early going.7 Lowndes similarly exaggerates when he suggests that Goldwater’s bestseller Conscience of a Conservative was ‘‘perhaps most meant to appeal’’ to Southern segregationists (56). The book, ghostwritten by conservative activist Brent Bozell, instead was clearly designed more as a blueprint for conservatism as a whole, with support for states’ rights being only one of the issues Goldwater advocated. In fact, one easily could argue that Goldwater’s anti-communism was much more central to his campaign; indeed, its centrality was key to his landslide defeat at the hands of LBJ, as the latter’s campaign operatives used the inflammatory ‘‘Daisy’’ television ad to play on popular fears about Goldwater’s unsubtle and aggressive diatribes against communism. But the real problem with Lowndes’s book—less for his particular concerns than for the story of conservatism as a whole—is that it ends before things really get interesting. Lowndes wants to show how the foundations for the conservative edifice were laid in the race-baiting politics of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet a number of forces, including the business elites who would largely manage the conservative coalition, would not fully coalesce until years later. Even the movement of Southern whites into the Republican Party only became 6. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 7. See Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), especially chapter 1.

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pronounced with the rise of feminism and the sexual revolution. Southern evangelicals and other social conservatives eventually became a major force within the conservative coalition. They did so not during the racial battles of the 1960s, however, but during the culture wars that began to heat up during the 1970s—which, as the editors of Rightward Bound observe (and seek to remedy), is often a forgotten decade.

Conservatism in the 1970s Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer have assembled a collection of wide-ranging essays from historians of both American conservatism and the culture of the 1970s. Contributions to the volume range from a treatment of conservative philanthropy by Alice O’Connor to a recounting of the failures of labor unionism by Joseph A. McCartin to (more or less helpfully, depending upon your tastes) a look at 1970s singer-songwriters by Bradford Martin. As a result of this eclecticism, the volume as a whole unsurprisingly lacks focus; a number of the essays, although diverting, contribute little to a coherent account of the right turn in the 1970s. Still, the overall effect is to return that decade— often unfairly dismissed, the editors note, as ‘‘a national joke’’ (4)—to prominence in accounts of the rise of the American right. As Schulman and Zelizer recognize, the 1970s saw an overall shift of national power south and west, from the Frost and Rust Belt of the Northeast and midwestern industrial states to the Sunbelt of Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan (and, later, Clinton and the younger Bush). A second important development noted by the editors is the building of what they call conservatism’s ‘‘organizational infrastructure’’ (5): the think tanks, media organizations, fundraising operations, and interest groups that would form the basis for the Reagan Revolution and its successors.8 Three major forces within conservatism mobilized during the 1970s. The editors explicitly acknowledge only one of these, but various chapters in Rightward Bound address the other two, albeit less directly. The first powerful influence on conservatism was the emergence of the neoconservatives. Although these former Democrats had a domestic agenda centered on laissez-faire 8. While the editors suggest that the 1970s entailed the ‘‘completion’’ of this infrastructure, conservative networks became much more integrated during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they grew into a power base for Newt Gingrich’s takeover of Congress in 1994. See, for example, Alan Ehrenhalt on what he calls the ‘‘Republican megaphone’’ in: ‘‘The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy and How It Grew,’’ AEI Newsletter, December 2003, http.//www.aei.org/news19471; David Callahan’s description of the 1990s as a boom decade for conservative think tanks: ‘‘$1 Billion for Conservative Ideas,’’ The Nation, 26 April 1999; and especially Susanna Monroney’s claim that Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay worked out the Contract for America at Paul Weyrich’s ‘‘Conservative Opportunity Luncheons’’ during the 1980s: ‘‘Laying the Right Foundations’’, Rutherford, December 1995, 7–11, 24.

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economics and stringent social policies, their most notorious role in the development of the conservative coalition was to devise a post-Vietnam foreign policy in response to the perceived failures of Democrats to confront communism. Rightward Bound, seemingly more concerned with these failures than the neocons’ response, includes chapters by Zelizer and Derek N. Buckaloo on Carter’s failures to form a national security consensus for either Nicaragua or other trouble spots. Together, these two chapters describe the void within American foreign policy that Reagan found so easy to fill with a neocon-inspired, anti-communist agenda. A second major mobilization during the 1970s saw the politicization of a conservative business elite. (Again, because of his limited timeframe, Lowndes offers only tantalizing hints of how discursive links between race and economics might have helped spur this mobilization.) Thanks in part to the financial pressures of inflation, globalization, and the guns and butter policies of the Vietnam-era Democrats, corporations largely rejected the Fordist compact and turned against both labor unions and their allies in the federal government.9 Business created new mechanisms, such as the Business Roundtable, to promote free market economic policies and revitalized and radicalized other vehicles for corporate collective action (e.g., the Chamber of Commerce). Bethany E. Moreton contributes a chapter that describes the outreach efforts undertaken by these business groups and corporations on college and university campuses during the 1970s. While this dissemination of what was, in effect, propaganda, was an important part of the business right’s developing crusade against the welfare state; such efforts represent only the tip of the iceberg. Business increased lobbying efforts, funneled money to think tanks and intellectuals who supported the free market, and forged increasingly strong ties to the Republican Party. Finally, the most significant conservative sector to mobilize in the 1970s, at least for today’s electoral landscape, is the one that Schulman and Zelizer explicitly acknowledge: social conservatives, particularly the Christian evangelicals who had largely eschewed politics since the Scopes trial earlier in the century. The alliance between these social conservatives and the economic conservatives who controlled the Republican Party led directly to the Reagan victory in 1980, the historic Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and over three decades of conservative policymaking. Yet, the motivations behind the politicization of evangelicals are often obscured, thanks to a familiar culprit: the narrative of white racial backlash about which Lowndes warns.

9. Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986); David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (Fredrick, MD: Beard Books, 2003).

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Civil Rights and Feminism In a 2006 book,10 Randall Balmer, a professor of religious history at Columbia, took pains to correct what he called the ‘‘abortion myth’’ about the mobilization of religious conservatives. According to this myth, evangelicals became so incensed by Roe v. Wade that they joined the Republican ranks en masse to stop the killing of unborn children. Not true, Balmer claimed; instead, it was the federal government’s threats to rescind the tax-exempt status of race-segregated schools in the South that finally drove evangelicals into politics. The abortion myth was only a self-serving story told by evangelical leaders, Balmer argued, to illustrate the purity of their political motivations. But what the myth also accomplished was to mask the ugly racist history underneath. Balmer never clearly identified the evangelical leaders who supposedly promote this myth, so he may have overstated its importance. Still, he was correct to remind us of the salience of the tax exemption issue for Southern evangelicals. The Carter administration’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revoked the exemption for segregated Bob Jones University in 1976, stirring up fears among leaders of local Christian schools and the families who attended them that they would be next. Indeed, as Joseph Crespino shows in his chapter on civil rights in Rightward Bound, some of these schools—almost all of them de facto segregated—had been fighting with the IRS over their exemption status since the late 1960s. For Southern evangelicals, renewed attempts by the IRS to force integration after the Bob Jones case were the final straw. But the previous straws piled on the camel’s back were not just related to race. Thanks to the gains of the feminist movement and the accompanying sexual revolution, issues of gender and sexuality were just as much a factor as civil rights in propelling evangelicals into Republican politics. The importance of feminism for evangelical mobilization is especially clear if one examines the history of social conservatism construed more broadly, and not just the Southern evangelical wing of the movement. Balmer may be right to downplay the role of abortion as the trigger for political mobilization, but it was still exceedingly influential on nascent social conservatism in the 1970s. Of course, Catholics had taken the lead on opposing abortion earlier in the decade. But evangelical Protestants started coming aboard in later years, spurred in part by a partnership between evangelical theologian Francis Schaefer and future Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. Their 1979 film, ‘‘Whatever Happened to the Human Race?,’’ along with a related book, was 10. Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America (New York: Basic, 2006).

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featured regularly in church meeting rooms throughout the country.11 Although it reached evangelicals late in the decade, abortion was just one issue among many that helped spur the remarkable ‘‘evangelical resurgence’’ described by Paul Boyer, whose chapter details the increasingly dense networks of evangelical churches, media organizations, book publishers, interest groups, and ministries that rose up in the 1970s. Still, abortion held special significance for all social conservatives—Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise—thanks to the salient mix of incendiary subjects it contained, including sexuality, changing gender roles, and federal funding for liberal social causes. Opposition to abortion would later become the standard ‘‘litmus test’’ for Republican judicial appointees, as well as for electoral support from most social conservatives. Neocon William Kristol would later famously refer to abortion as the ‘‘bloody crossroads of American politics.’’12 The resulting conservative attempts to overturn Roe v. Wade and ban abortion in America were part of a longer history of counterattacks against the feminist reworking of societal norms. Social conservatives of various denominations organized during battles with liberals over education beginning in the 1960s. But rather than segregation in private schools, it was sex education in public schools that embroiled conservatives in politics. Anaheim’s sex education controversy in the 1960s and the debate over textbooks in West Virginia from 1969 to 1974 were national controversies that galvanized evangelicals across the South and elsewhere. The latter battle launched the career of Connaught Marshner, one of the New Right’s most prominent spokespersons and the eventual right-hand woman to social conservative uber-organizer Paul Weyrich. Later in the 1970s, Southern white evangelicals, particularly women, also joined the coalition organized by Phyllis Schlafly (herself a Catholic) against the Equal Rights Amendment. Another major factor in the politicization of these women was a series of major conferences on women’s issues, all of which were ironically developed and promoted by women’s rights advocates. As a Rightward Bound chapter by Marjorie Spruill shows, the International Women’s Year conferences that feminists demanded from Congress ended up galvanizing their Christian opponents. In a chapter on ‘‘family values,’’ Matthew Lassiter similarly points to President Carter’s White House Conference on the Family in 1980 as another attempt by feminists to set the agenda for women’s issues, only to stoke strong opposition among conservative women. Feminists lauded these conferences as proof that 11. Richard Land, ‘‘Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop’s Invaluable Impact on Pro-Life Evangelicalism,’’ National Right to Life News (January 2003), http.//www.nric.org/news/2003/NRL01/ land.html. 12. See Kristol’s contribution to ‘‘On the Future of Conservatism: A Symposium,’’ Commentary (February 1997): 14–43.

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government officials were taking their claims seriously. But conservative antifeminists saw the very same conferences as evidence that the federal government had already taken sides in the culture war. They realized, rightly, that if they were going to reverse the tide they needed to get involved in electoral politics. So Lowndes’s warnings about the term aside, there was a backlash among conservatives during the 1970s. But the main thrust of this backlash was less about race in the South and more about pushing back against the gains of feminism and the sexual revolution nationwide. Of course, many evangelical women, Catholic pro-lifers, and antifeminists considered themselves part of Nixon’s Silent Majority, and were stirred and even frightened by the changes wrought by the civil rights movement as well. Spruill hints that some of the gender fears of conservatives acted as a kind of replacement for racism; she notes the irony of the fact that ‘‘at the time that it had become politically unacceptable to be overtly racist, being overtly antifeminist became increasingly acceptable’’ (79–80). Crespino similarly points out that no matter how credible a case Southern private school supporters made for their religious freedom, their schools were functionally racist, in that they were empirically segregated. The IRS was coming to call because, for whatever reason, blacks simply did not attend these schools; evangelicals’ demands to be left alone to raise their children as they pleased were, in some sense, beside the point. Still, for the bulk of social conservatives, race may not have been as much a factor in their growing politicization as what they saw as incessant attacks upon the traditional family structure from liberals, feminists, the federal government, or even the culture at large. The particular institutional forms that their response took and the movement organizations they created—interest groups like the Moral Majority and, later, the Christian Coalition, as well as the so-called ‘‘pro-family’’ groups, campaigns, and associations—did not seem in the least bit preoccupied by race. Of course, one could argue that the fact that they ignored racial inequality demonstrates a form of racism. Ralph Reed attempted to get the Christian Coalition to reach out to minorities in the mid-1990s, but the deaf ears on which his appeals fell may be illustrative of at least willful neglect. But over the course of their history, social conservatives as a whole have seemed more concerned about gays and abortion than about the gains blacks have made in American society. In fact, appeals to race usually only resonate for social conservatives when they are combined with aspects of morality and values, such as the dangers of promiscuity or the importance of hard work; Reagan’s infamous ‘‘welfare queen’’ stories were effective in this regard. In his discussion of how family values became important for Republicans, Rightward Bound’s Lassiter seems to follow Thomas Frank by suggesting that concerns with cultural issues are distractions from the real problems facing the

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country. He notes that ‘‘the electoral alliance forged between social conservatives and the Republican Party has done little to resolve the fundamental economic causes of the crisis of the American Dream that emerged during the 1970s’’ (80). Like Frank, Lassiter uses this analysis to reveal the terrible effects of unchecked capitalism on many American wage earners. But it would be wrong to dismiss social conservatives’ concerns about cultural issues as somehow insubstantial. Abortion, homosexuality, feminism, and the sexual revolution all represent very real challenges to a particular way of life, one set in tradition, hierarchy, and a model—however archaic and possibly unrealistic—of a single male wage-earner in a nuclear family structure. At least in the minds of social conservatives, the world envisioned by feminists and liberals turns what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls ‘‘cultural reproduction,’’ the passing on of values to younger generations, into a ‘‘daily hazard.’’13 Social conservatives are afraid of feminism because, in fact, they probably should be.

Conservative ‘‘Failure’’? Lassiter’s emphasis on economics as the ‘‘real’’ problem in his chapter in Rightward Bound points towards a serious flaw in this otherwise excellent collection of essays. In the book’s introduction, Schulman and Zelizer suggest that the 1970s ushered the United States into a period defined both by conservatism and ‘‘its persistent failures’’ (2). They argue that ‘‘conservatives failed to remake the nation. Rather, they layered themselves over the accumulated changes of the twentieth century’’ (4). Certainly, as any good American political development scholar would recognize, institutions and norms from the old order can persist into the next political regime; this should also be the case with New Deal liberalism following the advent of Reagan conservatism. But in their attempts to ‘‘remake the nation,’’ what evidence do we have that conservatives actually deserve a failing grade? The editors’ epilogue tells the story. ‘‘Turn on a television or open a Web browser and you find airwaves full of violence, sexuality, edgy humor,’’ the editors observe, ‘‘and the very secular values conservatives have long derided’’ (292). In other words, conservatives have failed because they have lost the culture war. Although strongly motivated by what Lassiter calls their misguided ‘‘nostalgia’’ for a halcyon past, social conservatives have been completely unsuccessful in stopping the sexual revolution or reversing the accompanying trends of secularization in popular culture. Abortion remains legal; liberal values dominate television, film, and music; stem cell research is a popular cause; and gay rights 13. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Public Worlds, v.1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 45.

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increasingly has become one. Brokeback Mountain wins an Oscar, and so conservatism is a failure. But the editors and authors of Rightward Bound seem to forget that the conservative alliance is not an equal one. Social conservatives are the junior partner in the Republican coalition, and have never been completely happy about their alliance with more powerful economic interests. But it is these economic concerns that move the Republican Party. Successive conservative leaders in government have emphasized tax cuts and deregulation much more than federal action on abortion or homosexual rights. With nowhere else to go, social conservatives often subsist on a mere seat at the table, some symbolic offerings, or the occasional scrap of policy change. They may have little option but to keep on fighting to get their social issues placed on the agenda. So of course the right has lost the culture war; on some level, most conservative officeholders were never invested in fighting it in the first place. In light of the uneven conservative alliance, then, it seems odd to emphasize the failures of conservatism to change the culture. In their defense, the editors point to continued popular support for government programs like hurricane relief and social security as evidence that, even after thirty years of conservative dominance, liberalism still matters underneath. And Barack Obama’s historic victory in the 2008 Presidential election suggests that many Americans are ready to reject the race-baiting politics that helped overturn the liberal consensus in the first place. Still, during just the current decade alone, we have seen the continued dismantling of the welfare state; increased surveillance power in the hands of government alongside shrinking support for civil liberties; further erosion of any checks on corporate power, with unsurprising results in the financial and housing markets; and the conduct of two large-scale military actions overseas, based largely on a neoconservative policy of unilateral action. Social conservatives may not have beaten back the tides of change in either gender or race, the issues that—as together the Lowndes and Schulman and Zelizer books show—were instrumental in their rise to power. But since so many of these other policy outcomes result from the stated desires of conservatives to move towards greater economic freedom and a stronger defensive posture, how could anyone possibly call conservatism a failure?