50th Anniversary of "The Speech" that Launched Reagan's Political Career

Next Monday marks the 50th anniversary of The Speech, "A Time for Choosing," a paid-for television spot for the Goldwater campaign, that launched Ronald Reagan's career as a national conservative leader.

All the bunkum is on display -- honest people yearning to be free from meddling, intrusive, redistributive government taxes and regulations -- and it is still on display today as Republicans, all Goldwaterites now, are poised for a great victory in two weeks.

The Republicans have not only been successful at controlling the agenda in Washington D.C., they now dominate state politics more than at any time since the early 1950s. As Thomas Edsall wrote recently in "The State-by-State Revival of the Right":

While politics in Washington remain gridlocked, the conservative revolution has been thriving outside the Capitol beltway.

Republicans in states across the Midwest and the South are determined to eviscerate liberal policies and to entrench the political power of the right.

Twenty-three state governments are now under the complete control – governor, house and state senate — of the Republican Party, more than at any time since Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952. Democrats control 14 states. The rest are divided.

Not only are Republicans today in charge of more states, they are exercising their power to gain partisan advantage far more aggressively than their Democratic counterparts.

The state-based revival of the right has the strong backing of conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Tax Reform, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads/Crossroads GPS and the network of tax-exempt organizations tied to the Koch brothers. 

There are some common themes to the current Republican state-based agenda.
The most visible effort is the drive to gut public sector unions, a key source of votes and financial support for Democrats. Wisconsin, under Republican Governor Scott Walker, has led the charge on this front. With support from the Koch brothers, the state has severely restricted collective bargaining rights for public employees, ended mandatory union dues and limited wage hikes to the rate of inflation. 

Both supporters and opponents of Walker’s initiative realized that this was a key battleground – pathbreaking, in fact – hence the rallies, the recall and so on. 

Many Republican-controlled states have weakened or eliminated laws and regulations protecting the environment. In North Carolina the state legislature cut the budgets of regulators and prohibited local governments from enacting strict pro-environmental rules. The state chapter of the League of Conservation Voters has rated members of the legislature every year since 1999. Between 1999 and 2012, the group issued North Carolina a total of 48 scores of zero. In 2013 alone, 82 North Carolina Republicans got zeros. 

The anti-abortion movement has held sway in many of the 23 Republican-led states, successfully winning passage of legislation designed to force the closing of abortion clinics and to make access to related services as onerous as possible. The Guttmacher Institute publishes a description of state-level abortion laws. The measures adopted in conservative states generally include some or all of these restrictions: a woman must wait 24 hours and accept counseling designed to discourage abortion; a minor must obtain parental consent; public funding is restricted to abortions in cases of life endangerment, rape or incest; the woman must undergo ultrasound and the provider must show and describe the image to the woman. 

Perhaps the most controversial action taken by Republicans in states where they have power has been the approval of legislation designed to restrict minority and student voting through photo ID laws and limitations on early voting. In 2013, the North Carolina legislature enacted a major revision of state voting laws that Dan T. Carter, a prominent historian of the South, describes as the “nation’s most extensive effort at voter suppression.” Carter writes:

"Every change in North Carolina’s new election code was targeted at reducing potential Democratic voters regardless of race, creed, color or national origin. The state’s VIVA/Election Reform law, passed on a straight party line vote, now requires a government-issued photo ID card to vote, but rejects student IDs, public-employee IDs, or photo IDs issued by public assistance agencies. Other provisions end Sunday voting (African Americans have a tradition on voting after church) and straight-party ticket voting (fifty seven percent of straight ticket votes are by Democrats), shorten the early voting calendar, (Democratic voters are thirty percent more likely to vote early than Republicans), ban same-day registration during early voting, (a majority of same day registrants are Democrats)."

State level Republicans have taken a cue from tax bills passed at a national level during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to push through tax cuts with the lion’s share of benefits going to the top of the income distribution. Last year, for example, Mike Pence, the Republican governor of Indiana, signed legislation that slashed rates across the board and eliminated the state estate tax.

Edsall sees "a day of demographic reckoning" coming for the GOP when all the old white people who represent the Republican base die off and are replaced by young blacks and Latinos. But by then our merely formal system of two-party representative democracy will be even more constricted. Universal suffrage will no longer exist as a conservative federal bench continues to whittle down the franchise; at which point, the parties might not even feel it necessary to nominate people of color and women as window dressing.