Is Life a Spectator Sport?

Conventional political wisdom in the 1970s held that the majority of Americans were liberal on economic issues, in general supporting the welfare state, while remaining conservative on what are called the “social” issues, encompassing sensitive areas of personal morality like sex and drugs.

The seeming contradiction is not at all mysterious. In most societies the majority of people are essentially traditional in their beliefs, and the general concept of the welfare state is now traditional, deeply imbedded in our politics for well over forty years. Until the 1960s, it would not have occurred to many that there was any inconsistency in being both economically liberal and socially conservative. Such a combination precisely defined the working-class backbone of the New Deal coalition that lasted until the student radicals of the 1960s began to call for a cultural revolution.

JH

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James Hitchcock

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Conventional political wisdom in the 1970s held that the majority of Americans were liberal on economic issues, in general supporting the welfare state, while remaining conservative on what are called the “social” issues, encompassing sensitive areas of personal morality like sex and drugs.

The seeming contradiction is not at all mysterious. In most societies the majority of people are essentially traditional in their beliefs, and the general concept of the welfare state is now traditional, deeply imbedded in our politics for well over forty years. Until the 1960s, it would not have occurred to many that there was any inconsistency in being both economically liberal and socially conservative. Such a combination precisely defined the working-class backbone of the New Deal coalition that lasted until the student radicals of the 1960s began to call for a cultural revolution.