Question

1.  Describe the context that gives rise to conservatism - in the era that runs from Presidents Nixon, through Reagan to Clinton.  What are some of the ideas of this conservative movement that have impact on welfare policy?

Answer 1

Although conservatism has much older roots in American history, the modern movement began to gel in the mid–1930s when intellectuals and politicians collaborated with businessmen to oppose the liberalism of the New Deal led by President Franklin D.

This timeline of modern American conservatism lists important events, developments and occurrences which have significantly affected conservatism in the United States. With the decline of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party after 1960, the movement is most closely associated with the Republican Party (GOP). Economic conservatives favor less government regulation, lower taxes and weaker labor unions while social conservatives focus on moral issues and neoconservatives focus on democracy worldwide. Conservatives generally distrust the United Nations and Europe and apart from the libertarian wing favor a strong military and give enthusiastic support to Israel.^[1]

Although conservatism has much older roots in American history, the modern movement began to gel in the mid–1930s when intellectuals and politicians collaborated with businessmen to oppose the liberalism of the New Deal led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, newly energized labor unions and big city Democratic machines. After World War II, that coalition gained strength from new philosophers and writers who developed an intellectual rationale for conservatism.^[2]

Richard Nixon's victory in the 1968 presidential election is often considered a realigning election in American politics. From 1932 to 1968, the Democratic Party was the majority party as during that time period the Democrats had won seven out of nine presidential elections and their agenda gravely affected that undertaken by the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, but the election of 1968 reversed the situation completely. The Vietnam War split the Democratic Party. White ethnics in the North and white Southerners felt the national Democratic Party had deserted them. The white South has voted Republican at the presidential level since the mid-1960s and at the state and local level since the 1990s.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan solidified conservative Republican strength with tax cuts, greatly increased defense spending, deregulation, a policy of rolling back communism rather than just containing it, a greatly strengthened military and appeals to family values and conservative Judeo-Christian morality. His impact has led historians to call the 1980s the Reagan Era.^[3] The Reagan model remains the conservative standard for social, economic and foreign policy issues. In recent years, social issues such as abortion, gun control  have become important. Since 2009, the Tea Party movement has energized conservatives at the local level against the policies made by the presidency of Barack Obama, leading to a Republican landslide in 2010 and again in 2014, eventually culminating in the election of Republican Donald Trump as President in 2016.