The wars in Vietnam and Iraq
aren’t the same, of course, but there’s an eerie
feeling of sameness to what’s happening now and what happened
in the early 1970s. Only this time, it’s a conservative
political coalition that’s crumbling.
In 1971, when
I moved to rural Wallowa County in Oregon, a national liberal
coalition held sway. This movement had its roots in New Deal
programs that brought jobs, unemployment and retirement benefits
and affordable housing to the masses. It reached its moral high
mark in the civil rights legislation of the mid-‘60s.
It was the unpopular war in Vietnam that changed
everything, from party politics to where an entire generation spent
its youth. The war created the “draft lottery” to choose who went
and who didn’t go to war, and thousands of young people fled
to Canada. The war dulled the civil rights movement and confused
and embittered veterans who came back to an often hostile
environment. It also chased me out of a possible career in the
State Department to a rural community development job with the
Extension Service.
Anti-Vietnam energy dominated music
and culture in the 1970s. It gave rise to a youth movement that
didn’t trust its elders, and it brought an end to the old
coalition of civil rights advocates, labor unionists and small
farmers. Along with social service providers, academics and
intellectuals, this loose alliance had held a lock on government
for a quarter-century.
As the liberal coalition frazzled,
conservative movements, though varied in their aims, found each
other. Economic and limited-government conservatives who had
rallied behind Republican Barry Goldwater, social conservatives
upset with the legal interpretations of the Warren Supreme Court,
and an evangelical Christian movement preaching return to one
version or another of basic values — all became members of a
broad conservative coalition.
I’ve often wondered
how some of these groups could gather in the same room. Chuck
Gavin, my old Extension Service boss, was a dyed-in-the-wool
Republican who hated environmental groups and regulations. But he
also had no use for organized religion. I have friends who would go
to the wall over gun rights but who think the war in Iraq is a
mistake. When times were good, conservative factions each got
enough of what they needed to let them look away from their
party-mates’ views and positions on other matters, just as
populist Southern farmers put up with the civil rights advocacy of
Democrats.
Now, the conservative factions no longer seem
to fit in the same room, and they are admitting it. Columnist
George Will, a “limited government” conservative, complained
recently that “federal spending… has grown twice as fast under
President Bush as under President Clinton.”
Charles
Krauthammer, a leading conservative columnist who has been
outspoken in support of President Bush’s foreign policy and
the war in Iraq, said that we are in “a fight over evolution that
is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national
embarrassment. … ‘Intelligent design’ may be
interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud.” And Rich
Lowry, the editor of the conservative National
Review, said that Republicans are “associated with an
unpopular war… beset by scandal… and appear to have run out
of ideas.”
Various parties to the conservative coalition
got along until prison scandals, torture stories, rising war costs
and American casualties pulled them apart. Meanwhile, Democrats,
busy checking the political wind speed and finding their
satisfaction in a blame game, have failed to hammer out coherent
positions to remedy the mess we’re in. All of which
contributes to that deja vu all-over-again feeling.
In
1971, Democrats outnumbered Republicans two to one in Wallowa
County, a hangover, I’m sure, from New Deal farm programs.
Local offices such as sheriff and the county commission were
partisan back then, and most office holders were Democrats. A few
years later, many locals were casting their votes for Republicans
and re-registering as Republicans. Over the 35 years, local
registration has become three-to-one Republican, a phenomenon
common to much of the rural West.
But, as Dylan said,
“the times they are a changin’.” A decade or two from now, we
may look back at the Iraq War as the cause, and 2005 as the year,
the conservative coalition broke apart. The interesting question is
what kind of coalition will pick up its pieces.
Rich Wandschneider is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
He lives in Joseph, Oregon, where he directs the Fishtrap
gatherings of writers and community
activists.
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