Moral arguments in politics assume many guises. In American history, the most politically consequential moral arguments have involved allegations of tyranny or attacks on vice. The Declaration of Independence, an indignant catalogue of despotic abuses, indicted a colonial government corrupted by royal scheming; the revolution it justified created constitutions designed to hold tyranny in check. But tyranny had other means, as Andrew Jackson later reminded his countrymen. He denounced the Second Bank of the United States as a privileged monopoly with no place in a democratic republic.

Slavery’s enemies often evoked the specter of tyranny. For Abraham Lincoln, the principle of slavery was that of the divine right of kings: “You work, you toil, you earn bread, and I will eat it.” The real moral difference between himself and Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said during their 1858 Alton debate, was that Douglas refused to look to the end of this iniquitous institution. Lincoln did look to its end, as had the founding fathers, whose vision of human freedom Douglas’s legislative compromises threatened.Footnote ¹

The Civil War and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution ended slavery and, nominally, unequal citizenship for African Americans. Reconstruction inaugurated a political and paramilitary struggle over these aims that was to shape the course of American politics for the century after the Civil War and whose outcome represented, however belatedly and formally, the victory of the egalitarian principles on which the republic was founded.

It was also during Reconstruction that the politics of vice became salient. “Vice” had a double meaning for Victorians. It meant the immoral practices and habits of individuals, such as gambling and drinking, but also the enterprises that encouraged these practices, such as the saloon and the liquor industry. The hydra of commercialized vice threatened not only individuals and families but also democratic governments, whose officials it systematically corrupted. Legislators dawdled and police looked away while saloons, prostitution, and other vice enterprises catered to the workers pouring into America’s industrializing cities.

The antivice reformers, a diverse alliance of women, Evangelical Protestants, nativists, populists, progressives, and medical authorities, fought to prohibit or more strictly regulate alcoholic beverages, narcotic drugs, gambling, and sexual conduct that deviated from the norm of procreative heterosexual intercourse. Their campaigns bore fruit in state laws, such as those restricting liquor sales, and municipal ordinances, such as those banning opium dens. Nineteenth-century Americans assumed that the police power, the authority to preserve and promote public health, safety, morals, and welfare, lay with state and local governments.

That assumption began to change with the passage of the 1873 Comstock Act, a broadly worded federal law that banned from the mail “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials, including contraceptive devices and information about abortion. Over the next half century, Congress enacted antivice laws dealing with Chinese prostitutes (1875), interstate sales of lottery tickets (1895), interstate trafficking in women (1910), and the regulation or prohibition of narcotic drugs (1906, 1909, 1914, 1922, and 1924). Each of these laws extended federal police power in a novel fashion. The Supreme Court upheld their constitutionality, if sometimes by only a single vote. The status of one bill, however, was clear from the start. That was the 1919 Volstead Act, whose constitutionality was assured by the Eighteenth Amendment, ratified that same year.

Often mischaracterized as “prohibition,” the Volstead Act, which allowed the private and sacramental use of alcoholic beverages, the home brewing of wine and cider, and the prescription of spirits, was a classically mixed progressive policy response. Its aim was to medicalize most alcohol consumption, restrict vicious use, and forbid commercialization. Even so, it was sufficiently restrictive to spawn corruption and black markets and to cost the government revenue it could ill afford to forego as the Depression deepened. In 1933 Repeal demoted prohibition to a state and local issue.

Repeal marked the end of the first great era of antivice activism. The crisis of the Depression drew attention from vice issues generally, as did the world war and cold war that followed. The power of the federal government, the rights of labor and management, the scope of the welfare state, and national security dominated the political agenda in the middle third of the twentieth century. Progressivism, though hardly a spent force, took a Keynesian turn. No issue related to vice control held front rank in national politics during Franklin Roosevelt’s long presidency (1933–45) or the two decades that followed it.

The closest thing to an exception was organized crime. The 1950–51 senate investigations, led by Senator Estes Kefauver, attracted widespread publicity and spawned state and local crime commissions. In 1951 and again in 1956, Congress strengthened federal laws against narcotic trafficking, in which the Mafia figured prominently. The political effects proved transient, however. John F. Kennedy, who as a young Massachusetts senator had participated in organized-crime hearings, all but ignored the issue in his 1960 presidential campaign. He preferred to talk about how the Republicans had bungled the Cold War. No one listening to Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address—a rousing foreign-policy speech—could have imagined that the country was embarking upon a decade in which controversies about the moral order would again become central to American politics.

Besides the press of overseas business, the low profile of moral issues reflected a prevailing ethical consensus in mid-century America. Whatever their private behavior and religious views, Americans publicly assented to a moral code that emphasized hard work, honesty, patriotism, and sensual self-restraint. Nowhere was this more apparent than with respect to sex. Intercourse—and children—were supposed to wait for marriage. When they did not, parents-to-be accelerated their wedding plans. Nonmarital births, one in twenty-five in 1950, were stigmatized and rare. So were divorces, apart from an uptick in 1945-47 that weeded out the hastiest wartime marriages. Underworld recreations like prostitution, pornography, drugs, gambling, and gay bars remained available, but clandestinely and at the social margins. Most Americans expected them to remain there.

They did not. The consensual moral and sexual order, frayed by the late 1950s, unraveled during the 1960s and 1970s. Crime and commercial vice increased sharply, as did youthful drug abuse, divorce, and nonmarital births. In 1960, unwed mothers gave birth to one child in twenty. In 1970, it was one in nine; in 1980, nearly one in five. Social scientists explained the changes by evoking structural factors like the postwar baby boom, mass media, or the deindustrialization of the economy. Alarmed conservatives blamed prophets of permissiveness like Dr. Benjamin Spock, Hugh Hefner, and Timothy Leary. They reserved their worst scorn for the Supreme Court justices, who elevated the rights of atheists, criminals, abortionists, and vice peddlers over those of praying students, law-abiding citizens, unborn children, and rural conservatives whose legislative strongholds fell before yet another judicial fiat: “one man, one vote.” What the Warren Court’s progressive activism came down to, observed historian Lucas Powe Jr., was the requirement that “national liberal values be adopted in outlying areas of the United States.”Footnote ²

The more sophisticated conservatives understood that the activist judiciary was only the most visible instrument of a left-liberal establishment that dominated the government, media, and schools. Indulgent of personal misbehavior, this establishment had, in the eyes of these same conservatives, actively discouraged the entrepreneurial behavior essential to national wealth and character. Liberals had made regulation and redistribution so burdensome as to constitute a new form of tyranny, the more insidious because it was accompanied by the neglect of state power to safeguard public safety and morals.

This was the point of Choice, an abortive (or perhaps premature) 1964 Citizens for Goldwater-Miller campaign film. Choice dished up a half-hour montage of rioters, strippers, smut peddlers, relief-roll babies, and grafting officials, including Lyndon Johnson’s protégé Bobby Baker. Johnson himself made an appearance, in the guise of a 1964 Lincoln Continental careening down a dusty country road. The narrator intoned the moral: “Something must be wrong—very wrong—at the top.” Although Barry Goldwater judged the film too risqué and racially provocative for television—it was slated to run between soap operas, when housewives would be watching—Choice nonetheless entered history as a trailer for the Culture War and a preview of a successful tactical shift. Republican conservatives who followed Goldwater would, with greater deftness, portray liberalism as a failed elitist ideology that denied liberty and fomented vice. They thus combined American politics’ most enduring strands of moral argument in a single powerful indictment.Footnote ³

Historians, political scientists, sociologists, journalists, and pundits have set forth the consequences of that indictment in numerous books, several of which have achieved best-seller status. The titles have ranged from the directional (America’s Right Turn, The Right Nation, Rightward Bound) to the cyclical (The Rise of Southern Republicans, The Conservative Ascendancy, Right Star Rising) to the defiant (Blinded by the Right, American Theocracy, The Conscience of a Liberal) to the cryptic (Chain Reaction, Why Americans Hate Politics, What’s the Matter with Kansas?) to the ironically divine (With God on Our Side, The Jesus Machine, God’s Own Party). Although they vary in method and emphasis, particularly on the centrality of racism, their historical gist is much the same. Republican politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, with the help of New Right operatives, media-savvy religious conservatives, and a well-funded conservative counter-establishment, exploited moral outrage, racial resentment, and disenchantment with taxes and liberal social experiments to pry away moral traditionalists and southern voters from the Democratic Party. The defections hastened the breakup of the New Deal coalition and made the GOP permanently competitive in all regions.Footnote ⁴

If the political consequences of antiliberal backlash were clear, the policy consequences were less so. Conservatives won some early legislative victories, as in the Hyde Amendment to bar most Medicaid-funded abortions, first enacted in 1976. They won some belated victories, as in the welfare reform (actually, limitation) that President Clinton reluctantly signed in 1996. And at every level of government, they got longer criminal sentences and bigger appropriations for law enforcement. Spending on police and corrections quadrupled in the quarter century after Reagan took office, as did the number of Americans in jail or prison.

The catch was that the new wars on vice and crime (and the old, expanded war on Soviet Communism) were expensive. One way to pay for them was to pare entitlement spending. But the big programs like Social Security and Medicare remained sacrosanct. Congress continued to expand these popular entitlements and periodically add new ones, such as the 1981 Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program or the 1997 State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Government spending on benefits as a share of total outlays, around 30 percent at the end of the 1960s, doubled to 60 percent by century’s end.Footnote ⁵

The alternative to cutting spending was increasing taxation, anathema to conservative economists and the wealthy individuals and corporations footing the GOP’s bills. From this dilemma emerged a hypertrophied conservatism, properly called Reaganism, that combined lower taxes, larger entitlements, rising deficits, mass imprisonment, military modernization, and an assertive foreign policy with moral nostalgia, patriotic sentimentalism, pro-life tokenism, and high regard for wealth. Libertarians like David Stockman, who, as Reagan’s first budget director, had been present at the messy creation, mocked the new dispensation of big-government conservatism as incoherent and unsustainable. Stockman predicted fiscal ruin, a prophecy taken up by the Tea Party activists, whose fury erupted during President George W. Bush’s free-spending second term (2005–9). By then, moral conservatives were just as disenchanted. Their legislative victories had been scattered, their cultural victories nonexistent. American society had become more, not less, permissive.Footnote ⁶

The articles in this special issue offer case studies of conservative frustration in the Culture War, the long but ultimately stalled counterrevolution against liberal mores and social policies. Ian Dowbiggin, Daniel K. Williams, Michael Nelson, Beth Bailey, and Andrew Hartman show that, for all their energy and passion, social-issue conservatives achieved, at best, checkered policy results. In hindsight, a clear pattern emerges. Conservatives won their biggest victories on issues involving public safety, racial resentment, the undeserving poor, and/or the well-being of children, particularly middle-class children. Longer sentences and less time on welfare were obvious examples. So was the drug war launched by Reagan and supported by Democrats like House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill and Senator Joseph Biden. Democrats refused to be legislatively outbid, or to allow Republicans to politically weaponize kids on drugs. By contrast, social-issue conservatives did less well on issues involving considerations of personal and family privacy, adverse Supreme Court decisions, concerted efforts to progressively reframe (“spin”) moral questions, and/or liberalizing public opinion.

The first two articles, on euthanasia and abortion, highlight the importance of privacy and the role of the Supreme Court. Euthanasia predictably divided orthodox religious conservatives who found spiritual meaning in suffering and secular progressives who found in suffering only a prompt for better social engineering. The issue was clouded, however, by morally distinct varieties of euthanasia—foregoing futile treatment, withdrawing feeding tubes, introducing lethal toxins—and by the wrenching circumstances of individual cases—malformed neonates, vegetative teenagers, cancer patients in extremis. Ian Dowbiggin shows that large majorities of Americans consistently preferred to let patients’ families and physicians resolve these matters privately, without interference from the state. The majority’s preference undercut progressive efforts to legalize and regularize physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill. Yet it also made it difficult for religious conservatives to pass laws or enforce regulations that brought government into the process. The grandstanding of rival activists, notably Jack Kevorkian and Randall Terry, reinforced the prevailing belief that the state should stay out. Euthanasia thus remained a quietly stalemated Culture War front, lit sporadically by flares of publicity from headline-making cases.

One reason for the quiet, Dowbiggin explains, was that the Supreme Court never ruled that there was a constitutional right to die. No equivalent of Roe v. Wade enabled progressives to realize “a blitzkrieg-like breakthrough in the struggle over euthanasia.” Daniel K. Williams’s article on abortion explores the opposite case. The Supreme Court decided Roe in 1973, at a moment when the progressive drive to liberalize state abortion laws had stalled. Absent Roe, progressives would have been forced to accept limits on abortion and the country would have evolved a red-state, blue-state pattern of more or less strict regulation. Such a result, Williams observes, would have matched Americans’ ambivalence. A majority recognized considerations of privacy and women’s rights but believed that fetal life deserved at least some protection. Roe pushed national policy to the left of this middle-ground position and required legalization in all fifty states. It led to a conspicuous increase in legal abortions. And it created a permanent irritant, assuring that abortion, unlike euthanasia, remained an active Culture War front.

Despite the hard-fought battles, pro-life conservatives failed to achieve their primary objective. They lost the 1987 confirmation battle over Robert Bork, whose vote would have overturned Roe. They lost again when his eventual replacement, Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined the majority in reaffirming Roe’s core constitutional principles. The 1992 Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey allowed only state regulations that imposed no “undue burden” on a woman’s right to choose an abortion before the point of fetal viability, which the Court chose not to define. Pro-life efforts to bypass the Supreme Court with a constitutional amendment that defined human life as beginning at conception consistently failed—partly, as Williams notes, because most Americans still had a relative view of fetal rights. Amendment supporters were reduced to electoral siege, voting for presidential candidates pledged to appoint, and senate candidates pledged to confirm, pro-life justices. Those justices would, if they succeeded in keeping their mouths shut and their pasts hidden long enough to get through confirmation, perhaps someday vote to overturn Roe. Thus did the abortion issue become a permanent, if strangely indirect, feature of national political life.

The same cannot be said of gambling, an issue the Supreme Court and Congress mostly avoided. As Michael Nelson shows, the key battles over this ancient vice, rechristened “gaming” by the casino industry, occurred in the state legislatures. Proponents of legal lotteries and casinos made remarkable gains after the 1960s; the South, the nation’s most morally conservative region, held out the longest. Eventually, however, even Evangelical strongholds like Tennessee and Mississippi permitted gambling—a lottery in the former, casinos in the latter. Victory depended on defusing the issue culturally and morally. It helped that gambling proponents were mainstream politicians and business leaders, not “limousine liberals” or “secular humanists” who grated on conservative culture warriors. The proponents resorted to indirection, stealth, and constructive language (let’s let people vote on it, let’s grow tourism and local economies, let’s use the money for scholarships) to obfuscate, conceal, and sanitize the issue. “The dumb and dumbest are going to be paying for the best and the brightest’s education,” complained Jim Kyle, a Tennessee senator who refused the sugared bait. “That’s a helluva policy.”

It was also an expedient one, insofar as chronically tight state budgets played into the legalizers’ hands. One cannot read Nelson’s study of gambling without thinking of more recent arguments on behalf of marijuana legalization in hard-pressed states like California. “We need the money,” Oakland marijuana advocate Richard Lee observed in a 2010 interview. “Second, we need tax savings on police and law enforcement, and have that law enforcement directed towards real crime.” The last two words, “real crime,” are a virtual haiku of progressive reframing.Footnote ⁷

Nelson remarks that the revolution in gambling policy was part of America’s ongoing moral revolution. Beth Bailey makes the same point about gays in the military, but with a twist. Homosexuals in the Cold War military faced prosecution and dishonorable discharge, a policy few Americans found objectionable in an era of conservative sexual norms. Throughout the 1950s and most of the 1960s, policy and public opinion were in close alignment. However, the rise of civil rights and gay rights generated legal pushback and prompted the Carter administration to reformulate the policy. Beginning in 1981, homosexuals were barred not because their sodomy was intrinsically sinful or criminal, but because individual homosexual behavior threatened the cohesion of larger, presumably heterosexual, units. Morale became the basis of morality—a subtle but fateful shift.

President Bill Clinton’s premature 1993 effort to lift the ban yielded an awkward “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. However, the morally leftward drift of public opinion eventually forced conservatives from even this boggy middle ground. When unit cohesion became “the only acceptable way to speak publicly about the issue,” moral conservatives could no longer say what was really on their minds—that homosexuality was an affront to God and a danger to society. And when a substantial majority of Americans expressed support for gay soldiers and sailors serving openly, conservatives were left without support for the claim that their young comrades would take umbrage. As often happens when the ethical ground shifts from the sacred and morally absolute to the relative and the utilitarian, progressives gained the advantage.

Andrew Hartman revisits the struggle over school curricula, another instance where Christian and especially Evangelical conservatives faced strong cultural headwinds. Objecting to sex education, evolutionary biology, multiculturalism, and the secular humanist ethos of education, they fought to purge progressive curricula in places as far separated as Anaheim, California, and Kanawha County, West Virginia. Despite scattered and mostly symbolic victories, Hartman judges that they lost the war over moral content. “The American curriculum continues to reflect a post-1960s moral paradigm: secular, relativistic, and culturally liberal,” he writes, adding that “many conservative curriculum warriors have abandoned the battlefield by joining the Christian day-school and homeschool movements.” Neoconservatives who advocated rigorous national standards backed by testing had better legislative results, though they were ironically at odds with the religious conservatives, who favored local control of curricula tailored to their priorities.

This last point reminds us that modern American conservatism has never been monolithic. Socially and ideologically diverse, conservatives have found common ground in the partisan and the emotional, notably in the belief that the damned Democrats wanted to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and to heal their self-inflicted wounds with other people’s money. Yet conservatives have differed, sometimes in surprising ways, over the details of moral policy. Lee Atwater, the hardball operative who in 1988 destroyed Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, favored legal abortion. So did David Stockman. Libertarians could be as secular as left-liberals, even if for tactical reasons they made nice with GOP Evangelicals. More fundamentally, the loosely regulated capitalist economies that libertarians favored undermined—through affluence, advertising, consumerism, and the commercialization of addictive vices—the very moral values to which religious conservatives longed to return.Footnote ⁸

In the Culture War, nothing succeeded like failure. Business rationality—profit maximization—dictated that American culture would become more permissive and self-indulgent, which ensured that moral traditionalists would continue to be upset, which enabled conservative politicians to go on harvesting their votes by blaming the godless liberal smarty-pants. This political perpetual-motion machine, set in motion, as Max Weber foresaw, by the morally and religiously corrosive qualities of capitalism itself, helps explain the great paradox of American political history since the late 1960s: that the conservative electoral ascendancy has been unmatched by conservative cultural or moral-policy gains, duly noting the crime-race-class-youth exceptions. Two words that appear in the first and last of these fine articles, “stalemate” and “mixed,” fairly sum up the matter.Footnote ⁹