A remarkable transformation has occurred in American thought. It's one of those transformations that's imperceptible while it's happening, but seems breathtaking when looked upon in retrospect. I believe historians will almost certainly remark upon the 1990s as the linchpin decade that marked a radical shift in the American mindset.
Consider a 1950 book called Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, by Lionel Trilling. In it, Trilling wrote:
In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism...but [they] do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.
Trilling was concerned that, with such a dearth of intellectual challenge, liberalism would become soft, complacent, flabby. He went on to talk about John Stuart Mill, who encouraged liberals to get to know the thinking of Coleridge:
Mill, at odds with Coleridge all down the intellectual and political line, nevertheless urged all liberals to become acquainted with this powerful conservative mind. He said that the prayer of every true partisan of liberalism should be, "Lord, enlighten thou our enemies...; sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength."
An important thing to keep in mind is that Trilling wasn't being sarcastic. This wasn't some barb he was throwing at his conservative opponents. He meant it. He didn't have any conservative opponents. He worried that, if liberalism is about open-minded truth-seeking, then a dearth of rigorous and logical dissent would lead to the decay of liberalism itself.
In The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, historian Steven F. Hayward discusses this same intellectual trend, which carried on through the 1960s and 1970s. Conservatism was looked down upon with condescension, when it wasn't feared or demonized. Conservatives themselves tended to internalize this assumption of intellectual inferiority. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a famous liberal intellectual who worked in the Nixon White House, noted how the conservatives he worked with tended to be defensively thick about intellectual ideas. He characterized them as people who withdrew into a turtle-like shell, saying "Middle America is with us" when confronted with arguments they didn't like.
Article comments
1 - Henrik Mintis
The Republican trend began with Reagan, who adopted ideas from Goldwater, a wise man if not an intellectual. The Democrat trend began with LBJ, Goldwater's nemesis. Liberalism started creeping toward socialism and government control. Nixon was more liberal than JFK, and the Republicans collapsed, pending Reagan. Carter was more liberal than LBJ, and the Democrats collapsed, pending Clinton.
During the 1990s, science became increasingly popular, and computers made documentation and statistical computation easy. We can track the effects of opinions and laws more precisely now. We passed "workfare" and saw positive feedback. We passed gun control laws, and saw negative ones. We bonded with North Korea in 1994, and learned its outcome today. Call it "outcomes-based public policy". Moynihan's grandiloquent class could justify any idea with educated rhetoric, but today's arguments sound much stronger when backed by living data.
The Republicans' turning point was Buchanan's leaving. Him gone, the Republicans today are the true liberals (in the sense of our founders and the free market proponents of the 19th and 20th centuries), and the Democrats have become socialist fascists. The Democrats' turning point was 9/11. The party maintained success issuing narcissistic rhetoric, and pandering to sub-groups, but has finally come to the edge of a cliff. Reagan lifted Republicans from the depths, and Dubya is standing on the shoulders his father would not. Clinton took the Democrats to the tippy-top of the mountain they started climbing in 1963, and 9/11 pushed them off the edge. Their collapse is not pretty, but beautiful.