History of the United States II / Unit 18 USH2 2589 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Liberal and Conservative as Fixed Positions
The idea
The course's second cross-theme twin is that liberal and conservative are fixed positions, each owning its policies across the century. The entries say otherwise: the same federal role was defended and attacked by different coalitions at different times. The Progressive movement of unit six already combined reform with restriction, entry 0755. In the nineteen thirties the conservative Liberty League came from Roosevelt's own party, entry 1531, and the conservative coalition of nineteen thirty-eight joined southern Democrats to Midwestern Republicans, entry 1549. In the nineteen fifties a Republican president kept the New Deal and expanded Social Security, entry 1830. In the nineteen nineties a Democratic president signed welfare reform, entry 2301, and deregulated finance, entry 2462. In two thousand ten Democrats enacted a health care model, entry 2441, that Republicans had proposed.
In practice
One federal programme, Social Security, created by Democrats in nineteen thirty-five, expanded by a Republican in the nineteen fifties, and surviving the Reagan years, battered but intact.
Where people slip
What stays fixed is the question, not the answer. From the Progressives of entry 0754 to the Tea Party of entry 2442, the argument has been over how far the federal government should reach into the economy and into citizens' lives, and who counts as a citizen it should serve, the question entry 0791 leaves open. Two misreadings sit on either side. The first treats the traditions as fixed teams, which cannot account for Eisenhower, the Liberty League or the health care law's conservative model. The second treats the labels as meaningless, which cannot account for the real and lasting difference between the Great Society of entry 1967 and the New Right of entry 2252. The course's position: the traditions are real, and their coalitions move.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for History of the United States II