Post-1984 Political Landscape

Report Outline
Liberalism's Decline
The Turning Point
Conservative Challenge
Ideology and the Parties

Liberalism's Decline

Liberal Crisis and Conservative Gains

On Jan. 21, Americans will witness the second inauguration of Republican President Ronald Reagan. Many of his supporters view Reagan's landslide victory last November as the ratification of a conservative political philosophy, out of vogue since the New Deal days of the 1930s but redeemed by Reagan's first election in 1980. In addition, many political pundits describe Reagan's triumph over Walter F. Mondale as another body blow, perhaps a fatal one, to the liberalism that has dominated the Democratic Party for the past half-century.

Obituaries for liberalism have been written before but seldom with such good reason. Mondale, who regarded himself as the bearer of a torch passed to him by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert H. Humphrey, received only 41 percent of the popular vote. The former vice president's performance continued a long and unhappy pattern for liberal Democrats. Since the brief heyday of post-New Deal liberalism in the early 1960s, no Democratic presidential candidate generally identified as a liberal has mustered as much as 43 percent of the total vote.

Many traditional Democrats—white Southerners, white laborers, Catholics, religious fundamentalists, even “baby boomers” with roots in the anti-Vietnam War movement—are indicating their dissatifaction with the Democrats' “drift to the left” by voting against the party. In a Gallup survey released Dec. 2, four-fifths of the respondents described themselves as “right-of-center” or “middle-of-the-road,” while only 18 percent called themselves “left-of-center.” However, 44 percent saw the national Democratic Party as left-of-center.