In 1964, Lyndon Johnson was elected president with 61.1% of the popular vote, the highest share for any candidate since 1824. With this mandate, he enacted his Great Society program, the high point of American liberalism. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president with 489 Electoral College votes to Jimmy Carter's 49, and the conservative counterrevolution was underway.

The path from 1964 to 1980 is often attributed to the fracturing of what prominent liberal Joe Rauh called “the liberal-labor-Negro coalition that had elected every liberal president and made possible every liberal advance since the 1930s.” Civil Rights and Vietnam were the great stressors of this coalition in the 1960s and 1970s, driving wedges between its labor faction and the liberals and minorities. But this isn’t th

See Full Page