Hollywood & Politics, Part 4: How So Much of The Conservative Movement Was Born In California – Though The Left Really Doesn't Want to Acknowledge It

 

There's a good argument that so much of American politics at every level has its roots in what was going on in California during the 1960s and 1970s.

On the side of the left we would see Huey Newton and Bobby Seale form The Black Panther Party, the riots in Watts, the take over of the Berkeley campus, the rise of Caesar Chavez as a labor organizer and Harvey Milk in San Francisco.  On the side of the conservatives was Barry Goldwater win in the California primary which led to the disastrous convention at the Cow Palace that summer, Ronald Reagan's surprise election as governor in 1966 and Richard Nixon's incredible comeback that led to him winning the Presidency in 1968.

I've written in a previous series of articles about the 'Lost Cause of the 1960s' and how that generation has written its own mythology about how America was this close to something and then they lost it.  In the decades since this myth has been reframed to argue that what all these groups – particularly the antiwar movement – were trying to do was warn us about the evils of Richard Nixon and America rejected it.  This has always been a false flag; the left famously wanted to get rid of LBJ because they blamed him for the war and backed the Eugene McCarthy candidacy for that sole purpose, never thinking for a moment that this would give the Republicans an opening  one which would essentially allow to dominate the White House for the next quarter of a century.

They've also done much to negate just how successful the conservative movement was in later years. In newsletters written by Daily Kos – which was founded in Berkeley in the 2000s – they have essentially done everything in the power to try to argue the entire Republican revolution from start to finish is a sign of moral bankruptcy on the GOP's part. They will acknowledge that the Republicans have gained immense political power but at the cost of their soul and in the binary language of the left, that means it shouldn't count. They've actually gone further in recent years trying to argue that so many of the dominant wins of Republican Presidents during this period were essentially frauds on the American people, engaging in a kind of election denialism that honestly puts anything in recent years to shame in terms of sheer fantasy.

Considering that during the period from 1968 to 1992 the Republicans won four elections in massive landslides with 400 electoral votes or more and in two cases carrying 49 of 50 states you would think it would be impossible to argue that these candidates did not have the mandate of the masses. And yet that is exactly what publications like Daily Kos have argued. I'll deal with two of there arguments in this article, but its worth noting that in both cases the left has completely erased its role in either election – and it was significant in both.

It's worth noting that there were origins of it during the 1964 election. Barry Goldwater had hoped to win the Presidency by capitalizing on the 'backlash' movement: the reaction of white working class voters to the riots in the streets that were beginning to take place during this period. George Wallace had managed to gain some momentum on it during the 1964 primaries and Goldwater had hoped to do the same, particularly in the South.  This was considered unsuccessful considering that LBJ managed a landslide victory in 1964 carrying 45 of 50 states and the District of Columbia. But Goldwater had done better than any Republican in the South since Reconstruction, carrying Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi.

When rioting became far worse in the aftermath of this period many Republicans were carried to power. The most notable one was Ronald Reagan who had managed an upset victory against Pat Brown in the gubernatorial race in 1966, mainly because of the increased violence in Berkeley and Watts. This led to the use of the phrase 'law and order' when it came as a campaign strategy, something that George Wallace and Richard Nixon would use when campaigning for the Presidency.

The left then and now would frame this as a dog whistle for white supremacy and while there is a considerable amount of truth in it, it's essentially asking you to negate just how upset so many American people were because of the violence in the streets. This in itself was not a new tactic by leftist movements, protests had always been a part of their actions ever since the antislavery movement and by and large it had always done more harm to the movement then good. But the left seemed to believed that if the masses saw it on television it would inspire them to realize the moral right of their cause and they would act.

And they did – the white working class vote started to go Republican from the 1964 election on.  The left has essentially framed this as 'the racist vote' and shrugged it off as the failure of the masses, not the protestors. The fact that this essentially led to Nixon being elected is something they have chosen to ignore, as well as their role in the marching in Chicago and their refusal to vote for Humphrey which led to Nixon winning a narrow victory.

The left has chosen to shade his victory, particularly in regard to 'the Southern strategy' and Nixon's wooing of Strom Thurmond.  Again they frame this as a morally bankrupt decision rather than s strictly political one. What they leave out is that Nixon was also hoping the win working class voters in northern states as well as the Southern ones, a strategy that did pay dividends. He was able to carry Illinois and Ohio by a small margin – and just as critically, California.

There may be no bigger sign as to how much ground the Democrats had lost between 1964 and 1968 then in California. California had gone for Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 and narrowly for Nixon in 1960. In 1964 LBJ had carried it by nearly 19 points over Goldwater. But in 1968 Nixon took the state with 47.8 percent of the vote to Humphrey's 44.7 percent and Wallace's 7 percent. In just four years' time the Democrats lost fifteen percent of the vote in that state to the opposition.

Richard Nixon, as I mentioned in a previous article, is the first example of how the left chose to ignore the threat of a Republican candidate that they considered intellectually and morally beneath them. In the case of the residents of California it is particularly striking that they chose to ignore this fact.  They had seen firsthand how he could use television to appeal the masses on an emotional level to great effect and they chose to argue that there was something wrong with the masses.  When he'd run for President in 1960 and lost they have rejoiced in his defeat, particularly after his failed campaign for governor in 1962 when he famously said: "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." And even as he rose from the ashes largely because of protests very much like the ones going on in California they still refused to take him seriously.

Nixon's victory was the clearest sign yet that Republicans were better at messaging and using television to win elected office at the highest level of the land then Democrats could be even in the 1960s. And his reign also demonstrated a clear advantage the Republicans would have going forward that the Democrats have never truly been able to overcome.

Had all of the movements that were part of the New Left been able to unite around a single message and campaign, they might have become a political force. But there's no sign that there was even an attempt for any collaboration between any groups: the Black Power movement never tried to collaborate with the rising feminist movement, the feminist movement with the Chicano movement, etc. Each group chose to work on its own and try to realize its own goals with no idea of collaboration. And as long as the Republicans managed to stay focused on their group of voters, they had no chance of getting any seat at the table. The McGovern campaign was the only real attempt to even to try to do so – and when it collapsed in a 49 state landslide for Nixon, no serious attempt would be made again in the 20^th century.

When Nixon began to bring himself down as the Watergate scandal, the left took a victory lap even though they had done nothing to help in that sense. Bumper stickers began to appear in California saying: "Don't blame me, I voted for Helen Gagahan Douglas."  It took the standards one has seen of the left ever since: they bore no responsibility for the rise of a horrible politician and it was everyone's else fault. The disgrace Nixon had brought about on the nation was not theirs to bear even though he had won elected office in their state and had carried it in all three of his runs for the Presidency.

Almost immediately they got a chance to demonstrate that they had learned nothing from a California Republican's rise to power and eventually the White House when not long after Nixon resigned Ronald Reagan announced his campaign for the Republican nomination, challenging Gerald Ford. In this case Hollywood had more to do with it then anything else – and they chose to pretend it wasn't their fault.

 

During the 1948 campaign Harry Truman had made a stop in Los Angeles where the then President of the Screen Actors Guild Ronald Reagan introduced him.

During this campaign for the Presidency many of Reagan's colleagues had been open admirers of Henry Wallace's doomed Progressive campaign for the Presidency and Reagan had to be aware of how many of them were former members of the American Communist Party. He also had to be aware of the kinds of ridiculous statements Wallace was making about what was happening in Eastern Europe and how so many Californians were in his favor despite that.

Perhaps he paid attention to the results of the election and saw that Wallace had gotten the most votes in California and New York. He also had to have noticed that Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond got nearly as many votes in thirteen states than Wallace did in 50. And given his propensity for borrowing lines he felt might play well with audiences maybe he chose to steal Glen Taylor's statement upon running as Wallace's Vice President: "I have not left the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me."

I might be reading too much into this but for all the things Reagan has been accused of during his career, no one ever said he wasn't a great politician. And two things are true: Hollywood took Reagan's defection to the Republican party harder than anyone else and ignored even the possibility that the rest of America would ever take him seriously as a Presidential candidate.

Reagan's skills as an actor no doubt gave the ability to give stirring speeches and his amiability was a powerful draw. And its not as though California hadn't had actors run for higher office before and since: in the 1964 election George Murphy had been elected to the Senate in California as a Republican. I suspect it was the fact that Reagan had been a Democrat and moved to the right that offended them the most. Whenever a Democrat switches parties to the other side (as is almost always the case of every Senator or Congressman who has done so in the last century) the left takes particular offense and phrases it as if it is an intellectual or moral defect. "How can any intelligent person become a Republican?" is implied.

This belief has become more and more locked in during the last fifty years even as many political official and indeed much of both political parties began moving more to the right. Indeed McGovern's landslide defeat in 1972 was the clearest message to the Democrats that what was known as old school liberalism was dead and the party would have to adapt in order to survive. Nixon's resignation muddied the waters slightly and it would the Democrats a while – maybe too long – to catch up with America.

The left, particularly in places like Hollywood, has refused to acept the message. Election results be damned, Americans wanted liberal values. They chose to pretend that was not the case when Reagan did very well in the primaries – particularly in crossover primaries where members of both parties could vote for the candidate they chose – only to eventually lose to Ford. They ignored it when the centrist Democrat Jimmy Carter managed to do well at the grass roots level – talking to the people and building coalitions – over the left wing of the Democratic Party including their own new Governor Jerry Brown, eventually winning the nomination and finally the White House.

And almost from the start they had no patience for Carter. It wasn't that they were nearly as affected  by the stagflation that was crippling the economy of the rest of the country. It was that he was he spoke with a funny accent. He wore a sweater to give a fireside chat. He talked about being a Christian. Most of all, he wasn't a liberal.

I mention all of this because in their rewrite of history publications like Daily Kos have tried to argue that America loved Jimmy Carter. He was a good President. They've basically had to omit the entire 1970s in order to reach that explanation as well as the fact that had they lived in the 1970s they would have been supporting Ted Kennedy's primary challenge from the start. Hollywood had famously loved JFK and they'd embraced RFK just as much. They weren't quite as fond of Teddy – with good reason, as I've written in other articles – but if he could get rid of funny guy from Georgia, they'd be for him. Again they had learned nothing from their backing of McCarthy and Kennedy and how it led to Nixon winning the White House in 1968.

I've written how the Democrats never liked Carter that much either and were trying to get him to decline the nomination all the way up to the convention. This is also omitted from the left's discussion of Carter – though they will point out how a Kennedy aide decided to work for Reagan and help 'fix' the debate for him. And they also argue that Reagan's aides went out of their way to persuade the Iranians not to release the hostages in Teheran until after the election in order to make sure that Carter couldn't pull off an 'October surprise'

Even allowing the truthfulness of both events they leave out the very real fact as to why Carter was almost certain to lose reelection even if Kennedy hadn't challenged him and almost certainly if the Iranian hostage crisis hadn't happened. The best reasons were summed up by two Reagan anecdotes.

When he made the gaffe of saying America was in a depression rather than a recession, he changed the narrative with a perfect joke: "Recession is when your neighbor loses your job. Depression is when you lose your job. Recovery starts when Jimmy Carter loses his."  Combine that  with his famous line at the summation of his debate: "Are you better off now then you were four years ago?"

These two lines explain why, despite the fact that many voters did have doubts about Reagan's ability to lead because of his age and verbal gaffes, they were more than willing to vote him in the general. Many academics and filmmakers have written thousands of pages and made hours of documentaries trying to understand the conservative movement which they have focused entirely on Reagan, a man they utterly despite for destroying the liberal order. (They usually try to do so omitting the left's role in it, of course.)

But it's incredibly simple when you strip it down to its bare minimum, particularly when it comes to Reagan's election in 1980. Economic times were horrible with stagflation, oil embargoes and recession. Carter was judged incompetent to handle it and  Reagan won because he offered an alternative.  The only thing that surprises me in retrospect is that the polls were as close as they were for much of the fall campaign, rather than illustrating what turned out to be a landslide with Reagan winning 489 electoral votes to Carter's 49. This included California, which Reagan won by a whopping 17 percent, far larger than in any of Nixon's electoral victories and Ford's narrow victory in 1976.

His landslide victory in 1984 was even more dominant where he won 59 percent of the vote to Walter Mondale's 40 percent and 49 of 50 states, totaling 525 electoral votes. His combined total of 1014 electoral votes in two elections is by far the largest of any President in history save FDR who ran in four elections. And his landslide was the official nail in the coffin of the kind of old school liberalism that Mondale represented.

There was a famous quote about Reagan used by the left: "Everybody you know hates him. Everybody you don't know loves him." The lesson that should have been taken from this quote is that the left was elitist and out of touch with the American people. The lesson left chose to take was that America was out of touch and beneath reaching.

It's a policy they've essentially stuck to ever since, choosing to essentially write huge numbers of pages arguing ever since that Reagan was responsible for everything that was responsible for the world today and quite a few things he didn't do.  They've done so omitting any role they have played in pushing Americans to the right as well as arguing that whatever economic good times Americans might think they are experience are not, in fact, real. They've chosen to increasingly denounce the Democratic Party when, in the aftermath of so many considerable electoral defeats, they chose to take the course of moving to the right as a morally bankrupt decision rather than the political necessity the Democrats were going to need to do to survive rather than go extinct pursuing a course the public had repeatedly – and enormously – rejected. Even now they are convinced that the reason that Americans have rejected liberal policies for decades is because something is wrong with – America.

And there is no evidence that during the forty years since they've done anything to widen their reach beyond the faithful. We'll deal with those failures in the following articles but it's worth noting that in the decade that followed California itself would end up going to the right. After Jerry Brown chose not to run for a third term in 1982  Mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley would win the Democratic primary while George Deukmejian run the Republican race. The early expectations were that it would be a close race but Bradley pulled away in the polls.  But on election night Deukmejian narrowly won by less than 100,000 votes.

In fact Bradley would only carry fourteen counties as over forty counties flipped from Democrat to Republican. In what would later become known as 'The Bradley effect'  a statistically significant number of voters had said that they would vote for an African-American candidate rather than a white one. Not even liberal California was immune to the idea of the backlash. When Bradley ran against Deukmejian four years later he got clobbered as Deukmejian won with over 60 percent of the vote.

Bradley served for 20 years as Mayor of Los Angeles and was known for being a political liberal. However he believed business prosperity would be good for the city. But by his fourth term, traffic congestion, air pollution and the worsening of Santa Monica Bay the tide began to term. Just as critical to his problems his decision to refuse to condemn Louis Farrakhan when he made speeches in Los Angeles that were considered Anti-Semitic.

And even when Bradley was successful his record on the LAPD was always one he was reluctant to use. The first time he ran for mayor against Sam Yorty the incumbent questioned Bradley's credibility in fighting crime. Bradley refused to use his record as a police officer in the election, no doubt because he feared how African-American voters might turn on him for it in an era not far removed from the Watts riots despite his own issues with racism in that department. Even it was the most liberal state in America, there were tough roads to work through.

Meanwhile in the Senate Pete Wilson would win the Republican primary in 1982 to replace retiring Senator S.I. Hayakawa. He would run against Brown for that seat. Both men were moderate to liberal on social issues but Wilson was a fiscal conservative in favor of Proposition 13. He would win narrowly in 1982 then won in a landslide for reelection in 1988.

In 1990 Wilson resigned from the Senate to run for Governor against then Mayor of San Francisco Diane Feinstein. This was a closer election as Wilson only took 25 of California's 45 congressional districts in his victory. Four years later Wilson easily won reelection over Kathleen Brown, Jerry Brown's younger sister.

By this point the states' economy was starting to falter but his signature opposition to affirmative action and state services for illegal immigrants led to his win. Wilson would win 25 percent of the African-American vote and 25 percent of the Latino vote. It was also the first time that California's gubernatorial results were difference since the incumbent president since 1974. Considering the Republican revolution that year California was following the country, much as the left and Hollywood might not have wanted it too.

California was still politically important – George H.W. Bush had carried in 1988 and four years later it had gone for Clinton – but no one was willing to call it a model for what America should be.  And it wasn't even clear if those in Hollywood were truly thinking that there policies of liberalism were popular even among themselves.

In the next article I will deal with how Hollywood became more left-wing and self-important in national politics even as the state itself began to self-destruct.