The presidencies of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson marked the high point of liberal reform. Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society expanded the power of the national state to provide both compassionate government and bureaucratic regulation. Liberalism permitted greater freedom for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; expanded educational opportunities for the disadvantaged; reduced poverty; extended health care; and began to clean up the environment. However, liberalism imposed a degree of federal oversight that seemed too restrictive and expensive to many Americans. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War weakened many of these accomplishments and fractured the liberal consensus of the 1960s.
Kennedy and Johnson did not achieve liberal triumphs by themselves. The civil rights movement, with unsung heroes like Bayard Rustin, forced the federal government into action by creating crises and raising the stakes for preserving domestic tranquillity. In addition, Earl Warren’s Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of major pieces of reform legislation and charted a new course for expanding the guarantees of the Bill of Rights.
Although the Vietnam War tarnished liberalism, the struggles of African Americans, women, Chicanos, Indians, and gays continued. Indeed, the civil rights movement spurred other exploited groups to seek greater freedom, and they flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s despite the waning of the liberal consensus. Even the counterculture, which lost its most extreme elements to drugs and overindulgence, saw its styles, music, and attitudes toward pleasure blended into mainstream consumer culture.
Liberalism produced unparalleled accomplishments but planted the seeds for its own unravelling. During the 1960s, liberal policies and programs generated powerful counterattacks from radicals and conservatives alike. Indeed, over the next twenty-five years conservatives mobilized the American electorate and gained power by attacking liberal political, economic, and cultural values. The liberal ascendancy proved short-lived, but its impact on the United States has had a lasting effect.
Rather than encompassing any one political and social philosophy, the decade of the 1960s was a time when reform, revolution, and reaction intermingled. Although the era remains known for radicalism and excess, it also saw the revival of conservatism as a force that would dominate politics for the rest of the twentieth century and into the beginning of the next millennium.