this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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It's hard to describe personal politics prior to 2000. It was easy to be a sane conservative in the 80s. There was obviously shady shit going on behind the scenes. But outwardly the conservative movement mostly espoused mainstream thought at the time.
I see that, but it's hard not to connect the dots between Reagan and Trump; what people voted for then has a direect relationship with what they're voting for now, and it wasn't rare to hear alarm bells being raised back then either. These progressions are not chaotic, unpredictable, or sudden, so it's weird to hear people talk about how normal conservatives used to be just thirty years ago. The window was not so skewed then maybe, but it was being pulled right even then.
The Republican Party in the 1980s was just starting to get taken over by Evangelicals and the NRA, and was firmly behind the Southern Strategy. It was definitely getting pulled right at that time.
On the topic of the Southern Strategy, it is also such a weird transition because you still had some lingering vestiges of the Dixiecrats who turned Republican existing within the Democratic party, while other Dems, suddenly free of the conservative members of their party, were trying to figure out what they were all about.
A lot of Dems were all aboard the "Christian family values" train back then. I'd imagine some even still are, but you don't see public figures from the Dems these days like Tipper Gore trying to ban rock and roll music because references to sex and the occult might corrupt the youth.
Satanic Panic was a bipartisan movement back then, but today it really only survives in one party (the Republicans), which I would attribute less towards general sentiment changing and more towards those voters consolidating into the Republican party as they turned into elder boomers, giving better definition to the partisan politics we have today.
This isn't a particularly new chart but I think it illustrates the shift well.
It just seems the country was overall more conservative back then and they had a stranglehold on America. Their "boTh SiDeS" "Good Christian" antics were dominant. Republicans began shitting the bed as the direction of the nation diverged and they were no longer obviously in control. Then the veil got lifted on the power of money in politics and the rat lashed out from the corner.
Yeah, I was also an 80s conservative, but I couldn’t tell you how much I moved left vs how much the right pulled ever farther right.
Or maybe it was naïveté: for example it felt like “family values” meant actually valuing family, that fiscal conservativism was not spoken ironically, and science and education were worth investing in. Environmentalism seemed perfectly compatible with being an 80s conservative
But more importantly in the 80s it was ok to work with or even vote for someone in the other party. It was an attitude how things should be run, rather than a lifestyle or an us vs them. Maybe that’s just me though
It really was so different.