The Social Conservative as Historical Protagonist

I do not mean protagonist in a positive way

A New Right is in town. This isn’t your Old Right, whose unapologetic adoration for the free market sat unquestioningly next to a reverence for the family. The days where libertarians ran roughshod over social conservatives are over. Now, the social conservatives, the true champions of the family, are on the upswing. They are here to bring forth the family-first society modern-day America was meant to be.

These proclamations are among many growing louder and louder in corners of the Right. The embodiment of this new anti-libertarianism is a recent Compact article written by Robert Orr, titled “The Free Market Doesn’t Care About Your Family.” Orr argues that the New Right crusaders seeking to shape GOP policy will have to overcome the party’s “libertarian assumptions.” Orr claims that free-market ideologues “gaslit” pro-family conservatives “into believing their differing priorities are… achieved through the same means.” Orr cites corporate tax breaks as one of several examples illustrating the policies that pro-family conservatives have been conned into believing suit their interests.

It’s a simple but compelling narrative, one which even leftists can find themselves getting behind. But the article demonstrates a fundamental ignorance unfortunately shared by so many on both the Left and the Right: the narrative of the guileless, populist social conservative tricked by the shuckster big-city neoliberal into supporting policies running against his own interests. The term gaslighting denotes a kind of smolbeanification of Middle America; the New Rightists would have it that the housewives and working men of Orange County (those poor babies!) were tricked into Reaganism.

As little regard as I have for the Republican Party, I firmly believe in the necessity of historical agency for the purposes of clear analysis. The narrative which Orr and others push is not only a red herring, but insults the intelligence of the very constituency they defend. The social conservatives were not fooled. The dismantling of the New Deal order was to the immediate material interest of the white homeowners who made up the social conservative mass base. Supporting “anti-family” policies such as corporate tax breaks was and continues to be not only a coherent, but reasonable stance from the material position social conservatives occupy as well as how the rules of a capitalist society function.

The peculiar way our welfare system is distributed through asset-ownership and the ways in which this is racialized clarifies the material basis for why social conservatives i.e. white homeowners appear to vote against their interests and eschew class solidarity time and time again. The goal of this piece is not to evoke sympathy for the conservative cause. Rather, this analysis intends to treat the social conservatives as neither guileless, as the Right would, nor blindly cruel, as the Left would (though I sympathize) — but instead as historical agents, who are both the subjects acting through history and the objects upon which history acts. Clear analysis is a necessary condition for clear strategy.

Neoliberalism From Below

Ironically, the Levittowns of Los Angeles and Long Island whose streets would soon be lined with anti-welfare Goldwater yard signs were the product of prodigious amounts of government money. After the Second World War, the Truman administration accelerated suburban development through a policy of “industrial dispersion,” in which northern and midwestern manufacturers and defense contractors were subsidized through the tax code to move out of industrially-concentrated Steel Belt and Mid-Atlantic cities and into more spread-out Sun Belt cities for national security concerns.¹ Because modern conservatism first cohered and found its mass base within the postwar suburbs, throughout this essay I will use conservative and homeowner interchangeably.

Although the New Deal is generally perceived as a centralizing force in American politics, its administration had little choice but to embrace a form of “cooperative federalism” in order to both appease Southern Democrats in Congress and recruit local and state governments in the administration of public works projects. But the New Deal’s attempt to balance federal prerogatives and local initiatives created a contradiction. As Elizabeth Shermer points out, New Dealers wanted to promote economic growth through industrialization that would modernize the Sunbelt, but at the same time “champion state protections for the citizenry through social welfare programs funded through higher taxes…”² In order to bring in industry, sunbelt municipalities had to build “business friendly” climates attractive to northern manufacturers and defense contractors that promised freedom from pesky union organizers and high taxes to fund social programs.

The flow of capital wrought a Hobbesian one-against-all war between states and municipalities. Large corporations and defense contractors wanting the best deal pitted governments against one another. Although Sunbelt Senators above greased the wheels, by no means was this a top-bottom process of corporations manipulating family-values conservatives. The Sunbelt suburbs played an important role in the northern exodus of capital through their governance strategies. As subsidized as they were, suburbs still needed tax revenue to finance public schools, social services, and public infrastructure to become attractive for both businesses and their blue and white-collar employees. Property taxes are the most common way of going about this. But raising property taxes was the last thing upstart Sunbelt municipalities like Phoenix wanted to do. There was thus a fundamental tension between the desire for strong school systems or public infrastructure and the increased tax revenue necessary to fund them.

This contradiction was partially resolved in the boom times of the postwar era. A nationwide race to the bottom paradoxically produced a virtuous cycle. In 1966, newspapers like The Wall Street Journal hailed Oakland suburbs like San Leandro as models of small-scale municipal governance: “[the city] managed to get all the benefits of lavish public spending while putting a surprisingly small bite on the local taxpayers.” As Sunbelt suburbs like San Leandro attracted more industry, the city could lower the tax rate while still collecting more tax revenue.³

Over a period of three decades, the tax burden on homeowners and industries remained relatively stable because the suburb was constantly expanding, and so tax rates could be kept low while still collecting more revenue. This option was unavailable to Rustbelt cities like Detroit. Whereas Oakland could continue lowering taxes and benefit from constant expansion, Detroit’s shrinking industry — which Sunbelt cities like Oakland benefited from — meant tax cuts would lead to worse public amenities, accelerating capital flight while increasing taxes would also lead to capital flight and thus a shrinking tax base. The total value of property in the city fell as much as “77 percent” beginning in the early 1960s.⁴ It was not the genius of governance that led to cities like Oakland and Phoenix prospering but the grasstops capitalizing on larger-scale national trends. 

Opting for lower property taxes was a fundamentally rational strategy from the point of view of not only municipalities but homeowners. From the point of view of city governance, lowering taxes and creating a “pro-corporate” environment made complete sense in a regional race-to-the-bottom between cities for the biggest gains from the northern and midwestern exodus of industrial capital. From the perspective of homeowners, fighting for lower taxes on their increasing property values for more money in their pocket was rational. And obviously from the perspective of industry, exploiting the gigantic federal subsidies to move down south was equally so. New rightists argue that the suburbanites were gaslit into supporting business friendly policy, but the incentives to lower taxes were so obvious that no con was necessary. The city councilmen of Phoenix didn’t need Milton Friedman to teach them the benefits of lowering taxes to attract business; they — both suburbanites and city administrators — understood this intimately. Both suburbanites and administrators were not acting against their interests. They were merely playing by the rules of a game unfolding far above their heads.

For all intents and purposes, suburban whites were pursuing “pro-family” policies within the wider economic and political forces in which they found themselves. Suburban white families in the South and West enjoyed the tremendous benefits of prosperous communities funded by a boomtime climate for capital and facilitated by a low tax municipal regimes. New Rightists as well as others are correct to point out that this led to tremendous problems within the housing market. But to declare that the social conservative suburbanites were tricked into being pro-corporate shills detracts from the historical agency which the suburbanites have wielded and continue to wield.

White Homeownership as Welfare

The racial element of this economic development was a crucial factor that shaped the social conservatives’ preferences in social welfare policy. To begin with, the mass ownership of housing after World War II was a double movement. On the one hand, the mass democratization of housing for whites in the suburbs; on the other, the mass enforcement of racial segregation for blacks in the inner-cities. By 1955, black homeownership hovered at a little less than forty percent while white homeownership was around sixty percent.⁵ Many use the term White Flight to label the mass exodus of whites from the cities to the suburbs during the mid-twentieth century. But as Robert Self argues, the term is a misnomer. Whites in cities like postwar Oakland and Atlanta did not so much “flee” the city as much as respond to the incredible federal subsidies leading them there.⁶ Meanwhile, The presence of even one black family was often reason enough for a Federal housing Agency (FHA) appraiser to designate the neighborhood as in decay and therefore disqualify all its members from access to highly generous FHA-backed loans.⁷

To white homeowners, blackness was joined to the hip with failing schools, cratering property values, and shuttering factories. As the inner-cities withered, the movement of whites from the city to the suburbs accelerated. As the postwar continued, suburbs resisted annexation — the traditional means by which cities grew — thus denying cities precious tax revenue to fund social services for increasingly overcrowded black and hispanic neighborhoods. Homeownership was thus highly racialized, pitting propertied white workers in the suburbs against propertyless black workers in the inner-cities.

The Civil Rights movement arose to contest not only the legal apartheid of Jim Crow but the economic apartheid that forbade blacks from the suburbs. President Lyndon Johnson kicked off the Great Society as a means of addressing blacks’ economic subordination. But the “special treatment” blacks received from the federal government through Great Society programs angered blue- and white-collar whites. The “hidden” nature of the American welfare system exacerbated these antagonisms. Working-class homeowning whites saw themselves as strivers who had to work for everything they received.8 But they themselves were the beneficiaries of massive federal subsidies in the form of public-private healthcare, incredibly generous mortgages, and lucrative manufacturing jobs indirectly propped up by military-keynesian spending — benefits which most blacks were excluded from.9 Broadly speaking, whites were the beneficiaries of asset-based welfare while blacks had to rely on state-based welfare. One was indirect and respectable, the other direct and disreputable. The former was the domain of the suburban white male breadwinner, the latter the inner-city black single mother.

Both policies may be considered pro-family from different perspectives. Asset-based welfare is pro-family in that it promotes a certain standard of living and way of life for the propertied middle-class. Importantly, the tactics pursued by grasstops suburban leaders such as the Chambers of Commerce were necessary to their towns’ survival given the rules structural to capital in the postwar era. However, because asset-based welfare is generally “hidden,” the suburban business and government leaders hailing from conservative pressure cookers like Orange County could rail against federal interference and support for “welfare queens” while still eagerly competing for federal funds for internal development projects or defense contractors.⁸ This also allowed propertied whites to admonish propertyless inner-city blacks, especially single mothers whose families were seen as “broken,” for being dependents on government largesse. 

The Family-First Society

Understanding the seventies and eighties, the neoliberal turn, is key to the final puzzle piece of why “pro-family” conservatives support “anti-family” policies. Left-wing geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore characterizes this period as the shift from the postwar welfare-warfare state to the workfare-warfare state in which the “will for equity, however weak it had been, yielded to pressure for privatizing or eliminating public — or social — goods and services [while leaving the militarism intact].”⁹ While the thrust is generally correct, it leaves unexplained why whites in this period abandoned the New Deal for Nixon and later Reagan. Indeed, Gilmore explains the defection of many whites as the conjunction between their reactions to the seventies profitability crisis and the apex of the Civil Rights movement. While broadly correct, Gilmore is strengthened when considering the role asset-based welfare played in giving homeowning whites a material reason to “vote against their interests” by voting Republican.

For one thing, inflation led to many homeowners being pushed into higher tax brackets. As the flood of capital withered to a drip, the virtuous cycle ended, and many suburbs had to raise property taxes. On top of insult to injury, homeowning whites had to watch the federal government give “special treatment” to blacks while they withered from the effects of inflation.¹⁰ It was thus easy to see why social conservatives — who benefited from asset-based welfare and therefore unwilling to support state-based welfare to blacks who were both spatially and socially far away — would support the “dismantling” of the state-based welfare state.

By no means was this a wholesale defunding however. As Melinda Cooper observes, the budget cuts carried out by Reagan did not so much eradicate state-sponsored welfare to the poor as much as “transfer [its provisional responsibilities] to cheaper third-party providers,” in particular, faith-based institutions, which practically exploded in inverse relation to the selective dismantling of the state-based welfare state.¹¹ This form of privatized public-private welfare not only served the interests of the neoliberals but also the social conservatives: their taxes were no longer directly go to single black mothers in the inner-cities, but instead religious-organizations whose assistance came with strings attached in the form of workfare to “teach responsibility” to the undeserving poor.

But what was the positive vision which neoliberals offered to the social conservatives? Neoliberals offered a massive expansion of the asset-based welfare state from which white homeowners benefited in conjunction with the selective contraction of the state-based welfare system. Under the Reagan and Bush administrations, individual pension accounts like 401(k)s and mutual funds exploded. The migration from Social Security to financial assets was one of the most effective tools in fusing the interests of the middle-class with those of financial investors. It offered relief to white homeowners, aligned with the interests of small and large industry, and helped the neoliberals dismantle the New Deal order.

The appreciation on financial assets after the Volcker Shock was a huge windfall, and the neoliberals essentially told the middle-class that the water was fine. And it was! The “pro-family” conservatives were not tricked into this arrangement, because as propertied working and middle-class voters the arrangement was in their short-term interest. The stock market was booming, the value of their assets were soaring, and tax cuts meant they could enjoy even bigger slices of the pie. Furthermore, it was not only to their economic, but also social interest. Ironically, Reagan’s asset-based welfare policies were pro-family inasmuch as they forced individuals to rely more on their families by reprioritizing familial wealth accumulation as the means by which individuals ascend the socio-economic ladder and relegating the responsibilities of distribution from the state to the family. This appealed to the individualist, boot-strapping, family-first values of property-owning middle and upper-class whites. “Unlike Social Security benefits, it was argued, the wealth invested in stocks was inheritable and would therefore serve to strengthen rather than undermine the bonds of family dependence.”¹²

The “democratization” of asset-based welfare was a key feature of neoliberalism. Abundant credit made the poison pill of precarious wages easier to swallow. But for propertyless Americans, the simultaneous strengthening of asset-based welfare and hollowing out of state-sponsored welfare — upon which many, white and black, depended for survival — was disastrous. Black-Americans would bear the brunt of what was to come. After the mid-sixties blacks could no longer be denied housing based on the color of their skin. But as Keeanga-Yamahata Taylor demonstrates, whereas Jim Crow was characterized by predatory exclusion, post-racist America would be defined by predatory inclusion, in which blacks were finally given access to the American Dream of homeownership, but on predatory terms extremely favorable to mortgage lenders and real estate agents. Johnson and Nixon believed letting blacks into the housing market and subsidizing mortgage brokers to lend was sufficient by itself for asset democratization. The federal government stepped in to “minimize” risk by insuring and underwriting loans made to blacks in the inner-cities.

However, because the wealth gap between blacks and whites remained, the federal government under Johnson and Nixon effectively subsidized brokers to push dilapidated housing on the most speculative terms possible onto highly-risky and therefore highly-profitable black-americans with poor credit.¹³ Under the neoliberal turn, “color-blind” credit scores were effectively racialized as financial firms preyed on working- and lower-middle-class blacks while the federal government underwrote the new predatory fiscal regime. The gunpowder-speculation resulting from the partnership between the government and financial sector led to the explosive financial crisis and housing collapse in 2008. Black homeowners lost the small but steady gains in wealth made during the post-Civil Rights era. The contradiction of democratizing asset-based ownership — making a “private” asset publicly-owned — is thus further complicated within a society in which economic equality between the races has yet to be achieved.

The False Dichotomy of Being Pro- and Anti-Welfare

Rightists and even many leftists believe that voters are either pro or anti-welfare, when the picture is closer to “welfare for me, not for thee.” The tax giveaways proffered by the Sun Belt suburbs that would become the modern Right’s mass base later on were first playing by the rules laid out by a New Deal order that never got around to resolving the contradiction between a strong welfare state, a lax hand for capital, and uneven geographic development. This strategy was racialized as blacks were left out of the New Deal order and had to fight for their place in it.

The neoliberal turn of the seventies and eighties was characterized not by an anti-welfare policy per se, but a strengthening of the asset-based welfare state whose roots go back to the New Deal and the partial privatization of the state-based welfare state. The neoliberalization of the state and economy benefited “pro-family” conservatives in two ways: first, the windfalls resulting from the far bigger stake they now had in a financialized economy; and second, the triumph of the asset-owning family in the form of private, inherited wealth constituted by stocks, mutual funds, 401(k)s, and inflated housing markets.

The prominence of asset-based welfare complicates the notion of bringing state-based welfare to America. Voting patterns since the eighties points to how. The suburbs are no longer solidly red as they were under Reagan. Since the 1992 Presidential victory of Bill Clinton, and thus the inauguration of the Democrats’ suburban strategy, the suburbs are now the most intensely contested territory in the electoral landscape. The pro-family policy which some Republicans, and even left-leaning Democrats, want would require tremendous tax levies that would require at least partially appropriating and therefore alienating the suburbanites — one of the most crucial voting blocs in the country. 

While the mass base of the Republican party is animated by vitriolic racial animus, it is too often seen as what it’s against rather than what it’s for. The conflict between postwar whites and blacks is often framed as cutting one’s nose to spite their face — instead of working together, whites act against blacks out of pure spite. While vitriolic racism existed before the postwar, the material conditions in which it now existed were genuinely novel: the massive democratization of homeownership that essentially pitted propertied white workers against propertyless black workers. Racial antagonisms were refracted through and exacerbated by two very different welfare states: one based in reputable asset-ownership, the other in disreputable state-sponsored welfare rolls.

My analysis benefits also by situating race not as static categories, but as relational. Race is the mode through which class politics plays out. This does not just apply to black-americans struggling for what was promised to them, but also white-americans fighting to keep what they see as theirs. Situating the white homeowner then and now as a historically rational actor, motivated not only by racial animus, but animus with a clear, material basis, clarifies our analysis and sets forth a clearer strategy whose tactics are better equipped at building cross-racial working-class alliances.

1. O’Mara, Margaret Pugh. Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley. Pg. 28-31. Princeton University Press.

2. Shermer, Elizabeth Tandy. Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics, 64. University of Pennsylvania Press

3. Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, 107. Princeton University Press

4. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, xvi. Princeton University Press.

5. Washington Post. The Black-White Economic Divide is as Wide as it was in 1968: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/04/economic-divide-black-households/.

6. Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, 16.

7. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. 209. Oxford University Press.

8. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. 37. Princeton University Press.

9. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. 121. Verso.

10. Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. 130-131. Zone Books

11. Cooper, Family Values. 294.

12. Cooper, 137-138.

13. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. 65. University of North Carolina Press.