This article ran in the Tallahassee Democrat on February 11, 1996.

Now that the primary season is upon us, and as a nation we are afflicted by that quadrennial rash of political fever, it is time to reorient ourselves in the broader landscape of politics. Where have we been rambling in the recent past?

America, for the past 30 years, has been under the influence of political conservatism, just as in the 30 years before that it was ruled by liberalism. It is important for the clarity of our present ideas that we understand why we came to stand on the conservative ground we inhabit.

Political shifts of this magnitude occur gradually, of course, and can't be pinpointed precisely. But consider one example. In 1964 the liberal candidate, Lyndon Johnson, received about 62% of the popular vote--a substantial victory. Four years later, the conservative candidates, Nixon and George Wallace, together polled 57% of the popular vote. In these pivotal four years, that is, roughly three-fifths of the citizens moved from supporting liberalism to supporting conservatism.

While this simple illustration is too elementary to bear much weight, it represents what we know from experience: that sometime in the vicinity of the 1960s, conservatism began to find greater support, politically and intellectually, in American society.

Why did this transformation occur? In history, as in life, there are no easy answers. A few obvious factors include the backlash against the Civil Rights movement, distaste for the student protests against Vietnam, disenchantment with Lyndon Johnson's sprawling Great Society programs, and the perception that crime and the disintegration of families presented a growing threat to the nation's future.

But a much more important source for the rise of conservatism in recent decades is the declining standard of living that began to reverse America's economic fortunes in 1973. While such factors as the backlash against the civil rights movement and Vietnam might have triggered a temporary conservatism in the 1960s, the deep and abiding conservative convictions we have displayed as a nation in the past several decades indicate deeper roots in an important transformation that straddled the early 1970s.

Our conservative revolution that began a generation ago was prompted by the loss of the American dream, a birthright to which citizens had become accustomed in the heady affluence immediately following World War II. In an era when the Gross National Product more than tripled between 1945 and 1965, Americans not only did better than their parents, but they learned to expect that would always be the case. Naturally, it was a shock when, in about 1973, the promise of ever-expanding affluence began to crumble.

Let's examine some figures. In 1973 average hourly wages hit their summit and began a steady decline. Average weekly earnings peaked a year earlier. Productivity in the national economy, which had caused real wages to double between the end of World War II and 1973, hit a plateau where only anemic gains were recorded. One reason, certainly, is that in the decades after 1945 the U.S. had the only industrial economy left unbombed, so our economy had a world of markets with no competition. By the early 1970s, the thundering hooves of foreign competition was deafening.

Where were you in 1973, and how did you feel about the society around you? That beginning year of Nixon's second term witnessed the first oil embargo, Roe v. Wade, the Yom Kippur War, the expansion of the Watergate revelations, Kissinger's first year as Secretary of State, and the US peace treaty with North Vietnam. Did you notice that the engine of the national economy was starting to cough? Has it been harder to pay your bills?

And before 1973 were you less conservative, less pessimistic about America's future, less hostile to taxes, and less resentful of Washington? If you have avoided conservative convictions in this period, many of your fellow citizens have not. These last decades, after all, have witnessed the blossoming of New Right family and Christian groups, a protracted tax revolt, the triumph of Reaganism, and the agenda of the 104th Congress.

This period of conservatism has been, in effect, the politics of economic decline. We have been unsettled spectators at the Englandization of our economy. Our universities, government programs, health care system, libraries, and roads are all becoming more modest--some of them slightly shabby, like pensioners who can't replace their tattered socks. The politics of decline has produced an ethic in which people, facing shrinking fortunes, are pitted against each other. In this environment people care more about preserving what they can for themselves than contributing to the commonwealth, the common good. Taxes are resented as an unwarranted intrusion, rather than as a contribution to such community benefits as education, transportation, street lights, and safety.

Perhaps we can never break away from this dark, Malthusian, closefisted approach to life as long as our economy is shrinking. In the same way that Frederick Jackson Turner worried that democracy might be impossible after the closing of the frontier, we might wonder today whether liberalism will be impossible after the end of affluence.

The Republican party has been the beneficiary of this increased national conservatism. But because of that windfall it also bears the responsibility, even in this primary season, of determining the shape of conservatism in the future. Will we be given the optimistic, supply-side spirit of Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and Steve Forbes: a belief that America still has all of the benefits and opportunities it experienced in the 1950s--if only we could institute sufficient tax cuts? Or will we experience that older, darker vision of Patrick Buchanan: an ethic of economic protectionism, a balanced budget, an isolationist disengagement from the rest of the world, and a reigning Christian moral authority?

America, still in the grip of a politics of decline that reaches back to 1973, will continue in the foreseeable future as a conservative nation. The question of this primary season is not whether we will abandon that politics of decline, but whether that conservatism will adopt an optimistic or pessimistic face.