5
During this period, from 1960 through 1974, new partisan divisions over race in
American life were established. These divisions were clearest when it came to the question of
federal enforcement of the civil rights of African-Americans: Republican leaders and Southern
Democrats opposed these efforts, while the presidential leadership of the Democratic Party
pursued them aggressively and successfully.
6
The implications for the party system thereafter
remained unclear, except that race would certainly continue to be important for quite some time.
I argue that to understand the success of the Reagan administration’s public
retrenchment efforts regarding federal programs for the poor, particularly Aid to Families with
Dependent Children (AFDC), one must understand the complex set of policy feedbacks from the
politics of poverty and welfare during the Johnson and Nixon presidencies.
7
It was during these
years (1963 – 1974) that welfare policy became inextricably linked with the broader drama of
national racial politics, and that the leadership of the two national parties responded with the
crafting of distinctive approaches to poverty and welfare. The collision of these opposed
partisan approaches to poverty and welfare produced a new structure of welfare politics, one that
was limited and defined in large part by the broader impact of race in the context of national
party politics. Reagan’s electoral success in 1980 and ’84, and his subsequent welfare policy
successes in both terms, were built partially upon opportunities to access racial resentment within
this “racially structured welfare politics”. This new structure afforded Reagan easy access to
public resentment toward blacks without explicitly addressing race.
Welfare was one of the central vehicles for pursuing this strategy. The racial cues that
had become attached to welfare policy had their origins in the politics of race and welfare during
the 1960s. Because of the prior structuring of welfare politics around race, Reagan could issue
6
Ibid. Also see Sundquist 1983, chapters 16 and 17, pp. 352 – 411.
7
On the power of policy feedbacks generally, see Pierson 1993.
Convention