1 gen 1974 anni - Watergate babies elected

Descrizione:

Nixon’s downfall also granted Democrats a chance to recapture their eroding political fortunes. Democratic candidates in the 1974 midterm elections made the Watergate scandal and Ford’s pardon of Nixon their top issues. It worked. Seventy-five new Democratic members of the House came to Washington in 1975, many of them under the age of forty-five.

Dubbed the “Watergate babies” by the press, the new Democrats solidified huge majorities in both houses of Congress and quickly pursued a reform agenda. They eliminated the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had investigated alleged Communists in the 1940s and 1950s and antiwar activists in the 1960s. In the Senate, Democrats reduced the number of votes needed to end a filibuster from 67 to 60 — a move intended to weaken the power of the minority to block legislation. In both houses, Democrats dismantled the existing committee structure, which had entrenched power in the hands of a few elite committee chairs. Overall, the Watergate babies helped to decentralize power in Washington and bring greater transparency to American government.

These changes largely succeeded in making government more transparent. But in one of the great ironies of American political history, the post-Watergate reforms made government less efficient and more susceptible to special interests — the opposite of what had been intended. Under the new committee structure, smaller subcommittees proliferated, and the size of the congressional staff doubled to more than twenty thousand. A diffuse power structure provided lobbyists more places to exert influence. As the importance of committee chairs weakened, influence shifted to party leaders, such as the Speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader. With little incentive for parties to compromise, bipartisanship became rare. Finally, with fewer votes needed to block legislation, filibustering, a seldom-used tactic largely employed by anti–civil rights southerners, increased in frequency. The Congress that we have come to know today — defined by partisan rancor, armies of lobbyists, and slow-moving response to public needs — came into being in the 1970s.

Despite Democratic gains in 1974, the electoral realignment that had begun with Nixon’s presidential victories in 1968 and 1972 continued. As liberals failed to stop runaway inflation or speed up economic growth, conservatives gained traction with the public. The postwar liberal economic formula — sometimes known as the Keynesian consensus — consisted of micro-adjustments to the money supply coupled with federal spending. When that formula failed to revive the economy in the mid-1970s, conservatives in Congress saw an opening to articulate alternatives, especially economic deregulation and tax cuts for the well-off


The political geography of the country changed as well, with deindustrialization in the Northeast and Midwest and continued population growth in the Sunbelt. Power was shifting, incrementally but perceptibly, toward the West and South (Table 28.1). States such as New York, Illinois, and Michigan — strongholds of union labor — lost industry, jobs, and people, while libertarian- and conservative-leaning California, Arizona, Florida, and Texas gained greater political clout. The full impact of this shifting political map would not be felt until the 1980s and 1990s, but it was already a factor by the mid-1970s.

In the fifty years between 1940 and 1990, the Rust Belt states lost political clout, while the Sunbelt states gained it — measured here in congressional seats (which are apportioned based on population). Sunbelt states gained 66 seats, with the Rust Belt losing 44. This shifting political geography helped undermine the liberal coalition, which was strongest in industrial states with large labor unions, and paved the way for the rise of the conservative coalition, which was strongest in southern and Appalachian states, as well as California.

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