Letters from an American
February 15, 2025
After World War II, the vast majority of Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—agreed that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. But not everyone was on board.
Some big businessmen hated regulations and the taxes necessary for social welfare programs and infrastructure, and racists and religious traditionalists who opposed women’s rights wanted to tear that “liberal consensus” apart.
They had no luck convincing voters to abandon the government that was overseeing unprecedented prosperity until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision permitted them to turn back to an old American trope.
That ruling, which declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional, enabled opponents of the liberal consensus to resurrect the post–Civil War argument of former Confederates that a government protecting Black rights was simply redistributing wealth from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving Black Americans.
Source Links: February 15, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson
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