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under a veneer of consensus. The rapidly changing role of women in society—itself the result of World War II, birth control, and economics that pulled women into higher education and the workforce—created new social divisions and eventually contributed to the “culture wars” of the 1960s and onward. The Vietnam War divided the country between hawks and doves, a division that would persist in later conflicts. The counterculture movement of the 1960s pitted traditional households against more experimental lifestyles. Changing sexual mores unleashed controversies that continue to today.
    I’ll focus on four more trends that I believe have also played a deep and lasting role and are even more directly related to the changes in Washington. The first is the civil rights movement, which led to major advances in the economic and social conditions of African Americans but also to a political backlash among some white Americans, notably in the South. The second is the rise of Hispanic immigration, another source of ethnic division. The third, and perhaps deepest, change is the demographic and economic rise of the Sunbelt, which brought new regions and values to the forefrontof American politics. Finally, the suburbanization of America, including the residential sorting of Americans by class, contributed to polarized politics.
    Civil Rights and Political Realignment
    The civil rights movement marked the moment in which political power shifted from the Snowbelt to the Sunbelt. I had a visceral glimpse into the changing social and political landscape by virtue of growing up in Detroit, Michigan, in the 1960s. My father was a labor lawyer and local civil rights leader, and our house was a meeting place for progressive politics. We knew full well the tensions of the time. Yet nothing prepared my family or the Detroit community for the devastation of the rioting in African American neighborhoods in 1967. Dozens of people died, the city burned, and Detroit began a downward spiral into poverty and abandonment. The riots were followed by massive white flight to the suburbs and an astonishing political backlash. The segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, found a surge of support in working-class neighborhoods in his third-party run for the presidency in 1968 and won the 1972 presidential primary in Michigan.
    It is here, I believe, that one must start the narrative of the anti-government and anti-tax revolt that culminated in Reagan’s election in 1980. The civil rights movement caused a nearly immediate and decisive political realignment throughout the country. The South, solidly Democratic for a century after the Civil War, suddenly flipped to the Republican Party. The Deep South and the Southwest (which together constitute the Sunbelt) were now politically ascendant in that they could deliver a Republican president (first Richard Nixon in 1968, then Reagan in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1988, and George W. Bush in 2000), ushering in an era in which white opposition to federal programs had an underlying racial component. Before the civil rights era, federal social spending was mainly forwhite voters. Federal support for farmers, home owners, and retirees introduced in the 1930s to 1950s overwhelmingly benefitted the majority white community and was precisely designed that way. When Social Security was introduced in the 1930s, it excluded farmworkers and therefore most of the poor African American population in the South. 2
    With the success of the civil rights movement and the rise of antipoverty programs in the 1960s, federal benefits increasingly flowed to minority communities. The political reaction was a sharp turn of many white voters away from government’s leadership role. 3 This backlash was amplified by repeated overreaching by liberal leaders. Ending discrimination was broadly acceptable to the white working class, but affirmative action was a step too far for many whites. Desegregation of neighborhood schools