Quotation
Most Americans, that is, oppose big government in the abstract but favor it in the particular. They oppose “regulation” and “spending,” but favor, say, enforcement of clean-air laws and Social Security.
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Previous generations of Americans knew times when it seemed impossible to imagine slavery might be abolished, women given the right to vote, business subject to any government regulation.
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White America had come to see the Democratic Party’s domestic agenda as a transfer of resources from the white middle class to the black poor. Violent crime shot upward, starting in the 1960s, a trend that continued into the 1990s. Whites fled cities for the suburbs, and many of them came to associate African-Americans with welfare, which became a synecdoche for laziness and unearned entitlement. Ronald Reagan regaled audiences with stories about a “welfare queen” driving a Cadillac, or a “strapping young buck” who used food stamps to buy steak while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.”