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The politics have moved right as a result of a very carefully designed and executed advertising campaign started in the Nixon administration. This campaign was designed to make government borrowing to fund imperial wars palatable to the masses without letting them know they, not the perpetrators, would be paying the bill. It also convinced many that controlling international trade and industrial outsourcing was bad economics even though it destroyed many of the masses jobs.
This campaign is funded by a relatively few hyper wealthy families to increase their own wealth, power and security. They apparently do not care if the republic is destroyed economically and politically by their machinations. Protecting and enriching themselves is the be all and end all of their concerns.
If you look exclusively at the presidents and presidential candidates in recent decades it is clear that there has been a rightward trend ever since Lyndon Johnson. I attribute much of this to Johnson's tragic mishandling of the Vietnam War. He had the potential to be a truly great president based on his forward thinking domestic policies, but he could not sustain the policies and his base of support once he made the decision to expand the war.
The war, and Humphrey's continued support of the war, were enough to turn the 1968 election over to Nixon, who was unquestionably more conservative than Johnson, although many of his policies would put him to the left of all present Republicans and many present Democrats.
Nixon's policies continued the nation's move to the right in a couple of ways. First, Nixon's Southern Strategy, which was a blatant, and successful, attempt to attract Southern racists from the Democratic Party, moved the geographic center of gravity of the Republican Party south and west and weakened the power of the traditional Eastern establishment Republicans, who were much less conservative than the Southerners Nixon attracted (note the contrast between Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay, and Mac Mathias on the one hand with Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Trent Lott on the other). Essentially all of the Southern racists attracted by Nixon have stayed in the Republican Party, and they, along with the conservative social values they embody, have formed the core of the socially conservative base of the national party.
Second, the corruption of Nixon's regime, including but not limited to Watergate, combined with the countercultural resistance to the Vietnam War to cause a widespread distrust of government. The conduct of the war, the repression of dissenters (like the recently observed anniversary of the Kent State Massacre), and the general hostility of the American establishment to the culture of the young let many of my generation to conclude that the government was our enemy. Then, with the end of the war and the draft, many who had been politically active and could have worked to strengthen liberal tendencies in the Democratic Party essentially dropped out of the political process.
Jimmy Carter was one result of these factors. He was He was the first successful presidential candidate in my lifetime to win on a campaign based on running against Washington. He was a conservative candidate who supported the war until the last shot was fired and supported anti-government policies such as zero-based budgeting. It's impossible to know what would have happened if he had been able to win a second term, but it is beyond question that Reagan was much more conservative than he was, and set the mold for Republican candidates.
I could go on, but the sad truth is that if you follow the trend of presidencies within each party, we see that the general trend has been to the right. Every Democratic President since Johnson has been more conservative than he was, and it could be shown that every Democratic President in that period has been more conservative than the previous one. For example, contrary to the overheated rhetoric from the Right, Obama's health care proposal, both as proposed and as enacted, was more conservative than Clinton's, which was, in turn, more conservative than what Nixon proposed.
The same is generally true of the Republicans. It is beyond dispute that Reagan was more conservative than Nixon, whom some have characterized as the last liberal president. It may be debatable whether Bush 41 was more conservative than Reagan, but it is unquestionable that Bush 43 was more conservative than either of them. Was McCain as conservative as Bush? Perhaps not, but he also lost handily. It's pretty much a given that the next Republican presidential candidate will be more conservative than McCain, and possibly more conservative than Bush.
So I would say there was no single cause, although I put the greatest share of blame at the feet of Johnson. Without Vietnam we wouldn't have had Nixon or Watergate, and his domestic policies would have increased economic and social equality and opportunity and the world would look very different today. Beyond that there has been a combination of factors, both within each party and arising out of inter-party dynamics (such as the Democratic Leadership Council's successful effort to move the Democratic Party to the right, with Clinton as its candidate, as a means of retaking the presidency).
What remains to be seen is where the vectors will go. It's almost certain that the Republicans will pick up seats in the House and Senate in 2010. It's not at all clear that they will be able to win the White House in 2012 if it continues to move even further to the right in response to the demands of the tea party and fundamentalist segment of the party (as illustrated by the absurd debate now going on in Alabama to see which Republican candidate is more hostile to scientific knowledge).
There hasn't. In case you haven't noticed, the American public threw the Cons out of the executive and legislative branches. But there's always NOVEMBER! Keep HOPE alive man!
Modern media can make anything seem bigger than life. Wake up.
America has always been a center/right country....but the new media will try and tell you different.
This is clearly false.
Even if we disregard the fact that the protection of slavery, possibly the most right-wing position ever in our history, was supported by a minority of our population, there are plenty of periods when the center of gravity was left, or center-left, and not center-right.
The Progressive period.
The years during and after the Great Depression and world War II.
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