wealthy liberals and workers, formerly united in support of Franklin Roosevelt and his heirs in the liberal succession. When Edward Kennedy tried to address an antibusing rally in 1974, an angry Irish crowd shouted him down and pursued him with eggs and tomatoes when he retreated to the Federal Building, named for his brother. So much for Camelot.
In his study of the Boston school wars, Anthony Lukas describes a confrontation in 1975—International Women's Year in Massachusetts, by gubernatorial proclamation—between the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women and a delegation of women from the antibusing movement. The antibusing agitators claimed that their responsibility for their children's education had been expropriated by the state. "You are supposed to defend women's rights. Why don't you defend ours?" The commission ruled that busing had "nothing to do" with the rights of women. Suburban feminists, "dressed in their Town and Country tweeds, Pierre Cardin silk scarves, and eighty-five-dollar alligator shoes," had nothing to say to a group of dowdy women in tam-o'-shanters, wind‐ breakers, and "Stop Forced Busing" T-shirts.
As "social issues" came to define the difference between the right and the left, a new breed of "populists" began to build a political coalition around lower-middle-class resentment. Like the populists of old, they saw themselves as the enemies of wealth and privilege, champions of the "average man on the street," in the words of George Wallace: the "man in the textile mill," the "man in the steel mill," the "barber" and "beautician," the "policeman on the beat," the "little businessman." The architects of the new right were by no means unanimously committed to free-market economics. Some of them remained New Dealers on economic issues. In 1968, Wallace's American Independent party called for Social Security increases, promised better health care, and reaffirmed the right of collective bargaining. The National Review denounced Wallace's "Country and Western Marxism," and his conservative opponents in Alabama judged him "downright pink." Paul Weyrich, a leading ideologist of the new right, was a man of the people, like Wallace—the product of a blue-collar, German Catholic background in Racine, Wisconsin. He felt "closer to William Jennings Bryan," he said, "than to the Tories." The "essence of the new right," as he saw it, was a "morally based conservatism," not free-market economics. "Big corporations are as bad as big government," said Weyrich. "They're in bed together." Insisting that
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