Thread by @LarryGlickman

ICYMI, my piece on how the popular ethic of the New Deal became the punchline of a joke first told in the 1970s that later became associated with Ronald Reagan's presidency. /1

https://twitter.com/BostonReview/status/1159173618691190790

In 1976, Senator Edmund Muskie took a genre--the "three lies" or "big lie" joke--that had highlighted interpersonal weaknesses ("the check is in the mail," "Of course, I'll still respect you in the morning.") and turned it into a spoof of government itself. /2

In Muskie's hands, in addition to mocking or reinforcing personal foibles, a new element was added: He suggested that the government was as unreliable in its duties to citizens as the person who told white lies to avoid ethical scrutiny. /3

Muskie almost certainly told this joke in tongue-in-cheek fashion. But it quickly was picked up by not only by conservative politicians but by arbiters of culture like Ann Landers (that part got cut from my article). /4

In the process, within two years, this very new joke--one that very few people would have found humorous during the New Deal era--became described as an "old chestnut." It became, in other words, what historians call an "invented tradition." /5

Its migration from Muskie to Reagan, who told the joke at a press conference in 1986, only a decade after the Maine Senator first employed it, provides a lens not only into an emerging conservative ethos but also into a internal debates among post-New Deal liberals. /6

Liberals like Muskie found themselves in a tough position in the 1970s. As Brent Cebul has recently shown in @ModAmHist there was real fear in this period that the growth that had fueled the postwar welfare state might be coming to an end. /7
cambridge.org/core/journals/…

@ModAmHist Muskie and other Democrats sought to promote a chastened liberalism that would keep alive the spirit of the New Deal in a context when, as NY Governor Hugh Carey said in his first State of the State address in early 1975, "the days of wine and roses are over." /8

@ModAmHist The constraints were real and the alternatives may have been limited, but I think the comments of Muskie and others about the need to rethink New Deal liberalism in late 1975 and 1976 (which were celebrated by conservatives and business leaders) were a lost opportunity. /9

@ModAmHist After all, this was also a time when the Republicans were in a historically weak position, what with Nixon's resignation, the Democrats overwhelming victory in the 1974 Congressional elections, the weak economy, and the unelected Ford's unpopularity. /10

@ModAmHist Could the Democrats of that period have pushed for a revived and expanded New Deal along the lines we are seeing today? Maybe not, although some within (and outside of) the Party were pushing for exactly this. /11

@ModAmHist But it strikes me that some were too quick too abandon some of the key principles and policies of the New Deal order, particularly the value of public goods. /12