As we have noted, the influence of liberal leaders in government and within the Democratic Party beginning in the 1930s gave liberal reform nearly unprecedented leverage. That influence was crucial in producing an effective War on Poverty that had no political constituency or grassroots movement to initiate or support it. It was equally vital in the fight for civil rights, where a “silent majority” of Americans and political obstructionism by a coalition of conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats would have doomed measures such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Open Housing Act of 1968. Liberal leadership helped to develop a foreign policy that placed significant emphasis on economic assistance to old industrial and newly developing countries on the theory that economic development served most effectively in combating the expansion of Soviet communism – apart from its importance for the American economy and humane ideals. Liberals in the judiciary system helped to enlarge the liberty of ethnic and racial minorities, of women, of gays and lesbians, and of political dissidents, meanwhile offering protection to persons accused of crimes from high-handed police behavior and similarly protecting personal choices in family planning and sexual behavior.

Yet by the seventies, leading liberals began leaving the Democratic Party in serious numbers. James Burnham, erstwhile radical socialist cum conservative, remarked on what appeared to be “a collapse of the morale of the governing elite.” One important reason for the collapse was the rising influence of the New Left, sometimes referred to as the Movement.