All in the Family : The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s

In the 1960s President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty legislation promised an array of federal programs to assist millions of American families.

In the 1980s President Ronald Reagan declared Republicans the party of traditional family values and promised to keep the federal government out of American lives.

Again and again, historians have sought to explain the nation's profound political realignment from the 1960s to the 2000s, four decades that witnessed the fracturing of liberalism and the rise of the conservative right.

The award-winning historian Robert O. Self is the first to recognize that the many separate threads of that realignment - from civil rights to women's rights, from the antiwar movement to the silent majority, from the abortion wars to gay marriage, from health care to welfare reform - all ran through the politicised modern American family. "All in the Family" is a synthetic history of the last half of the American century. Drawing on an astonishing breadth of sources, Self shows how movements on the liberal left that demanded equal rights and greater government protection inadvertently elicited conservative activism that sought to restore the nuclear family under the rubric of "family values," a political idea that is as influential now as it has ever been. "All in the Family" is an urgent, ambitious, and important work that will help us think anew about the legacy of the 1960s.