I'm endlessly amused that the Richard Nixon years gave us OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Act, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and NIOSH - National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health), the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act (proposed by the Nixon Administration, passed by Ford), the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, and the excellent Clean Air Act amendments/extension of 1970.
It’s kind of crazy how fast American politics went off the rails. Really seems like it really kicks off with Reagan but I’m not versed enough to be sure if he’s the cause or just one of the symptoms (most likely both really in the end) but it’s always wild to see just how many of the ‘big government run amok’ agencies came out of the Nixon admin.
I've seen the idea float around that in order for democracy to function, the people need to see the political leadership as a) competent and b) acting in good faith. For the group of people who were coming into political adulthood in the 70s-80s (mostly born circa 1945-1965), those sentiments were deeply undermined by the Iran-Contra affair/hostage crisis and Watergate respectively.
That cohort have now been the modal force in politics, business and the electorate for a few decades, and we're seeing the results.
Personally I think it's partially an (mis)information issue. With the explosion of information sources starting with cable and then exploding again with the internet and social media we've gone from a relatively uniform media environment and a drought of information to a fractured media environment with an absolute deluge. So now you can live in a completely different factual world than someone doors down from you and still have more supporting sources of information than you could consume even if you spent all your time awake.
Nixon was planning on redistributing money through a negative income tax as well. I’d say what you’re describing really started with the ideology behind the Goldwater candidacy.
It's easy to write "just-so" explanations about American political trends, but I agree that Goldwater is really the crux to understanding exactly the mess we're in today: you can draw a direct line of thought and political lineage (one politician fostering the next) from Goldwater to Reagan to the Contract with America[1] to our most recent ex-administration.
Toss in America's (inevitable) deindustrialization and the violent, systematic oppression of worker's movements without any real pushback from the DNC, and it's hard to see how things could have ended up any differently.
Given that Democrats controlled Congress during the 1980s, they were complicit, but most of the ideas originally came from right-wing think tanks funded by oligarchs like the Koch brothers:
Goldwater lost but it surprised most strategists that he was able to carry the deep south, historically a democratic stronghold since the end of the civil war, particularly with blue collar workers.
This was essentially due to Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights movement. This observation became strategy, to use the movement as a wedge issue to convince conservative southern democrats to switch allegiance. Before this, the distribution of conservative to progressive, while still slanted, was more even than afterwards. The trend continued through Nixon, Reagan, Newt Gingrich, GWB, and now Trump.
It's largely been the same cohort of voters driving this trend, and their views have been becoming more radical vs centrist. Among democrats you can see some attempts to cater to these voters as well like with Bill Clinton. Another big part of it is the rise of the evangelical right to top level influence in the republican party as well.
There's certainly a whole heck of a lot more to the story than this, but when you go digging through the dispassionate history and summaries, this realignment is clear. In some sense the republican leadership is now being hoisted by their own petard, as the more classical or centrist ones show in relation to how they respond to Trump's most extreme actions.
We're probably headed for another realignment, but I think anyone claiming to know what will trigger it or how it will shake it is far too confident of their own clairvoyance.
