or some years, a bipartisan foreign policy consensus agreed on the major thrusts of Cold War policy.
The bipartisan consensus broke up as a result of the Vietnam War. Although it had been launched as a major effort by a liberal Democratic administration, that of LBJ, much of the Democratic political base turned against the war. LBJ did not run for re-election in 1968, and in 1972 the Democrats nominated an antiwar candidate, George McGovern. Although doubts about the war were by then widespread, the antiwar movement, associated with social turmoil, was also unpopular, and McGovern lost by a landslide.
Vietnam thus contributed, along with the Civil Rights revolution and generalized "moral" anxieties to produce a cultural politics that became increasingly dominant in the 1980s. Many working-class whites, previously Democrats because of their economic interests, turned Republican in the Reagan era for cultural reasons, including a perception of the Democrats as "weak" on confronting the Soviet Union.
With the end of the Cold War around 1990, foreign policy seemed to recede again from public concern. President Clinton ran on a domestic platform in 1992, and George W. Bush's few foreign-policy pronouncements in 2000 had a nearly isolationist tone. However, the 9/11 attacks in 2001 returned foreign policy and
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