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In an essay in the New York Times, written prior to the presidential election and its tension-filled aftermath, author Alan Ehrenhalt argues that the dominant fact of our political life during the late 1960s to the early 1990s, or what he calls the Republican era, was a cultural backlash “against rising rates of crime, illegitimate birth and drug addiction, and a defense of religion, patriotism, authority and conventional family life.” This backlash “endured long enough to generate the Christian activism and antiabortion fervor of the early 1990s.”