{"id":1836,"date":"2026-05-26T09:50:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T09:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/textbook\/?page_id=1836"},"modified":"2026-06-02T23:53:45","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T23:53:45","slug":"27-the-triumph-of-the-right","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/textbook\/27-the-triumph-of-the-right\/","title":{"rendered":"27. The Triumph of the Right"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"A
Activist Phyllis Schlafly campaigns against the Equal Rights Amendment in 1978. Bettmann\/Corbis.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I. Introduction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Speaking to Detroit autoworkers in October 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan described what he saw as the American Dream under Democratic president Jimmy Carter. The family garage may have still held two cars, cracked Reagan, but they were \u201cboth Japanese and they\u2019re out of gas.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> A once-proud nation, the charismatic former governor of California suggested, was running on empty. But Reagan held out hope for redemption. Stressing the theme of \u201cnational decline,\u201d he nevertheless promised to make the United States once again a glorious \u201ccity upon a hill.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> In November, Reagan\u2019s vision triumphed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reagan rode the wave of a powerful political movement referred to by historians as the New Right. More libertarian in its economics and more politically forceful in its conservative religious principles than the more moderate brand of conservatism familiar to Americans after World War II, the New Right had by the 1980s evolved into both the most influential wing of the Republican Party\u2014it propelled Republican electoral successes\u2014and an increasingly vocal, reactionary force in American culture. Building on the gradual unraveling of the New Deal political order in the 1960s and 1970s, the conservative movement drew from the leadership of skilled politicians such as Ronald Reagan as well as tremendous energy from a broad range of grassroots activists. Countless ordinary citizens\u2014newly mobilized Christian conservatives in \u00adparticular\u2014helped the Republican Party steer the country\u2019s politics and culture rightward. Enduring conflicts over race, economic policy, sexual politics, and foreign affairs fatally fractured the liberal consensus that had dominated American politics since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt as the New Right attracted support from Reagan Democrats, blue-collar voters who had lost faith in the old liberal creed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rise of the right affected Americans\u2019 everyday lives in numerous ways. The Reagan administration\u2019s embrace of free markets dispensed with the principles of active income redistribution and social welfare spending that had animated the New Deal and Great Society in the 1930s and 1960s. As American liberals increasingly embraced a \u201crights\u201d framework that singled out African Americans, Latinos, women, lesbians and gays, and other marginalized groups, conservative policy makers targeted the regulatory and legal landscape of the United States. Critics complained that Reagan\u2019s policies served the interests of corporations and wealthy individuals and pointed to the sudden widening of economic inequality. But the New Right harnessed popular distrust of regulation, taxes, and bureaucrats, and conservative activists celebrated the end of hyperinflation and substantial growth in GDP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many ways, however, the rise of the right promised more than it delivered. Battered but intact, most of the social welfare programs of the New Deal and Great Society survived the 1980s and 1990s. Despite Republican vows of fiscal discipline, both the federal government and the national debt ballooned. At the end of the period, conservative Christians viewed popular culture as more vulgar and hostile to their values than ever before\u2014American culture had dramatically liberalized by the end of the millennium. And in the near term, the New Right registered only partial victories on a range of public policies and cultural issues. Yet from a long-term perspective, conservatives achieved a subtler and more enduring transformation of American politics and society. In the words of one historian, the conservative movement successfully \u201cchanged the terms of debate and placed its opponents on the defensive.\u201d3<\/a><\/sup> Liberals and their programs and policies did not disappear, but they increasingly fought battles on terrain chosen by the New Right. By the 1990s, even as the country\u2019s culture sloughed off much of its old postwar propriety and prudishness, the nation\u2019s politics had been transformed\u2014even two-term Democratic president Bill Clinton was a so-called \u201cNew Democrat\u201d who championed free trade, deregulation, privatization, and other historically conservative causes. Conservatism had triumphed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II. Conservative Ascendance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Reagan Revolution marked the culmination of a long process of political mobilization on the American right. In the first two decades after World War II the New Deal seemed firmly embedded in American electoral politics and public policy. Even two-term Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower declined to roll back the welfare state. To be sure, William F. Buckley Jr. tapped into a deep vein of elite conservatism in 1955 by announcing in the first issue of National Review that his magazine \u201cstands athwart history, yelling Stop.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup> Senator Joseph McCarthy and John Birch Society founder Robert Welch stirred anticommunist fervor. But in general, the far right lacked organizational cohesion. Following Lyndon Johnson\u2019s resounding defeat of Republican Barry Goldwater\u2014\u201cMr. Conservative\u201d\u2014in the 1964 presidential election, many observers declared American conservatism finished. New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that Goldwater had \u201cwrecked his party for a long time to come.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite these dire predictions, conservatism not only persisted, it prospered. Its growing appeal had several causes. The expansive social and economic agenda of Johnson\u2019s Great Society reminded anticommunists of Soviet-style central planning, and deficits alarmed fiscal conservatives. Race also drove the creation of the New Right. The civil rights movement, along with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, challenged the racial hierarchy of the Jim Crow South. All of these occurred under Democratic leadership, pushing white southerners toward the Republican Party. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black Power, affirmative action, and court-ordered busing of children between schools to achieve racial balance brought \u201cwhite backlash\u201d in the North, often in cities previously known for political liberalism. To many white Americans, the urban rebellions, antiwar protests, and student uprisings of the late 1960s signaled social chaos. At the same time, slowing wage growth, rising prices, and growing tax burdens threatened many working- and middle-class citizens who had long formed the core of the New Deal coalition. Liberalism no longer seemed to offer the great mass of white Americans a road map to prosperity, so they searched for new political solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Former Alabama governor and conservative Democrat George Wallace masterfully exploited the racial, cultural, and economic resentments of working-class whites during his presidential runs in 1968 and 1972. Wallace\u2019s record as a staunch segregationist made him a hero in the Deep South, where he won five states as a third-party candidate in the 1968 general election (becoming the last third-party candidate to win any state\u2019s electoral votes). Wallace\u2019s populist message also resonated with blue-collar voters in the industrial North who felt left behind by the rights revolution. On the campaign stump, the fiery candidate lambasted hippies, antiwar protesters, and government bureaucrats. He assailed female welfare recipients for \u201cbreeding children as a cash crop\u201d and ridiculed \u201cover-educated, ivory-tower\u201d intellectuals who \u201cdon\u2019t know how to park a bicycle straight.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup> Wallace also advanced progressive proposals for federal job training programs, a minimum wage hike, and legal protections for collective bargaining. Running as a Democrat in 1972, Wallace captured the Michigan primary and polled second in the industrial heartland of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. In May 1972, an assassin\u2019s bullet left Wallace paralyzed and ended his campaign. Nevertheless, his amalgamation of older, New Deal\u2013style proposals and conservative populism represented the rapid reordering of party loyalties in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Richard Nixon similarly harnessed the New Right\u2019s sense of grievance through his rhetoric about \u201claw and order\u201d and the \u201csilent majority.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup> But Nixon and his Republican successor, Gerald Ford, continued to accommodate the politics of the New Deal order. The New Right remained without a major public champion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christian conservatives also felt themselves under siege from liberalism. In the early 1960s, Supreme Court decisions prohibiting teacher-led prayer (Engel v. Vitale<\/em>) and Bible reading in public schools (Abington v. Schempp<\/em>) led some on the right to conclude that a liberal judicial system threatened Christian values. In the following years, the counterculture\u2019s celebration of sex and drugs, along with relaxed obscenity and pornography laws, intensified the conviction that \u201cpermissive\u201d liberalism encouraged immorality in private life. Evangelical Protestants\u2014Christians who professed a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, upheld the Bible as an infallible source of truth, and felt a duty to convert, or evangelize, nonbelievers\u2014composed the core of the religious right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With increasing assertiveness in the 1960s and 1970s, Christian conservatives mobilized to protect the \u201ctraditional\u201d family. Women composed a striking number of the religious right\u2019s foot soldiers. In 1968 and 1969 a group of newly politicized mothers in Anaheim, California, led a sustained protest against sex education in public schools.8<\/a><\/sup> Catholic activist Phyllis Schlafly marshaled opposition to the ERA, while evangelical pop singer Anita Bryant drew national headlines for her successful fight to repeal Miami\u2019s gay rights ordinance in 1977. In 1979, Beverly LaHaye (whose husband, Tim\u2014an evangelical pastor in San Diego\u2014later coauthored the wildly popular Left Behind Christian book series) founded Concerned Women for America, which linked small groups of local activists opposed to the ERA, abortion, homosexuality, and no-fault divorce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Activists like Schlafly and LaHaye valorized motherhood as women\u2019s highest calling. Abortion therefore struck at the core of their female identity. More than perhaps any other issue, abortion drew different segments of the religious right\u2014Catholics and Protestants, women and men\u2014together. The Supreme Court\u2019s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling outraged many devout Catholics and evangelicals (who had previously been less universally opposed to the procedure than their Catholic counterparts). Christian author Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop staked out some clear battle lines in their 1979 book Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, arguing that \u201cthe fate of the unborn is a question of the fate of the human race.\u201d9<\/a><\/sup> With abortion framed in stark, existential terms, many evangelicals felt compelled to combat the procedure through political action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Jerry Falwell, the wildly popular TV evangelist, founded the Moral Majority political organization in the late 1970s. Decrying the demise of the nation\u2019s morality, the organization gained a massive following, helping to cement the status of the New Christian Right in American politics. Photograph, date unknown. Wikimedia, http:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Jerry_Falwell_portrait.jpg. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Grassroots passion drove anti-abortion activism, but a set of religious and secular institutions turned the various strands of the New Right into a sophisticated movement. In 1979 Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, an explicitly political organization dedicated to advancing a \u201cpro-life, pro-family, pro-morality, and pro-American\u201d agenda. The Moral Majority skillfully wove together social and economic appeals to make itself a force in Republican politics. Secular, business-oriented institutions also joined the attack on liberalism, fueled by stagflation and by the federal government\u2019s creation of new regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Conservative business leaders bankrolled new \u201cthink tanks\u201d like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. These organizations provided grassroots activists with ready-made policy prescriptions. Other business leaders took a more direct approach by hiring Washington lobbyists and creating political action committees (PACs) to press their agendas in the halls of Congress and federal agencies. Between 1976 and 1980 the number of corporate PACs rose from under three hundred to over twelve hundred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grassroots activists and business leaders received unlikely support from a circle of neoconservatives\u2014disillusioned intellectuals who had rejected liberalism and the left and become Republicans. Irving Kristol, a former Marxist who went on to champion free market capitalism as a Wall Street Journal columnist, defined a neoconservative as a \u201cliberal who has been mugged by reality.\u201d10<\/a><\/sup> Neoconservative journals like Commentary and The Public Interest argued that the Great Society had proven counterproductive, perpetuating the poverty and racial segregation that it aimed to cure. By the middle of the 1970s, neoconservatives felt mugged by foreign affairs as well. As ardent Cold Warriors, they argued that Nixon\u2019s policy of d\u00e9tente had left the United States vulnerable to the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In sum, several streams of conservative political mobilization converged in the late 1970s. Each wing of the burgeoning New Right\u2014disaffected northern blue-collar workers, white southerners, evangelicals and devout Catholics, business leaders, disillusioned intellectuals, and Cold War hawks\u2014turned to the Republican Party as the most effective vehicle for their political counterassault on liberalism and the New Deal political order. After years of mobilization, the domestic and foreign policy storms of the Carter administration provided the tailwinds that brought the conservative movement to shore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III. The Election of 1980<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The inability to slow inflation or stem unemployment, combined with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the hostage crisis in Iran, hobbled Carter heading into his 1980 reelection campaign. Many Democrats were dismayed by his policies. The president of the International Association of Machinists dismissed Carter as \u201cthe best Republican President since Herbert Hoover.\u201d11<\/a><\/sup> Angered by the White House\u2019s refusal to back a national health insurance plan, Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy challenged Carter in the Democratic primaries. Running as the party\u2019s liberal standard-bearer and heir to the legacy of his slain older brothers, Kennedy garnered support from key labor unions and left-wing Democrats. Carter ultimately vanquished Kennedy, but the close primary tally exposed the president\u2019s vulnerability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carter\u2019s opponent in the general election was Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood actor who had served two terms as governor of California. Reagan ran as a staunch fiscal conservative and a Cold War hawk, vowing to reduce government spending and shrink the federal bureaucracy. Reagan also accused his opponent of failing to confront the Soviet Union and vowed steep increases in military spending. Carter responded by calling Reagan a warmonger, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the confinement of fifty-two American hostages in Iran discredited Carter\u2019s foreign policy in the eyes of many Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The incumbent fared no better on domestic affairs. Unemployment remained at nearly 8 percent.12<\/a><\/sup> Meanwhile the Federal Reserve\u2019s anti-inflation measures pushed interest rates to an unheard-of 18.5 percent.13<\/a><\/sup> Reagan seized on these bad economic trends. On the campaign trail he brought down the house by proclaiming: \u201cA recession is when your neighbor loses his job, and a depression is when you lose your job.\u201d Reagan would then pause before concluding, \u201cAnd a recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his job.\u201d13<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social and cultural issues presented yet another challenge for the president. Although a self-proclaimed \u201cborn-again\u201d Christian and Sunday school teacher, Carter struggled to court the religious right. Carter scandalized devout Christians by admitting to lustful thoughts during an interview with Playboy magazine in 1976, telling the reporter he had \u201ccommitted adultery in my heart many times.\u201d14<\/a><\/sup> Although Reagan was only a nominal Christian and rarely attended church, the religious right embraced him. Jerry Falwell directed the full weight of the Moral Majority behind Reagan. The organization registered an estimated two million new voters in 1980. Reagan also cultivated the religious right by denouncing abortion and endorsing prayer in school. The IRS tax exemption issue resurfaced as well, with the 1980 Republican platform vowing to \u201chalt the unconstitutional regulatory vendetta launched by Mr. Carter\u2019s IRS commissioner against independent schools.\u201d15<\/a><\/sup> Early in the primary season, Reagan condemned the policy during a speech at South Carolina\u2019s Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian school which had recently sued the IRS after the school\u2019s ban on interracial dating led to the loss of its tax-exempt status.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reagan\u2019s campaign appealed subtly but unmistakably to the racial hostilities of white voters. After winning the nomination, the candidate held his first rally at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. In his speech, Reagan championed the doctrine of \u201cstates\u2019 rights,\u201d which had been the rallying cry of segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s. In criticizing the welfare state, Reagan had long employed thinly veiled racial stereotypes about the \u201cwelfare queen\u201d in Chicago who drove a Cadillac while defrauding the government or the \u201cstrapping young buck\u201d purchasing T-bone steaks with food stamps.16<\/a><\/sup> Like George Wallace before him, Reagan exploited the racial and cultural resentments of struggling white working-class voters. And like Wallace, he attracted blue-collar workers in droves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the wind at his back on almost every issue, Reagan needed only to blunt Carter\u2019s characterization of him as an angry extremist. Reagan did so during their only debate by appearing calm and amiable. \u201cAre you better off than you were four years ago?\u201d he asked the American people at the conclusion of the debate.17<\/a><\/sup> The American people answered no. Reagan won the election with 51 percent of the popular vote to Carter\u2019s 41 percent. (Independent John Anderson captured 7 percent.)18<\/a><\/sup> Despite capturing only a slim majority of the overall popular vote, Reagan scored a decisive 489\u201349 victory in the Electoral College.19<\/a><\/sup> Republicans gained control of the Senate for the first time since 1955 by winning twelve seats. Liberal Democrats George McGovern, Frank Church, and Birch Bayh went down in defeat, as did liberal Republican Jacob Javits. The Republicans picked up thirty-three House seats, narrowing the Democratic advantage in the lower chamber.13<\/a><\/sup> The New Right had arrived in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IV. The New Right in Power<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"An
Harkening back to Jeffersonian politics of limited government, a viewpoint that would only increase in popularity over the next three decades, Ronald Reagan launched his campaign by saying bluntly, “I believe in states’ rights.” Reagan secured the presidency through appealing to the growing conservatism of much of the country. Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy Reagan waving from the limousine during the Inaugural Parade in Washington, D.C. on Inauguration Day, 1981. Wikimedia, http:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:The_Reagans_waving_from_the_limousine_during_the_Inaugural_Parade_1981.jpg. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In his first inaugural address Reagan proclaimed that \u201cgovernment is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem.\u201d20<\/a><\/sup> In reality, Reagan focused less on eliminating government than on redirecting government to serve new ends. In line with that goal, his administration embraced supply-side economic theories that had recently gained popularity among the New Right. While the postwar gospel of Keynesian economics had focused on stimulating consumer demand, supply-side economics held that lower personal and corporate tax rates would encourage greater private investment and production. Supply-side advocates promised that the resulting wealth would reach\u2014or \u201ctrickle down\u201d to, in the words of critics\u2014lower-income groups through job creation and higher wages. Conservative economist Arthur Laffer predicted that lower tax rates would generate so much economic activity that federal tax revenues would actually increase. The administration touted the so-called Laffer Curve as justification for the tax cut plan that served as the cornerstone of Reagan\u2019s first year in office. Republican congressman Jack Kemp, an early supply-side advocate and co-sponsor of Reagan\u2019s tax bill, promised that it would unleash the \u201ccreative genius that has always invigorated America.\u201d21<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
The Iranian hostage crisis ended literally during President Reagan\u2019s inauguration speech. The Reagan administration received credit for bringing the hostages home. This group photograph shows the former hostages in the hospital in 1981 before being released back to the U.S. Wikimedia, http:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:DF-SN-82-06759.jpg. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The tax cut faced early skepticism from Democrats and even some Republicans. Vice President George H. W. Bush had belittled supply-side theory as \u201cvoodoo economics\u201d during the 1980 Republican primaries.22<\/a><\/sup> But a combination of skill and serendipity pushed the bill over the top. Reagan aggressively and effectively lobbied individual members of Congress for support on the measure. Then, on March 30, 1981, Reagan survived an assassination attempt by a mentally unstable young man named John Hinckley. Public support swelled for the hospitalized president. Congress ultimately approved a $675 billion tax cut in July 1981 with significant Democratic support. The bill reduced overall federal taxes by more than one quarter and lowered the top marginal rate from 70 percent to 50 percent, with the bottom rate dropping from 14 percent to 11 percent. It also slashed the rate on capital gains from 28 percent to 20 percent.23<\/a><\/sup> The next month, Reagan scored another political triumph in response to a strike called by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). During the 1980 campaign, Reagan had wooed organized labor, describing himself as \u201can old union man\u201d (he had led the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952) who still held Franklin Roosevelt in high regard.24<\/a><\/sup> PATCO had been one of the few labor unions to endorse Reagan. Nevertheless, the president ordered the union\u2019s striking air traffic controllers back to work and fired more than eleven thousand who refused. Reagan\u2019s actions crippled PATCO and left the American labor movement reeling. For the rest of the 1980s the economic terrain of the United States\u2014already unfavorable to union organizing\u2014shifted decisively in favor of employers. The unionized portion of the private-sector workforce fell from 20 percent in 1980 to 12 percent in 1990.25<\/a><\/sup> Reagan\u2019s tax bill and the defeat of PATCO not only enhanced the economic power of corporations and high-income households, they confirmed that a new conservative age had dawned in American life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new administration appeared to be flying high in the fall of 1981, but developments challenged the rosy economic forecasts emanating from the White House. As Reagan ratcheted up tension with the Soviet Union, Congress approved his request for $1.2 trillion in new military spending.26<\/a><\/sup> The combination of lower taxes and higher defense budgets caused the national debt to balloon. By the end of Reagan\u2019s first term it equaled 53 percent of GDP, as opposed to 33 percent in 1981.27<\/a><\/sup> The increase was staggering, especially for an administration that had promised to curb spending. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker continued his policy from the Carter years of combating inflation by maintaining high interest rates, which surpassed 20 percent in June 1981.28<\/a><\/sup> The Fed\u2019s action increased the cost of borrowing money and stifled economic activity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result, the United States experienced a severe economic recession in 1981 and 1982. Unemployment rose to nearly 11 percent, the highest figure since the Great Depression.29<\/a><\/sup> Reductions in social welfare spending heightened the impact of the recession on ordinary people. Congress had followed Reagan\u2019s lead by reducing funding for food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children and removed a half million people from the Supplemental Social Security program for the physically disabled.30<\/a><\/sup> The cuts exacted an especially harsh toll on low-income communities of color. The head of the NAACP declared that the administration\u2019s budget cuts had rekindled \u201cwar, pestilence, famine, and death.\u201d31<\/a><\/sup> Reagan also received a bipartisan rebuke in 1981 after proposing cuts to social security benefits for early retirees. The Senate voted unanimously to condemn the plan, and Democrats framed it as a heartless attack on the elderly. Confronted with recession and harsh public criticism, a chastened White House worked with Democratic House Speaker Thomas \u201cTip\u201d O\u2019Neill in 1982 on a bill that restored $98 billion of the previous year\u2019s tax cuts.32<\/a><\/sup> Despite compromising with the administration on taxes, Democrats railed against the so-called Reagan Recession, arguing that the president\u2019s economic policies favored the most fortunate Americans. This appeal, which Democrats termed the \u201cfairness issue,\u201d helped them win twenty-six House seats in the autumn congressional races.33<\/a><\/sup> The New Right appeared to be in trouble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

V. Morning in America<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"An
President Ronald Reagan, a master of the \u201cphoto op,\u201d appears here with a row of American flags at his back at a 1982 rally for Senator David Durenberger in Minneapolis, Minnesota. National Archives (198527).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Reagan nimbly adjusted to the political setbacks of 1982. Following the rejection of his social security proposals, Reagan appointed a bipartisan panel to consider changes to the program. In early 1983, the commission recommended a onetime delay in cost-of-living increases, a new requirement that government employees pay into the system, and a gradual increase in the retirement age from sixty-five to sixty-seven. The commission also proposed raising state and federal payroll taxes, with the new revenue poured into a trust fund that would transform social security from a pay-as-you-go system to one with significant reserves.34<\/a><\/sup> Congress quickly passed the recommendations into law, allowing Reagan to take credit for strengthening a program cherished by most Americans. The president also benefited from an economic rebound. Real disposable income rose 2.5 percent in 1983 and 5.8 percent the following year.35<\/a><\/sup> Unemployment dropped to 7.5 percent in 1984.36<\/a><\/sup> Meanwhile, the \u201charsh medicine\u201d of high interest rates helped reduce inflation to 3.5 percent.37<\/a><\/sup> While campaigning for reelection in 1984, Reagan pointed to the improving economy as evidence that it was \u201cmorning again in America.\u201d38<\/a><\/sup> His personal popularity soared. Most conservatives ignored the debt increase and tax hikes of the previous two years and rallied around the president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Democratic Party, on other hand, stood at an ideological crossroads in 1984. The favorite to win the party\u2019s nomination was Walter Mondale, a staunch ally of organized labor and the civil rights movement as a senator during the 1960s and 1970s. He later served as Jimmy Carter\u2019s vice president. Mondale\u2019s chief rivals were civil rights activist Jesse Jackson and Colorado senator Gary Hart, one of the young Democrats elected to Congress in 1974 following Nixon\u2019s downfall. Hart and other \u201cWatergate babies\u201d still identified themselves as liberals but rejected their party\u2019s faith in activist government and embraced market-based approaches to policy issues. In so doing, they conceded significant political ground to supply-siders and conservative opponents of the welfare state. Many Democrats, however, were not prepared to abandon their New Deal heritage, and so the ideological tension within the party played out in the 1984 primary campaign. Jackson offered a largely progressive program but won only two states. Hart\u2019s platform\u2014economically moderate but socially liberal\u2014inverted the political formula of Mondale\u2019s New Deal\u2013style liberalism. Throughout the primaries, Hart contrasted his \u201cnew ideas\u201d with Mondale\u2019s \u201cold-fashioned\u201d politics. Mondale eventually secured his party\u2019s nomination but suffered a crushing defeat in the general election. Reagan captured forty-nine of fifty states, winning 58.8 percent of the popular vote.13<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mondale\u2019s loss seemed to confirm that the new breed of moderate Democrats better understood the mood of the American people. The future of the party belonged to post\u2013New Deal liberals like Hart and to the constituency that supported him in the primaries: upwardly mobile, white professionals and suburbanites. In February 1985, a group of centrists formed the Democratic Leadership Council as a vehicle for distancing the party from organized labor and Keynesian economics while cultivating the business community. Jackson dismissed the DLC as \u201cDemocrats for the Leisure Class,\u201d but the organization included many of the party\u2019s future leaders, including Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.39<\/a><\/sup> The formation of the DLC illustrated the degree to which the New Right had transformed American politics: the New Democrats looked a lot like the old Republicans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reagan entered his second term with a much stronger mandate than in 1981, but the Republican makeover of Washington, D.C., stalled. The Democrats regained control of the Senate in 1986, and Democratic opposition prevented Reagan from eliminating means-tested social welfare programs, although Congress failed to increase benefit levels for welfare programs or raise the minimum wage, decreasing the real value of those benefits. Democrats and Republicans occasionally fashioned legislative compromises, as with the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The bill lowered the top corporate tax rate from 46 percent to 34 percent and reduced the highest marginal income tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent, while also simplifying the tax code and eliminating numerous loopholes.40<\/a><\/sup> The steep cuts to the corporate and individual rates certainly benefited wealthy individuals, but the legislation made virtually no net change to federal revenues. In 1986, Reagan also signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act. American policy makers hoped to do two things: deal with the millions of undocumented immigrants already in the United States while simultaneously choking off future unsanctioned migration. The former goal was achieved (nearly three million undocumented workers received legal status), but the latter proved elusive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of Reagan\u2019s most far-reaching victories occurred through judicial appointments. He named 368 district and federal appeals court judges during his two terms.41<\/a><\/sup> Observers noted that almost all of the appointees were white men. (Seven were African American, fifteen were Latino, and two were Asian American.) Reagan also appointed three Supreme Court justices: Sandra Day O\u2019Connor, the first woman to serve on the US Supreme Court, who to the dismay of the religious right turned out to be a moderate; Anthony Kennedy, a solidly conservative Catholic who occasionally sided with the court\u2019s liberal wing; and archconservative Antonin Scalia. The New Right\u2019s transformation of the judiciary had its limits, though. In 1987, Reagan nominated Robert Bork to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Bork, a federal judge and former Yale University law professor, was a staunch conservative. He had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, affirmative action, and the Roe v. Wade decision. After acrimonious confirmation hearings, the Senate rejected Bork\u2019s nomination by a vote of 58 to 42.42<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

VI. Race in Reagan\u2019s America<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"A
Jesse Jackson was only the second African American to mount a national campaign for the presidency. His work as a civil rights activist and Baptist minister garnered him a significant following in the African American community, but never enough to secure the Democratic nomination. His Warren K. Leffler, \u201cIVU w\/ [i.e., interview with] Rev. Jesse Jackson,\u201d July 1, 1983. Library of Congress, http:\/\/www.loc.gov\/pictures\/item\/2003688127\/. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Reagan\u2019s election marked America\u2019s pivot away from the civil rights era, but questions of race still reigned over much of the country. African Americans, for instance, read Bork\u2019s nomination as another signal of the conservative movement\u2019s hostility to their social, economic, and political aspirations. Indeed, Ronald Reagan\u2019s America presented African Americans with a series of contradictions. Black Americans achieved significant advances in politics, culture, and socioeconomic status. A trend from the late 1960s and 1970s continued, and Black politicians gained control of major municipal governments across the country during the 1980s. In 1983, voters in Philadelphia and Chicago elected Wilson Goode and Harold Washington, respectively, as their cities\u2019 first Black mayors. At the national level, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson became the first African American man to run for president when he campaigned for the Democratic Party\u2019s nomination in 1984 and 1988. Propelled by chants of \u201cRun, Jesse, run,\u201d Jackson achieved notable success in 1988, winning nine state primaries and finishing second with 29 percent of the vote.43<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The excitement created by Jackson\u2019s campaign mirrored the acclaim received by a few prominent African Americans in media and entertainment. Comedian Eddie Murphy rose to stardom on television\u2019s Saturday Night Live and achieved box office success with movies like 48 Hours and Beverly Hills Cop. In 1982, pop singer Michael Jackson released Thriller, the bestselling album of all time. Oprah Winfrey began her phenomenally successful nationally syndicated talk show in 1985. Comedian Bill Cosby\u2019s sitcom about an African American couple (a doctor and a lawyer) raising their four children drew the highest ratings on television for most of the decade. The popularity of The Cosby Show revealed how class informed perceptions of race in the 1980s. Cosby\u2019s fictional TV family represented the growing number of Black middle-class professionals in the United States. Indeed, income for the top fifth of African American households increased faster than that of white households for most of the decade. Middle-class African Americans found new doors open to them in the 1980s, but poor and working-class Black Americans faced continued challenges. During Reagan\u2019s last year in office the African American poverty rate stood at 31.6 percent, as opposed to 10.1 percent for whites.44<\/a><\/sup> Black unemployment remained double that of whites throughout the decade.45<\/a><\/sup> By 1990, the median income for Black families was $21,423, 42 percent below the median income for white households.46<\/a><\/sup> The Reagan administration failed to address such disparities, and in many ways intensified them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New Right values threatened the legal principles and federal policies of the Great Society and the \u201crights revolution.\u201d Reagan\u2019s appointment of conservatives to agencies such as the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission took aim at key policy achievements of the civil rights movement. When the 1965 Voting Rights Act came up for renewal during Reagan\u2019s first term, the Justice Department pushed the president to oppose any extension. Only the intervention of more moderate congressional Republicans saved the law. The administration also initiated a plan to rescind federal affirmative action rules. In 1986, a broad coalition of groups\u2014including the NAACP, the Urban League, the AFL-CIO, and even the National Association of \u00adManufacturers\u2014compelled the administration to abandon the effort. Despite the conservative tenor of the country, diversity programs were firmly entrenched in the corporate world by the end of the decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Americans increasingly embraced racial diversity as a positive value but most often approached the issue through an individualistic\u2014not a systemic\u2014framework. Certain federal policies disproportionately affected racial minorities. Spending cuts enacted by Reagan and congressional Republicans shrank Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, food stamps, school lunch programs, and job training programs, all of which provided crucial support to African American households. In 1982, the National Urban League\u2019s annual \u201cState of Black America\u201d report concluded that \u201cnever [since the first report in 1976] . . . has the state of Black America been more vulnerable. Never in that time have black economic rights been under such powerful attack.\u201d47<\/a><\/sup> African American communities, especially in urban areas, also bore the stigma of violence and criminality. Homicide was the leading cause of death for Black males between ages fifteen and twenty-four, occurring at a rate six times that of other groups.48<\/a><\/sup> Although African Americans were the most common victims of violent crime, sensationalist media reports incited fears about Black-on-white crime in big cities. Ironically, such fear could by itself spark violence. In December 1984 a thirty-seven-year-old white engineer, Bernhard Goetz, shot and seriously wounded four Black teenagers on a New York City subway car. The so-called Subway Vigilante suspected that the young men\u2014armed with screwdrivers\u2014planned to rob him. Pollsters found that 90 percent of white New Yorkers sympathized with Goetz.49<\/a><\/sup> Echoing the law-and-order rhetoric (and policies) of the 1960s and 1970s, politicians\u2014both Democratic and Republican\u2014and law enforcement agencies implemented more aggressive policing of minority communities and mandated longer prison sentences for those arrested. The explosive growth of mass incarceration exacted a heavy toll on African American communities long into the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Race in America, of course, was not only a question of Black and white. Commentators often referred to the 1980s as the \u201cDecade of the Hispanic.\u201d In 1970, the US census introduced a new category, \u201cHispanic,\u201d that enumerated a distinct ethnic identity held by \u201ca person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.\u201d Five percent of all Americans were counted as Hispanic in 1970, and 9 percent by 1990, representing, in absolute numbers, a more than doubling of the US Hispanic population. Ethnic Mexicans represented the bulk, Puerto Ricans and Cubans\u2014more than 100,000 arrived in Florida in 1980 alone as part of the Mariel Boatlift\u2014constituted large and growing numbers, as well. As American-backed military regimes in Central America threw the region into chaos, thousands of refugees came to the United States, where churches launched the Sanctuary Movement to shield refugees from deportation. Reagan, meanwhile, seeking to modernize American immigration enforcement, signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in 1986, offering amnesty to nearly three million undocumented Americans. Hundreds of thousands of Latin American migrants, meanwhile, continued to flow across the southern border every year, a stream of immigration only exacerbated by the economic disruptions in Mexico wrought by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the sudden rush of American goods and American capital into Mexico in the 1990s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, Native Americans continued to fight in courts and in public. The Red Power movement had borne fruit: the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978) solidified Native people\u2019s right to define their own citizenship criteria. A US district court case, Windy Boy v. County of Big Horn (1986), ruled that Crow and Northern Cheyenne citizens in Big Horn County, Montana, had faced racial discrimination in violation of the Voting Rights Act and ordered the county to reform a system that had restricted Native suffrage for decades. The Reagan administration, in support of extractive industries challenging Indigenous control of land and resources, gutted the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) by 40 percent. Legislative gains, however, won cultural and financial victories for Indigenous Americans. The 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) permitted Native nations to operate Class III casino games such as blackjack and roulette, sparking a bonanza of casino construction and operation on reservations, leading to vast new revenue streams. Within five years, over half of all federally recognized tribes had some form of gambling, offsetting federal budget cuts. Meanwhile, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) allowed Indigenous nations to exercise power over human remains, sacred items, and cultural patrimony, repatriating Indigenous artifacts and remains from museums and other non-Native institutions to Native control. Requirements for documentation spurred the creation of vast new libraries, archives, and museums dedicated to historic preservation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

America had seemingly moved on from the civil rights era, but it could not escape race as a major fault line in American life. On March 3, 1991, Los Angeles police officers were videotaped violently beating a Black man, Rodney King, after a high-speed chase. The incident sparked a national furor and, a year later, when four LAPD officers were acquitted, the city of Los Angeles went up in flames. The 1992 Los Angeles Riots resulted in over sixty deaths, ten thousand arrests, and more than a billion dollars in property damage. Race was still everywhere in the public conscious when, two years later, ninety million Americans stopped what they were doing to watch broadcasts of a highway police chase involving former star football player, rental car pitchman, and comic actor O. J. Simpson, suspected of brutally murdering his wife and another man found at his Los Angeles home. The resulting trial, a sprawling eight-month media circus that dominated the country\u2019s attention and resulted in Simpson\u2019s eventual acquittal, refracted American race relations back upon the nation, exposing the deep and painful wounds left unhealed by the activism of earlier decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VII. Bad Times and Good Times<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Working- and middle-class Americans struggled to maintain economic equilibrium during the Reagan years. The growing national debt generated fresh economic pain. The federal government borrowed money to finance the debt, raising interest rates to heighten the appeal of government bonds. Foreign money poured into the United States, raising the value of the dollar and attracting an influx of goods from overseas. The imbalance between American imports and exports grew from $36 billion in 1980 to $170 billion in 1987.50<\/a><\/sup> Foreign competition battered the already anemic manufacturing sector. The appeal of government bonds likewise drew investment away from American industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continuing an ongoing trend, many steel and automobile factories in the industrial Northeast and Midwest closed or moved overseas during the 1980s. Bruce Springsteen, the self-appointed bard of blue-collar America, offered eulogies to Rust Belt cities in songs like \u201cYoungstown.\u201d The narrator of Springsteen\u2019s song \u201cMy Hometown\u201d laments that his \u201cforeman says these jobs are going, boys \/ and they ain\u2019t coming back.\u201d51<\/a><\/sup> Competition from Japanese carmakers spurred a \u201cBuy American\u201d campaign. Meanwhile, a farm crisis gripped the rural United States. Expanded world production meant new competition for American farmers, while soaring interest rates caused the already sizable debt held by family farms to mushroom. Farm foreclosures skyrocketed during Reagan\u2019s tenure. In September 1985, prominent musicians including Neil Young and Willie Nelson organized Farm Aid, a benefit concert at the University of Illinois football stadium designed to raise money for struggling farmers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the other end of the economic spectrum, wealthy Americans thrived under the policies of the New Right. The financial industry found new ways to earn staggering profits during the Reagan years. Wall Street brokers like junk bond king Michael Milken reaped fortunes selling high-risk, high-yield securities. Reckless speculation helped drive the stock market steadily upward until the crash of October 19, 1987. On Black Monday, as it immediately came to be known, the market plunged eight hundred points, erasing 13 percent of its value. Investors lost more than $500 billion.52<\/a><\/sup> An additional financial crisis loomed in the savings and loan (S&L) industry, for which Reagan\u2019s deregulatory policies bore significant responsibility. In 1982 Reagan signed a bill increasing the amount of federal insurance available to savings and loan depositors, making those financial institutions more popular with consumers, and also allowing S&Ls to engage in high-risk loans and investments for the first time. Many such deals failed catastrophically, while some S&L managers brazenly stole from their institutions. In the late 1980s, S&Ls failed with regularity, and ordinary Americans lost precious savings. The 1982 law left the government responsible for bailing out the S&Ls out at an eventual cost of $132 billion.53<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIII. Culture Wars<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Popular culture of the 1980s offered another venue in which conservatives and liberals waged a battle of ideas. The militarism and patriotism of Reagan\u2019s presidency pervaded movies like Top Gun, Red Dawn, and Rambo: First Blood Part II. In contrast, director Oliver Stone offered searing condemnations of the war in Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. Television shows like Dynasty and Dallas celebrated wealth and glamour, reflecting the pride in conspicuous consumption that emanated from the White House and corporate boardrooms during the decade. At the same time, films like Stone\u2019s Wall Street and novels like Bret Easton Ellis\u2019s Less Than Zero skewered the excesses of the rich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most significant aspect of much popular culture in the 1980s, however, was its lack of political content. Steven Spielberg\u2019s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and his Indiana Jones adventure trilogy topped the box office. Cinematic escapism, influenced by George Lucas\u2019s immensely profitable 1977 movie Star Wars and its sequels, replaced the social films of the 1970s. Quintessential Hollywood leftist Jane Fonda appeared frequently on television but only to peddle exercise videos. Television viewership\u2014once dominated by the big three networks of NBC, ABC, and CBS\u2014fragmented with the rise of cable television outlets catering to particularized tastes. Few cable channels so captured the popular imagination as MTV, which debuted in 1981. Telegenic artists like Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson skillfully used MTV to boost their reputations and album sales. Conservatives condemned music videos for corrupting young people with vulgar, anti-authoritarian messages, but the medium only grew in stature. Critics of MTV targeted Madonna in particular. Her 1989 video \u201cLike a Prayer\u201d drew protests for what some people viewed as sexually suggestive and blasphemous scenes. The religious right increasingly perceived popular culture as hostile to Christian values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cultural battles were even more heated in the realm of gender and sexual politics. American women pushed further into male-dominated spheres during the 1980s. By 1984, women in the workforce outnumbered those who worked at home.54<\/a><\/sup> That same year, New York representative Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman to run on a major party\u2019s presidential ticket when the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, named her his running mate. Despite (or perhaps in part because of) these trends, American feminism drew attacks from cultural conservatives. Susan Faludi\u2019s 1991 Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women argued that some Americans increasingly saw feminism not only as an outdated and unnecessary relic of the 1960s and 1970s\u2014women already had equality, the argument went\u2014but as the source of new social problems itself: feminism was blamed for women\u2019s declining fertility rates, decreasing mental health, poverty, disordered eating, and soaring divorce rates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Impoverished Black women were often singled out in the conservative assault on American social welfare programs. Everyday life became harsher for poor women and their families, who were hit hardest by the Reagan-era cuts to food and childhood development support and the ending of programs to address gender discrimination in education and employment. The 1980s saw increasing economic inequality among African Americans. The expansion of the Black middle class so winningly portrayed by The Cosby Show was at odds with a harsher reality in which single Black mothers were losing ground as the national economy shifted from industrial labor to low-wage retail and service work. Women overall became poorer during this period, but Black women were singled out in Reagan\u2019s demagogic image of the \u201cwelfare queen,\u201d which drew attention to mythical lazy cheats fraudulently collecting government relief. Welfare programs for mothers and families survived the Reagan administration, but they entered the 1990s battered by the relentless political attacks that delegitimized the social safety net.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

American women nevertheless mobilized for new feminist demands in the 1980s. The fight to end violence against women became a widely and deeply held feminist priority, although advocates disagreed over priorities and strategies. Some sided with conservative critics: in the feminist \u201csex wars,\u201d a vocal contingent of white feminists argued that pornography was the fundamental expression of women\u2019s systematically degraded status in male society and fought for legal measures to ban it. Catharine MacKinnon, a legal scholar, and Andrea Dworkin, a polemical feminist writer, lobbied for their model anti-pornography legislation across the nation. Other feminists argued that queer and feminist literature would be among the first targets in pornography bans and charged that the anti-porn wing of feminist movement were inviting sexual repression, not sexual freedom. This hunch was confirmed when MacKinnon, Dworkin, and other feminists worked with Reagan\u2019s attorney general, Edwin Meese, to produce a massive report condemning pornography. The report, burnished with feminist support, did not condemn pornography as an attack on women\u2019s bodily autonomy but as a threat to \u201cthe family concept and its value to society.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Feminist campaigns against gender-based violence and harassment met popular resistance. MacKinnon, leader of the anti-porn campaign, developed the name and legal category for \u201csexual harassment\u201d as a form of sex discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Critics such as influential anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly dismissed the idea: \u201csexual harassment on the job,\u201d she argued, \u201cis not a problem for the virtuous woman.\u201d But as a 1992 ABC News\/Washington Post poll found, 85 percent of Americans considered sexual harassment in the workplace a problem\u2014a third of working women reported having been harassed on the job.55<\/a><\/sup> Anita Hill, a lawyer at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), was one of those women. Her boss, Clarence Thomas, the Reagan-appointed head of the EEOC, repeatedly described sex acts and made other unwanted comments in her presence, she said. In 1991, when George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the Supreme Court, Hill went public with her experiences and testified in a grueling Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 1991. Despite widespread outrage\u2014Hill was both belittled and believed\u2014Thomas was narrowly confirmed. The hearings brought new attention to workplace sexual harassment. Four in ten working men reported adjusting their workplace behavior in the wake of the hearings.13<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Histories of women\u2019s liberation often end with second-wave feminism breaking apart during the \u201csex wars\u201d of the 1980s, but new causes, strategies, and demographics advanced the American women\u2019s movement. The 1980s were a veritable heyday for multiracial feminism. Lesbian poets published classic feminist texts, such as Audre Lorde\u2019s \u201cThe Master\u2019s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master\u2019s House\u201d and Gloria Anzald\u00faa\u2019s Borderlands\/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Feminists of color developed a new analysis of the compounding harms of racism and sexism like welfare cuts and violence against women, or what law professor Kimberl\u00e9 Crenshaw identified at the end of the decade as \u201cintersectional\u201d oppression. Leading feminists in this movement called for an expansive understanding of women\u2019s bodily autonomy, highlighting the disproportionate rates of sexual assault, reproductive coercion, and high rates of infant and maternal mortality among poor women of color. Organizations and coalitions bloomed to meet the rollbacks in welfare and healthcare that threatened the lives of poor women of color, like the National Black Women\u2019s Health Project, the National Latina Health Organization, Native American Women\u2019s Health Education Resource Center, and Sakhi for South Asian Women, an organization mobilizing against domestic violence in New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many white feminists responded by adopting a greater emphasis on race. In response to attacks on immigrants and the partial revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan, white women in Austin, Texas, organized the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, whose chapters disrupted Klan rallies and neo-Nazi rallies and protected Gay Pride marches across the nation. A similar mobilization took root in the punk counterculture, where anti-fascists in Minneapolis organized Anti-Racist Action (ARA) to block a white power takeover. By the end of the 1980s there were hundreds of ARA chapters across the nation. Other women in the punk scene, self-styled in the 1990s as \u201criot grrrls,\u201d made music and DIY booklets, or \u201czines,\u201d that fought back against macho punk culture and reclaimed demeaning slurs like \u201cslut\u201d and \u201cbitch.\u201d Other women organized against American militarism, interventions in the Middle East and Latin America, the Jewish occupation of Palestine, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ascendance of the conservative movement placed fundamental questions about women\u2019s rights near the center of American politics\u2014particularly in regard to abortion. The issue increasingly divided Americans. Pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans grew rare, as the National Abortion Rights Action League enforced pro-choice orthodoxy on the left and the National Right to Life Commission exerted comparable influence on the right. Religious conservatives took advantage of the Republican takeover of the White House and Senate in 1980 to push for new restrictions on abortion\u2014with limited success. Senators Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Orrin Hatch of Utah introduced versions of a Human Life Amendment to the US Constitution that defined life as beginning at conception; both efforts failed.56<\/a><\/sup> Reagan, more animated by economic issues than religious ones, provided only lukewarm support for the anti-abortion movement. He outraged anti-abortion activists by appointing Sandra Day O\u2019Connor, a supporter of abortion rights, to the Supreme Court. Despite these setbacks, anti-abortion forces succeeded in defunding some abortion providers. The 1976 Hyde Amendment prohibited the use of federal funds to pay for abortions; by 1990 a number of states had their own version of the Hyde Amendment. Yet some anti-abortion activists demanded more. In 1988 evangelical activist Randall Terry founded Operation Rescue, an organization that targeted abortion clinics and pro-choice politicians with confrontational\u2014and sometimes violent\u2014tactics. Operation Rescue demonstrated that the fight over abortion would grow only more heated in the 1990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
The AIDS epidemic hit the gay and African American communities particularly hard in the 1980s, prompting awareness campaigns by celebrities like Patti LaBelle. Poster, c. 1980s. Wikimedia, http:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:%22Don%27t_listen_to_rumors_about_AIDS,_get_the_facts!%22_Patti_LaBelle.A025218.jpg. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The emergence of a deadly new illness, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), simultaneously devastated, stigmatized, and energized the nation\u2019s homosexual community. When AIDS appeared in the early 1980s, most of its victims were gay men. For a time the disease was known as GRID\u2014gay-related immune deficiency. The epidemic rekindled older pseudoscientific ideas about the inherently diseased nature of homosexual bodies. The Reagan administration met the issue with indifference, leading liberal congressman Henry Waxman to rage that \u201cif the same disease had appeared among Americans of Norwegian descent . . . rather than among gay males, the response of both the government and the medical community would be different.\u201d57<\/a><\/sup> Some religious figures seemed to relish the opportunity to condemn homosexual activity; Catholic columnist Patrick Buchanan remarked that \u201cthe sexual revolution has begun to devour its children.\u201d58<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gay Americans were left to forge their own response to the crisis. Some turned to confrontation\u2014like New York playwright Larry Kramer. Kramer founded the Gay Men\u2019s Health Crisis, which demanded a more proactive response to the epidemic. Others sought to humanize AIDS victims; this was the goal of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, a commemorative project begun in 1985. By the middle of the decade the federal government began to address the issue haltingly. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian, called for more federal funding on AIDS-related research, much to the dismay of critics on the religious right. By 1987 government spending on AIDS-related research reached $500 million\u2014still only 25 percent of what experts advocated.59<\/a><\/sup> In 1987 Reagan convened a presidential commission on AIDS; the commission\u2019s report called for antidiscrimination laws to protect people with AIDS and for more federal spending on AIDS research. The shift encouraged activists. Nevertheless, on issues of abortion and gay rights\u2014as with the push for racial equality\u2014activists spent the 1980s preserving the status quo rather than building on previous gains. This amounted to a significant victory for the New Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all of the political gains of the conservative movement in the 1980s, cultural conservatives were forced to cede new cultural ground. American culture liberalized throughout the 1990s. \u201cParental Advisory\u201d labels emblazoned popular music with explicit lyrics, but the energy that fueled the Parents Music Resource Center\u2014which in turn compelled rock musicians such as Frank Zappa and Dee Snider to testify in the US Senate in 1985\u2014was very nearly spent. First Lady Barbara Bush complained publicly about the animated television show The Simpsons in 1990, and controversy compelled Ice-T to pull his controversial song \u201cCop Killer\u201d from the shelves in 1992, but the culture was opening up by the time Bill Clinton took office in 1993. Moral panics met new cultural forms, including the violence of the arcade game Mortal Kombat (1992), the blazingly popular new musical form of \u201cgangsta rap,\u201d the decision of the working woman at the center of television\u2019s Murphy Brown to raise a child alone in 1992, the vulgarity of the television show South Park after its 1997 debut, and the first appearance of a self-identified gay lead TV character in the sitcom Ellen (1994\u20131998; \u201cYep, I\u2019m Gay\u201d read the cover of Time featuring the show\u2019s also-out star, Ellen DeGeneres). Although Americans realized how far popular culture had traveled\u2014\u201cIt\u2019s the nineties,\u201d a popular refrain went\u2014conservatives still challenged the culture\u2019s persistent envelope-pushing. They fought back. \u201cIt is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America,\u201d failed presidential candidate Pat Buchanan thundered at the 1992 Republican National Convention. But while they fought the war\u2014and gained strength and unity of purpose from the fight\u2014they were fighting a rearguard action. By the end of the 1990s, American culture was broader, more diverse, and more explicit than ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IX. The New Right Abroad<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"An
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, leaders of two of the world\u2019s most powerful countries, formed an alliance that benefited both throughout their tenures in office. Photograph of Margaret Thatcher with Ronald Reagan at Camp David, December 22, 1984. Wikimedia, http:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Thatcher_Reagan_Camp_David_sofa_1984.jpg. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The conservative movement profited by dipping into gender and sexual politics, but it captured American politics in large measure on American foreign policy. Ronald Reagan entered office a committed Cold Warrior. In a 1983 speech, he denounced the Soviet Union as an \u201cevil empire.\u201d60<\/a><\/sup> And he never doubted that the Soviet Union would end up \u201con the ash heap of history,\u201d as he stated in a 1982 speech to the British Parliament.61<\/a><\/sup> Indeed, Reagan believed it was the duty of the United States to speed the Soviet Union to its inevitable demise. His Reagan Doctrine declared that the United States would supply aid to anticommunist forces everywhere in the world.62<\/a><\/sup> To give this doctrine force, Reagan oversaw an enormous expansion in the defense budget. Federal spending on defense rose from $171 billion in 1981 to $229 billion in 1985, the highest level since the Vietnam War.63<\/a><\/sup> He described this as a policy of \u201cpeace through strength,\u201d a phrase that appealed to Americans who, during the 1970s, feared that the United States was losing its status as the world\u2019s most powerful nation. Yet the irony is that Reagan, for all his militarism, helped bring the Cold War to an end through negotiation, a tactic he had once scorned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reagan\u2019s election came at a time when many Americans feared their country was in irreversible decline. American forces withdrew in disarray from South Vietnam in 1975. The United States returned sovereignty over the Panama Canal to Panama in 1978, despite protests from conservatives. Pro-American dictators were toppled in Iran and Nicaragua in 1979. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan that same year, leading conservatives to warn about American weakness in the face of Soviet expansion. Reagan spoke to fears of decline, warning in 1976 that \u201cthis nation has become Number Two in a world where it is dangerous\u2014if not fatal\u2014to be second best.\u201d64<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Reagan administration made Latin America a showcase for its newly assertive policies. Jimmy Carter had sought to promote human rights in the region, but Reagan and his advisors scrapped this approach and instead focused on fighting communism\u2014a term they applied to all Latin American left-wing movements. And so when communists with ties to Cuba overthrew the government of the Caribbean nation of Grenada in October 1983, Reagan dispatched the US Marines to the island. Dubbed Operation Urgent Fury, the Grenada invasion overthrew the leftist government after less than a week of fighting. Despite the relatively minor nature of the mission, its success gave victory-hungry Americans something to cheer about after the military debacles of the previous two decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An
Operation Urgent Fury, the U.S. invasion of Grenada, was broadly supported by the U.S. public. This photograph shows the deployment of U.S. Army Rangers into Grenada. Photograph, October 25, 1983. Wikimedia.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Grenada was the only time Reagan deployed the American military in Latin America, but the United States also influenced the region by supporting right-wing, anticommunist movements there. From 1981 to 1990, the United States gave more than $4 billion to the government of El Salvador in a largely futile effort to defeat the guerrillas of the Farabundo Mart\u00ed National Liberation Front (FMLN).65<\/a><\/sup> Salvadoran security forces equipped with American weapons committed numerous atrocities, including the slaughter of almost one thousand civilians at the village of El Mozote in December 1981.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Reagan administration took a more cautious approach in the Middle East, where its policy was determined by a mix of anticommunism and hostility toward the Islamic government of Iran. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the United States supplied Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with military intelligence and business credits\u2014even after it became clear that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons. Reagan\u2019s greatest setback in the Middle East came in 1982, when, shortly after Israel invaded Lebanon, he dispatched Marines to the Lebanese city of Beirut to serve as a peacekeeping force. On October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines stationed in Beirut. Congressional pressure and anger from the American public forced Reagan to recall the Marines from Lebanon in March 1984. Reagan\u2019s decision demonstrated that, for all his talk of restoring American power, he took a pragmatic approach to foreign policy. He was unwilling to risk another Vietnam by committing American troops to Lebanon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
President Reagan proposed space- and ground-based systems to protect the United States from nuclear missiles in his 1984 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Scientists argued it was unrealistic or impossible with contemporary technology, and it was lambasted in the media as \u201cStar Wars.\u201d Indeed, as this artist’s representation of SDI shows, it was rather ridiculous. Created October 18, 1984. Wikimedia, http:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Space_Laser_Satellite_Defense_System_Concept.jpg.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Though Reagan\u2019s policies toward Central America and the Middle East aroused protest, his policy on nuclear weapons generated the most controversy. Initially Reagan followed the examples of presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter by pursuing arms limitation talks with the Soviet Union. American officials participated in the Intermediate-range Nuclear Force (INF) Talks that began in 1981 and the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) in 1982. But the breakdown of these talks in 1983 led Reagan to proceed with plans to place Pershing II nuclear missiles in Western Europe to counter Soviet SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe. Reagan went a step further in March 1983, when he announced plans for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a space-based system that could shoot down incoming Soviet missiles. Critics derided the program as a \u201cStar Wars\u201d fantasy, and even Reagan\u2019s advisors harbored doubts. \u201cWe don\u2019t have the technology to say this,\u201d Secretary of State George Shultz told aides.66<\/a><\/sup> These aggressive policies fed a growing nuclear freeze movement throughout the world. In the United States, organizations like the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy organized protests that culminated in a June 1982 rally that drew almost a million people to New York City\u2019s Central Park.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Protests in the streets were echoed by resistance in Congress. Congressional Democrats opposed Reagan\u2019s policies on the merits; congressional Republicans, though they supported Reagan\u2019s anticommunism, were wary of the administration\u2019s fondness for circumventing Congress. In 1982, the House voted 411\u20130 to approve the Boland Amendment, which barred the United States from supplying funds to the Contras, a right-wing insurgency fighting the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Reagan, overlooking the Contras\u2019 brutal tactics, hailed them as the \u201cmoral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.\u201d67<\/a><\/sup> The Reagan administration\u2019s determination to flout these amendments led to a scandal that almost destroyed Reagan\u2019s presidency. Robert McFarlane, the president\u2019s national security advisor, and Oliver North, a member of the National Security Council, raised money to support the Contras by selling American missiles to Iran and funneling the money to Nicaragua. When their scheme was revealed in 1986, it was hugely embarrassing for Reagan. The president\u2019s underlings had not only violated the Boland Amendment but had also, by selling arms to Iran, made a mockery of Reagan\u2019s declaration that \u201cAmerica will never make concessions to the terrorists.\u201d But while the Iran-Contra affair generated comparisons to the Watergate scandal, investigators were never able to prove Reagan knew about the operation. Without such a \u201csmoking gun,\u201d talk of impeaching Reagan remained simply talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though the Iran-Contra scandal tarnished the Reagan administration\u2019s image, it did not derail Reagan\u2019s most significant achievement: easing tensions with the Soviet Union. This would have seemed impossible in Reagan\u2019s first term, when the president exchanged harsh words with a rapid succession of Soviet leaders\u2014Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko. In 1985, however, the aged Chernenko\u2019s death handed leadership of the Soviet Union to Mikhail Gorbachev, who, while a true believer in socialism, nonetheless realized that the Soviet Union desperately needed to reform itself. He loosened the Soviet Union\u2019s tight personal restraints and censorship (glasnost) and liberalized the repressive Soviet political machinery (perestroika). Gorbachev also reached out to Reagan in hopes of negotiating an end to the arms race, which was bankrupting the Soviet Union. Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1985 and Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986. The summits failed to produce any concrete agreements, but the two leaders developed a relationship unprecedented in the history of US-Soviet relations. This trust made possible the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, which committed both sides to sharp reductions in their nuclear arsenals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the late 1980s the Soviet empire was crumbling. Reagan successfully combined anticommunist rhetoric (such as his 1987 speech at the Berlin Wall, where he declared, \u201cGeneral Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace . . . tear down this wall!\u201d) with a willingness to negotiate with Soviet leadership.68<\/a><\/sup> But the most significant causes of collapse lay within the Soviet empire itself. Soviet-allied governments in Eastern Europe tottered under pressure from dissident organizations like Poland\u2019s Solidarity and East Germany\u2019s Neues Forum. Some of these countries, such as Poland, were also pressured from within by the Roman Catholic Church, which had turned toward active anticommunism under Pope John Paul II, the first Polish pope. When Gorbachev made it clear that he would not send the Soviet military to prop up these regimes, they collapsed one by one in 1989\u2014in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany. Within the Soviet Union, Gorbachev\u2019s proposed reforms unraveled the decaying Soviet system rather than bringing stability. By 1991 the Soviet Union itself had vanished, dissolving into the Commonwealth of Independent States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

X. Toward the New Millennium<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"An
The Apple II computer, introduced in 1977, was the first successful mass-produced microcomputer meant for home use. Rather clunky-looking to our twenty-first-century eyes, this 1984 version of the Apple II was the smallest and sleekest model yet introduced. Indeed, it revolutionized both the substance and design of personal computers. Photograph of the Apple iicb. Wikimedia, http:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Apple_iicb.jpg.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The conservative Reagan Revolution lingered over the presidential election of 1988. At stake was the legacy of a newly empowered conservative movement, a movement that would move forward with Reagan\u2019s vice president, George H. W. Bush, who triumphed over Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis with a promise to continue the conservative work that had commenced in the 1980s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The son of a US senator from Connecticut, George H. W. Bush had over the decades been a navy pilot duing World War II, president of a successful oil company, chair of the Republican National Committee, director of the CIA, and member of the House of Representatives from Texas. After failing to best Reagan in the 1980 Republican primaries, he was elected as his vice president in 1980 and again in 1984. In 1988, Michael Dukakis, a proud liberal from Massachusetts, challenged Bush for the White House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dukakis ran a weak campaign. Bush, a Connecticut aristocrat who had never been fully embraced by movement conservatism, particularly the newly animated religious right, nevertheless hammered Dukakis with moral and cultural issues. Bush said Dukakis had blocked recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in Massachusetts schools and was a \u201ccard-carrying member\u201d of the ACLU. Bush meanwhile dispatched his eldest son, George W. Bush, as his ambassador to the religious right.69<\/a><\/sup> Bush also infamously released a political ad featuring the face of Willie Horton, a Black Massachusetts man and convicted murderer who raped a woman after being released through a prison furlough program during Dukakis\u2019s tenure as governor. \u201cBy the time we\u2019re finished,\u201d Bush\u2019s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, said, \u201cthey\u2019re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis\u2019 running mate.\u201d70<\/a><\/sup> Liberals attacked conservatives for perpetuating the ugly \u201ccode word\u201d politics of the old Southern Strategy\u2014the underhanded appeal to white racial resentments perfected by Richard Nixon in the aftermath of civil rights legislation.71<\/a><\/sup> Buoyed by such attacks, Bush won a large victory and entered the White House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bush\u2019s election signaled Americans\u2019 continued embrace of Reagan\u2019s conservative program and further evidenced the disarray of the Democratic Party. American liberalism, so stunningly triumphant in the 1960s, was now in full retreat. It would still claim scattered victories. Protests by disability activists in 1990\u2014sixty individuals with physical disabilities, including eight-year-old Jennifer Keelan, notably crawled up the seventy-eight marble steps of the US Capitol Building without their mobility support\u2014successfully pressured lawmakers to finally push the American Disabilities Act (ADA) through Congress. Signing the bill was \u201csomething I\u2019m very proud of,\u201d President Bush later recalled, \u201cperhaps proudest of when I was President.\u201d Despite such gains, however, political and cultural conservatism continued to reign. It was still, as one historian put it, the \u201cAge of Reagan.\u201d72<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Soviet Union collapsed during Bush\u2019s tenure. Devastated by a stagnant economy, mired in a costly and disastrous war in Afghanistan, confronted with dissident factions in Eastern Europe, and rocked by internal dissent, the Soviet Union crumbled. Eastern Bloc nations turned against their communist organizations and declared their independence from the Soviet Union. Gorbachev let them go. Soon, the Soviet Union unraveled. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned his office, declaring that the Soviet Union no longer existed. At the Kremlin\u2014Russia\u2019s center of government\u2014the new tricolor flag of the Russian Federation was raised.73<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dissolution of the Soviet Union left the United States as the world\u2019s only remaining superpower. The United States suddenly and surprisingly towered over a seemingly unipolar world. Global capitalism seemed triumphant. Observers wondered if some final stage of history had been reached, if the old battles had ended and a new global consensus built around peace and open markets would reign forever. \u201cWhat we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such,\u201d wrote Francis Fukuyama in his much-talked-about 1989 essay \u201cThe End of History?\u201d74<\/a><\/sup> Assets in Eastern Europe were privatized and auctioned off as newly independent nations introduced market economies. New markets were rising in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. India, for instance, began liberalizing its economic laws and opening itself up to international investment in 1991. China\u2019s economic reforms, advanced by Chairman Deng Xiaoping and his handpicked successors, accelerated as privatization and foreign investment proceeded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Oilfields
The Iraqi military set fire to Kuwait\u2019s oil fields during the Gulf War, many of which burned for months and caused massive pollution. Photograph of oil well fires outside Kuwait City, March 21, 1991. Wikimedia, http:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Operation_Desert_Storm_22.jpg. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The post\u2013Cold War world was not without international conflicts, however. When Iraq invaded the small but oil-rich nation of Kuwait in 1990, Congress granted President Bush approval to intervene. The United States laid the groundwork for intervention (Operation Desert Shield) in August and commenced combat operations (Operation Desert Storm) in January 1991. With the memories of Vietnam still fresh, many Americans were hesitant to support military action that could expand into a protracted war or long-term commitment of troops. But the Gulf War was a swift victory for the United States. New technologies\u2014including laser-guided precision bombing\u2014amazed Americans, who could now watch twenty-four-hour live coverage of the war on the Cable News Network (CNN). The Iraqi army disintegrated after only a hundred hours of ground combat. President Bush and his advisors opted not to pursue the war into Baghdad and risk an occupation and insurgency. And so the war was won. Many entertained the notion that the \u201cghosts of Vietnam\u201d had been exorcised.75<\/a><\/sup> Bush won enormous popular support. Gallup polls showed a job approval rating as high as 89 percent in the weeks after the end of the war.76<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

President Bush\u2019s popularity seemed to suggest an easy reelection in 1992, but Bush had still not won over the New Right, the aggressively conservative wing of the Republican Party, despite his attacks on Dukakis, his embrace of the flag and the pledge, and his promise, \u201cRead my lips: no new taxes\u201d (his inability to follow through on this latter pledge woud spell problems for him later). He faced a primary challenge from political commentator Patrick Buchanan, a former Reagan and Nixon White House advisor, who cast Bush as a moderate, as an unworthy steward of the conservative movement who was unwilling to fight for conservative Americans in the nation\u2019s ongoing culture war. Buchanan did not defeat Bush in the Republican primaries, but he inflicted enough damage to weaken his candidacy.77<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1993. Wikimedia.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Still thinking that Bush would be unbeatable in 1992, many prominent Democrats passed on a chance to run, and the Democratic Party nominated a relative unknown, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. Dogged by charges of marital infidelity and draft dodging during the Vietnam War, Clinton was a consummate politician with enormous charisma and a skilled political team. He framed himself as a New Democrat, a centrist open to free trade, tax cuts, and welfare reform. Twenty-two years younger than Bush, he was the first baby boomer to make a serious run at the presidency. Clinton presented the campaign as a generational choice. During the campaign he appeared on MTV, played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show, and told voters that he could offer the United States a new way forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bush ran on his experience and against Clinton\u2019s moral failings. The GOP convention in Houston that summer featured speeches from Pat Buchanan and religious leader Pat Robertson decrying the moral decay plaguing American life. Clinton was denounced as a social liberal who would weaken the American family through both his policies and his individual moral character. But Clinton was able to convince voters that his moderated southern brand of liberalism would be more effective than the moderate conservatism of George Bush. Bush\u2019s candidacy, of course, was perhaps most damaged by a sudden economic recession. As Clinton\u2019s political team reminded the country, \u201cIt\u2019s the economy, stupid.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clinton won the election, but the Reagan Revolution still reigned. Clinton and his running mate, Tennessee senator Albert Gore Jr., both moderate southerners, promised a path away from the old liberalism of the 1970s and 1980s (and the landslide electoral defeats of the 1980s). They were Democrats, but conservative Democrats, so-called New Democrats. In his first term, Clinton set out an ambitious agenda that included an economic stimulus package, universal health insurance, continuation of the Middle East peace talks initiated by Bush secretary of state James A. Baker III, welfare reform, and the completion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to abolish trade barriers between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. His moves to reform welfare, open trade, and deregulate financial markets were particular hallmarks of Clinton\u2019s Third Way, a new Democratic embrace of heretofore conservative policies.78<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By implementing and championing NAFTA, Clinton reversed decades of Democratic opposition to free trade and opened the nation\u2019s northern and southern borders to the free flow of capital and goods. \u201cNAFTA represents the first giant step towards fulfillment of a dream that has long inspired us all,\u201d President Bush said in 1992, \u201cthe dream of a hemisphere united by economic cooperation and free competition.\u201d Critics, particularly in the Midwest\u2019s Rust Belt, blasted the agreement for opening American workers to competition by low-paid foreign workers. Many American factories relocated and set up shops\u2014maquilas\u2014in northern Mexico that took advantage of Mexico\u2019s low wages. Thousands of Mexicans rushed to the maquilas. Thousands more continued on past the border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If NAFTA opened American borders to goods and services, people still navigated strict legal barriers to immigration. Policy makers believed that free trade would create jobs and wealth that would incentivize Mexican workers to stay home, and yet multitudes continued to leave for opportunities in el norte. The 1990s proved that prohibiting illegal migration was, if not impossible, exceedingly difficult. Poverty, political corruption, violence, and hopes for a better life in the United States\u2014or simply higher wages\u2014continued to lure immigrants across the border. Between 1990 and 2010, the proportion of foreign-born individuals in the United States grew from 7.9 percent to 12.9 percent, and the number of undocumented immigrants tripled from 3.5 million to 11.2 million. While large numbers continued to migrate to traditional immigrant destinations\u2014California, Texas, New York, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois\u2014the 1990s also witnessed unprecedented migration to the American South. Among the fastest-growing immigrant destination states were Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina, all of which had immigration growth rates in excess of 100 percent during the decade.79<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The influx of immigrants provoked anti-immigration activists and spurred government policy. Immigration was a bipartisan fear. A 1994 ballot initiative in California, Proposition 187, promised to prohibit undocumented immigrants from accessing non-emergency healthcare, public services, and education, while encouraging stricter immigration enforcement. Although declared unconstitutional, it nevertheless passed with 59 percent of the vote. Under President Bill Clinton, the US government launched Operation Hold the Line in El Paso in 1993 and Operation Gatekeeper outside San Diego in 1994, but fencing and Border Patrol vehicles did little more than steer migrants toward more dangerous crossings. Immigration officials hoped the brutal natural landscape would serve as a natural deterrent. It wouldn\u2019t. By 2017, hundreds of immigrants were dying each year of drowning, exposure, and dehydration.80<\/a><\/sup> Clinton, meanwhile, continued to carve out a Third Way middle ground for his domestic agenda. In his first weeks in office, Clinton reviewed Department of Defense policies restricting homosexuals from serving in the armed forces. He pushed through a compromise plan, Don\u2019t Ask, Don\u2019t Tell, that removed any questions about sexual orientation in induction interviews but also required that gay military personnel keep their sexual orientation private. The policy alienated many. Social conservatives were outraged, and liberals recoiled at continued antigay discrimination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his first term, Clinton also put forward universal healthcare as a major policy goal, and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton played a major role in the initiative. But the push for a national healthcare law collapsed on itself. Conservatives revolted, the healthcare industry flooded the airwaves with attack ads, Clinton struggled with congressional Democrats, and voters bristled. A national healthcare system was again repulsed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The midterm elections of 1994 were a disaster for the Democrats, who lost the House of Representatives for the first time since 1952. Congressional Republicans, led by Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich and Texas congressman Dick Armey, offered a policy agenda they called the Contract with America. Republican candidates from around the nation gathered on the steps of the Capitol to pledge their commitment to a conservative legislative blueprint to be enacted if the GOP won control of the House. The strategy worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social conservatives were mobilized by an energized group of religious activists, especially the Christian Coalition, led by Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed. Robertson was a television minister and entrepreneur whose 1988 long-shot run for the Republican presidential nomination brought him a massive mailing list and a network of religiously motivated voters around the country. From that mailing list, the Christian Coalition organized around the country, seeking to influence politics on the local and national levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1996 the generational contest played out again when the Republicans nominated seventy-three-year-old Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, but Clinton again won the election, becoming the first Democrat to serve two full terms since Franklin Roosevelt. He had ameliorated conservative opposition, in part, by signing welfare reform legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which decreased welfare benefits, restricted eligibility, and turned over many responsibilities to states. Clinton said it would \u201cbreak the cycle of dependency.\u201d81<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clinton presided over a booming economy fueled by emergent computing technologies. Personal computers had skyrocketed in sales, and the Internet became a mass phenomenon. Communication and commerce were never again the same. The tech boom was driven by business, and the 1990s saw robust innovation and entrepreneurship. Investors scrambled to find the next Microsoft or Apple, suddenly massive computing companies. But it was the Internet that sparked a bonanza. The dot-com boom fueled enormous economic growth and substantial financial speculation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stymied at the polls in 1996, Republicans looked for other ways to undermine Clinton\u2019s presidency. Political polarization seemed unprecedented, and a sensation-starved, post-Watergate media demanded scandal. The Republican Congress spent millions on investigations hoping to uncover some shred of damning evidence to sink Clinton\u2019s presidency, whether it be real estate deals, White House staffing\u2014or adultery. Rumors of sexual misconduct had always swirled around Clinton. The press saturated the media with Clinton\u2019s sex scandals. Congressional investigations targeted the allegations and Clinton denied having \u201csexual relations\u201d with Monica Lewinsky before a grand jury and in a statement to the American public. Republicans used the testimony to allege perjury. In December 1998, the House of Representatives voted to impeach the president. It was a wildly unpopular step. Two thirds of Americans disapproved, and a majority told Gallup pollsters that Republicans had abused their constitutional authority. Clinton\u2019s approval rating, meanwhile, jumped to 78 percent.82<\/a><\/sup> In February 1999, Clinton was acquitted by the Senate by a vote that mostly fell along party lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2000 election pitted Vice President Albert Gore Jr. against George W. Bush, the twice-elected Texas governor and son of the former president. Gore, wary of Clinton\u2019s recent impeachment despite Clinton\u2019s enduring approval ratings, distanced himself from the president and eight years of relative prosperity. Instead, he ran as a pragmatic, moderate liberal. Bush, too, ran as a moderate, claiming to represent a \u201ccompassionate conservatism\u201d and a new form of faith-based politics. Bush was an outspoken evangelical. In a presidential debate, he declared Jesus Christ his favorite political philosopher. He promised to bring church leaders into government, and his campaign appealed to churches and clergy to get out the vote. Moreover, he promised to bring honor, dignity, and integrity to the Oval Office, a clear reference to Clinton\u2019s many vices. Utterly lacking the political charisma that had propelled Clinton, Gore withered under Bush\u2019s attacks. Instead of trumpeting the Clinton presidency, Gore found himself answering the media\u2019s questions about whether he was sufficiently an alpha male and whether he had invented the Internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Few elections have been as close and contentious as the 2000 election, which ended in a deadlock. Gore had won the popular vote by five hundred thousand votes, but the Electoral College hinged on a contested Florida election. On election night the media called Florida for Gore, but then Bush made late gains and news organizations reversed themselves by declaring the state for Bush\u2014and Bush the probable president-elect. Gore conceded privately to Bush, then backpedaled as the counts edged back toward Gore yet again. When the nation awoke the next day, it was unclear who had been elected president. The close Florida vote triggered an automatic recount.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lawyers descended on Florida. The Gore campaign called for manual recounts in several counties. Local election boards, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and the Florida Supreme Court all weighed in until the US Supreme Court stepped in and, in an unprecedented 5\u20134 decision in Bush v. Gore, ruled that the recount had to end. Bush was awarded Florida by a margin of 537 votes, enough to win him the state and give him a majority in the Electoral College. He had won the presidency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his first months in office, Bush fought to push forward enormous tax cuts skewed toward America\u2019s highest earners. The bursting of the dot-com bubble weighed down the economy. Old political and cultural fights continued to be fought. And then, in New York, the towers fell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

XI. Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Reagan left office in 1988 with the Cold War waning and the economy booming. Unemployment had dipped to 5 percent by 1988. Between 1981 and 1986, gas prices fell from $1.38 per gallon to 95\u00a2. The stock market rapidly recovered from the 1987 crash, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average\u2014which stood at 950 in 1981\u2014reached 2,239 by the end of Reagan\u2019s second term.83<\/a><\/sup> Yet the economic gains of the decade were unequally distributed. The top fifth of households enjoyed rising incomes while the rest stagnated or declined.84<\/a><\/sup> In constant dollars, annual chief executive officer (CEO) pay rose from $3 million in 1980 to roughly $12 million during Reagan\u2019s last year in the White House.85<\/a><\/sup> Between 1985 and 1989 the number of Americans living in poverty remained steady at thirty-three million.86<\/a><\/sup> Real per capita money income grew at only 2 percent per year, a rate roughly equal to the Carter years.87<\/a><\/sup> The American economy saw more jobs created than lost during the 1980s, but half of the jobs eliminated were in high-paying industries.88<\/a><\/sup> Furthermore, half of the new jobs failed to pay wages above the poverty line. The economic divide was most acute for African Americans and Latinos, one third of whom qualified as poor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The triumph of the right proved incomplete. The number of government employees actually increased under Reagan. With more than 80 percent of the federal budget committed to defense, entitlement programs, and interest on the national debt, the right\u2019s goal of deficit elimination floundered for lack of substantial areas to cut.89<\/a><\/sup> Between 1980 and 1989 the national debt rose from $914 billion to $2.7 trillion.90<\/a><\/sup> Despite steep tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, the overall tax burden of the American public basically remained unchanged. Moreover, so-called regressive taxes on payroll and certain goods actually increased the tax burden on low- and middle-income Americans. Finally, Reagan slowed but failed to vanquish the five-decade legacy of liberal economics. Most New Deal and Great Society programs proved durable. Government still offered its neediest citizens a safety net, if a now continually shrinking one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the discourse of American politics had irrevocably changed. The preeminence of conservative political ideas grew ever more pronounced, even when Democrats controlled Congress or the White House. In response to the conservative mood of the country, the Democratic Party adapted its own message to accommodate many of the Republicans\u2019 Reagan-era ideas and innovations. The United States was on a rightward path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

XII. Reference Material<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This chapter was edited by Richard Anderson and William J. Schultz, with content contributions by Emiliano Aguilar, Richard Anderson, Laila Ballout, Marsha Barrett, Seth Bartee, Eladio Bobadilla, Kyle Burke, Andrew Chadwick, Aaron Cowan, Jennifer Donnally, Leif Fredrickson, Anne Gray Fischer, Kori Graves, Rachel Michelle Gunter, Karissa A. Haugeberg, Jonathan Hunt, Stephen Koeth, Zeb Larson, Rose Miron, Colin Reynolds, Paul C. Rosier, William J. Schultz, and Daniel Spillman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recommended Reading<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Brier, Jennifer. Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Carter, Dan T. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1995.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Chappell, Marisa. The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Crespino, Joseph. In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Critchlow, Donald. The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Dallek, Matthew. The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan\u2019s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics. New York: Free Press, 2000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Hunter, James D. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1992.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Kalman, Laura. Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974\u20131980. New York: Norton, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Kruse, Kevin M. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Lassiter, Matthew D. The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 MacLean, Nancy. Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Moreton, Bethany. To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Nadasen, Premilla. Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States. New York: Routledge, 2005.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Nickerson, Michelle M. Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Patterson, James T. Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Phillips-Fein, Kim. Invisible Hands: The Businessmen\u2019s Crusade Against the New Deal. New York: Norton, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Rodgers, Daniel T. Age of Fracture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Schoenwald, Jonathan. A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Self, Robert O. All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Troy, Gil. Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Wilentz, Sean. The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974\u20132008. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Williams, Daniel K. God\u2019s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Zaretsky, Natasha. No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes<\/p>\n

  1. Ronald Reagan, quoted in Steve Neal, \u201cReagan Assails Carter on Auto Layoffs,\u201d Chicago Tribune, October 20, 1980, 5.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  2. Ronald Reagan, quoted in James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 152.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  3. Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 369.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  4. William F. Buckley, Jr., \u201cOur Mission Statement,\u201d National Review, November 19, 1955, http:\/\/\u200bwww\u200b.nationalreview\u200b.com\/\u200barticle\/\u200b223549\/\u200bour\u200b-mission\u200b-statement\u200b-william\u200b-f\u200b-buckley\u200b-jr.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  5. James Reston, \u201cWhat Goldwater Lost: Voters Rejected His Candidacy, Conservative Cause and the G.O.P.,\u201d New York Times, November 4, 1964, 23.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  6. George Wallace, quoted in William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 377.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  7. James Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945\u20131974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 735\u2013736.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  8. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 227\u2013231.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  9. Francis A. Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1979), 53.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  10. Walter Goodman, \u201cIrving Kristol: Patron Saint of the New Right,\u201d New York Times Magazine, December 6, 1981, http:\/\/\u200bwww\u200b.nytimes\u200b.com\/\u200b1981\/\u200b12\/\u200b06\/\u200bmagazine\/\u200birving\u200b-kristol\u200b-patron\u200b-saint\u200b-of\u200b-the\u200b-new\u200b-right\u200b.html.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  11. William Winpisinger, quoted in Cowie, Stayin\u2019 Alive, 261.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  12. Patterson, Restless Giant, 148.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  13. Ibid.[↩<\/a>]<\/span>[↩<\/a>]<\/span>[↩<\/a>]<\/span>[↩<\/a>]<\/span>[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  14. Jimmy Carter, quoted in \u201cCarter Tells of \u2018Adultery in His Heart,\u2019\u201d Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1976, B6.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  15. Joseph Crespino, \u201cCivil Rights and the Religious Right,\u201d in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian Zelizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 103.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  16. Patterson, Restless Giant, 163; Jon Nordheimer, \u201cReagan Is Picking His Florida Spots: His Campaign Aides Aim for New G.O.P. Voters in Strategic Areas,\u201d New York Times, February 5, 1976, 24.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  17. Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974\u20132008 (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 124.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  18. Meg Jacobs and Julian Zelizer, Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981\u20131989: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford St. Martin\u2019s, 2011), 2.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  19. Patterson, Restless Giant, 150.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  20. Ronald Reagan, quoted in Jacobs and Zelizer, Conservatives in Power, 20.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  21. Jack Kemp, quoted in ibid., 21.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  22. Wilentz, Age of Reagan, 121.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  23. Jacobs and Zelizer, Conservatives in Power, 25\u201326.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  24. Ronald Reagan, quoted in Neal, \u201cReagan Assails Carter,\u201d 5[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  25. Stein, Pivotal Decade, 267.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  26. Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 474.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  27. Patterson, Restless Giant, 159.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  28. Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 67.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  29. Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 476.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  30. Ibid., 474.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  31. Margaret Bush Wilson, quoted in Troy, Morning in America, 93.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  32. Ibid., 210.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  33. Ibid., 110.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  34. Patterson, Restless Giant, 163\u2013164.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  35. Troy, Morning in America, 208.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  36. Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 477.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  37. Patterson, Restless Giant, 162. The phrase \u201charsh medicine\u201d became common shorthand to describe Volcker\u2019s action on interest rates. See, for instance, Art Pine, \u201cLetting Harsh Medicine Work,\u201d Washington Post, October 14, 1979, G1.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  38. Patterson, Restless Giant, 189.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  39. Ibid., 190\u2013191.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  40. Troy, Morning in America, 210; Patterson, Restless Giant, 165.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  41. Patterson, Restless Giant, 173\u2013174.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  42. Ibid., 171.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  43. 1988 Democratic Primaries, CQ Voting and Elections Collection, database accessed June 30, 2015.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  44. The State of Black America, 1990 (New York: National Urban League, 1990), 34.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  45. Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Scribner, 1992), 102.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  46. Ibid., 94.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  47. Troy, Morning in America, 91.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  48. American Social History Project, Who Built America? Vol. Two: Since 1877 (New York: Bedford St. Martin\u2019s, 2000), 723.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  49. Patterson, Restless Giant, 172\u2013173.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  50. Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 487.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  51. Bruce Springsteen, \u201cMy Hometown,\u201d Born in the USA (Columbia Records, 1984).[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  52. Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 489.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  53. Patterson, Restless Giant, 175.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  54. Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women\u2019s Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin, 2000), 337.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  55. Richard Morin, \u201cHarassment Consensus Grows,\u201d Washington Post (December 18, 1992).[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  56. Self, All in the Family, 376\u2013377.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  57. Ibid., 387\u2013388.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  58. Ibid., 384.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  59. Ibid., 389.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  60. Wilentz, Age of Reagan, 163.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  61. Lou Cannon, \u201cPresident Calls for \u2018Crusade\u2019: Reagan Proposes Plan to Counter Soviet Challenge,\u201d Washington Post, June 9, 1982, A1.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  62. Conservative newspaper columnist Charles Krauthammer coined the phrase \u201cReagan Doctrine.\u201d See Wilentz, Age of Reagan, 157.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  63. Patterson, Restless Giant, 205.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  64. Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974\u20131980 (New York: Norton, 2010), 166\u2013167.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  65. Ronald Reagan, \u201cAddress to the Nation on United States Policy in Central America,\u201d May 9, 1984. http:\/\/\u200bwww\u200b.reagan\u200b.utexas\u200b.edu\/\u200barchives\/\u200bspeeches\/\u200b1984\/\u200b50984h\u200b.htm.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  66. Frances FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 205.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  67. Ronald Reagan, \u201cRemarks at the Annual Dinner of the Conservative Political Action Conference,\u201d March 1, 1985, http:\/\/\u200bwww\u200b.presidency\u200b.ucsb\u200b.edu\/\u200bws\/\u200b?pid\u200b=\u200b38274.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  68. Lou Cannon, \u201cReagan Challenges Soviets to Dismantle Berlin Wall: Aides Disappointed at Crowd\u2019s Lukewarm Reception,\u201d Washington Post, June 13, 1987, A1.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  69. Bill Minutaglio, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty (New York: Random House, 1999), 210\u2013224.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  70. Roger Simon, \u201cHow a Murderer and Rapist Became the Bush Campaign\u2019s Most Valuable Player,\u201d Baltimore Sun, November 11, 1990.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  71. See especially Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963\u20131994 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1996), 72\u201380.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  72. Wilentz, Age of Reagan.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  73. James F. Clarity, \u201cEnd of the Soviet Union,\u201d New York Times, December 26, 1991.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  74. Francis Fukuyama, \u201cThe End of History?\u201d National Interest (Summer 1989).[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  75. William Thomas Allison, The Gulf War, 1990\u201391 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 145, 165.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  76. Charles W. Dunn, The Presidency in the Twenty-First Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 152.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  77. Robert M. Collins, Transforming America: Politics and Culture During the Reagan Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 171, 172.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  78. On Clinton\u2019s presidency and the broader politics of the 1990s, see James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Wilentz, Age of Reagan.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  79. Patterson, Restless Giant, 298\u2013299.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  80. United Nations International Organization for Migration, \u201cMigrant Deaths Remain High Despite Sharp Fall in US-Mexico Border Crossings in 2017,\u201d press release, February 6, 2018, https:\/\/\u200bnews\u200b.un\u200b.org\/\u200ben\/\u200bstory\/\u200b2018\/\u200b02\/\u200b1002101.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  81. Carolyn Skorneck, \u201cFinal Welfare Bill Written,\u201d Washington Post, July 30, 1996, A1.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  82. Frank Newport, \u201cClinton Receives Record High Job Approval Rating,\u201d Gallup, December 24, 1998, http:\/\/\u200bnews\u200b.gallup\u200b.com\/\u200bpoll\/\u200b4111\/\u200bclinton\u200b-receives\u200b-record\u200b-high\u200b-job\u200b-approval\u200b-rating\u200b-after\u200b-impeachment\u200b-vot\u200b.aspx.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  83. See Patterson, Restless Giant.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  84. Jacobs and Zelizer, Conservatives in Power, 32.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  85. Patterson, Restless Giant, 186.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  86. Ibid., 164.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  87. Ibid., 166.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  88. Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 488.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  89. Jacobs and Zelizer, Conservatives in Power, 31.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  90. Patterson, Restless Giant, 158.[↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I. Introduction Speaking to Detroit autoworkers in October 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan described what he saw as the American Dream under Democratic president Jimmy Carter. The family garage may have still held two cars, cracked Reagan, but they were \u201cboth Japanese and they\u2019re out of gas.\u201d1 A once-proud nation, the charismatic former governor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1836","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/textbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/textbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/textbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/textbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/textbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1836"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/textbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2168,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/textbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1836\/revisions\/2168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/textbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}