Conservative Ascendance

• The Reagan Revolution marked the culmination of a long process of political mobilization on the American right

• Growing conservatism had several appeals:

  • The expansive social and economic agenda of Johnson’s Great Society reminded anticommunists of Soviet-style central planning

  • The civil rights movement, along with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, was challenging the racial hierarchy of the Jim Crow South

    • To many white Americans, the urban rebellions, antiwar protests, and student uprisings of the late 1960s signaled social chaos

  • Liberalism no longer seemed to offer the great mass of white Americans a road map to prosperity, so they searched for new political solutions

• Christian conservatives also felt themselves under siege from liberalism

  • In the early 1960s, Supreme Court decisions led some on the right to conclude that a liberal judicial system threatened Christian values

  • The counterculture’s celebration of sex and drugs, along with relaxed obscenity and pornography laws, intensified the conviction that “permissive” liberalism encouraged immorality in private life

• With increasing assertiveness in the 1960s and 1970s, Christian conservatives mobilized to protect the “traditional” family

  • Women composed a striking number of the religious right’s 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

    • Motherhood was valorized as women’s highest calling

      • Abortion, therefore, struck at the core of their female identity

      • Abortion drew different segments of the religious right together

      • The Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling outraged many devout Catholics and evangelicals

  • In 1979 Jerry Falwell (a Baptist minister and religious broadcaster from Lynchburg, Virginia) founded the Moral Majority, an explicitly political organization dedicated to advancing a “pro-life, pro-family, pro-morality, and pro-American” agenda

    • The moral majority wove social and economic appeals together and made itself a force in Republican politics

  • Secular, business-oriented institutions also joined the attack on liberalism, fueled by stagflation and by the federal government’s creation of new regulatory agencies

  • Grassroots activists and business leaders received unlikely support from a circle of neoconservatives (disillusioned intellectuals who had rejected liberalism and the Left and become Republicans)

• Each wing of the burgeoning New Right turned to the Republican Party as the most effective vehicle for their political counterassault on liberalism and the New Deal political order

  • These wings were comprised of:

    • Disaffected northern blue-collar workers

    • White southerners

    • Evangelicals and devout Catholics

    • Business leaders

    • Disillusioned intellectuals

    • Cold War hawks

The Conservatism of the Carter Years

• The election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 brought a Democrat to the White House for the first time since 1969

  • Large Democratic majorities in Congress provided the new president with an opportunity to move aggressively on the legislative front

• Many Democrats hoped the Carter administration would update and expand the New Deal, but the post-Watergate disillusionment with the government did not translate into support for liberal ideas

• In its early days, the Carter administration embraced several policies backed by liberals

  • It pushed an economic stimulus package containing $4 billion for public works

  • They extended food stamp benefits to 2.5 million new recipients

  • The Earned Income Tax Credit was enlarged for low-income households

  • The Nixon-era Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) was expanded

• However, the White House quickly realized that Democratic control of Congress did not guarantee support for its initially left-leaning economic proposals

  • Many of the Democrats elected to Congress in the aftermath of Watergate were more moderate than their predecessors, who had been trained in the New Deal gospel

    • These conservative Democrats sometimes partnered with congressional Republicans to oppose Carter

• Events outside Carter’s control certainly helped discredit liberalism, but the president’s own temperamental and philosophical conservatism hamstrung the administration and pushed national politics further to the right

  • The president offered tepid support for a national health insurance proposal and declined to lobby aggressively for a package of modest labor law reforms

  • In 1977 and 1978, liberal Democrats rallied behind the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Training Act, which promised to end unemployment through extensive government planning

    • However, Carter’s lack of enthusiasm for the proposal allowed conservatives from both parties to water the bill down to a purely symbolic gesture

  • Liberals, like labor leaders, came to regard the president as an unreliable ally

• Carter also came under fire from Republicans, especially the religious right

  • His administration incurred the wrath of evangelicals in 1978 when the IRS established new rules revoking the tax-exempt status of racially segregated, private Christian schools

    • Race sat just below the surface of the IRS fight, since many of the schools had been founded to circumvent court-ordered desegregation

• The Carter administration had to respond to the economic crisis in fundamentally conservative ways

  • Tax cuts, deregulating business industries, balancing the federal budget, and raising interest rates

The Election of 1980

• These domestic challenges, combined with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the hostage crisis in Iran, hobbled Carter heading into his 1980 reelection campaign

• Angered by the White House’s refusal to back national health insurance, Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy challenged Carter in the Democratic primaries

  • Carter ultimately vanquished Kennedy, but the close primary tally exposed the president’s vulnerability

• Carter’s 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

• The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the confinement of 52 American hostages in Iran had discredited Carter’s foreign policy in the eyes of many Americans

• Reagan won the election with 51 percent of the popular vote to Carter’s 41 percent

  • Republicans gained control of the Senate for the first time since 1955 by winning twelve seats

• The New Right had arrived in Washington, D.C.

The New Right in Power

• In reality, Reagan focused less on eliminating government than on redirecting government to serve new ends

  • His administration embraced supply-side economic theories that had recently gained popularity among the New Right

    • 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 lower-income groups through job creation and higher wages

• 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

  • A combination of lower taxes and higher defense budgets caused the national debt to balloon

  • As a result, the United States experienced a severe economic recession in 1981 and 1982

    • Cuts in social welfare programs exacted an especially harsh toll on low-income communities of color

Morning in America

• 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

• The Democratic Party, on other hand, stood at an ideological crossroads in 1984

  • Many Democrats conceded significant political ground to supply-siders and conservative opponents of the welfare state while others were not prepared to abandon their New Deal heritage

• Reagan entered his second term with a much stronger mandate than in 1981, but the Grand Old Party (GOP) 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

  • Democrats and Republicans occasionally fashioned legislative compromises, as with the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (which lowered the top corporate tax rate and reduced the highest marginal income tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent)

  • In 1986, Reagan also signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act

    • American policymakers hoped to do two things:

      • Deal with the millions of undocumented immigrants already in the United States

      • Stop future unsanctioned migration

  • One of Reagan’s most far-reaching victories occurred through judicial appointments, as he appointed 3 Supreme Court justices and 368 district and federal appeals court judges during his two terms

African American Life in Reagan’s America

• Ronald Reagan’s America presented African Americans with a series of contradictions

  • Black Americans achieved significant advances in politics, culture, and socioeconomic status

    • Black politicians gained control of major municipal governments across the country during the 1980s

    • A few prominent African Americans in media and entertainment received much acclaim

    • 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 the poor and working-class faced continued challenges

    • The Reagan administration failed to address socioeconomic disparities and in many ways intensified them

• New Right values threatened the legal principles and federal policies of the Great Society and the “rights revolution”

  • Reagan’s 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’s first term, the Justice Department pushed the president to oppose any extension

  • The administration also initiated a plan to rescind federal affirmative action rules

• Americans increasingly embraced racial diversity as a positive value but most often approached the issue through an individualistic — not a systemic — framework

  • Certain federal policies disproportionately affected racial minorities

  • African American communities, especially in urban areas, bore the stigma of violence and criminality

    • Sensationalist media reports incited fears about black-on-white crime in big cities

    • Echoing the law-and-order rhetoric of the 1960s and 1970s, politicians and law enforcement agencies implemented more aggressive policing of minority communities and mandated longer prison sentences for those arrested

Bad Times and Good Times

• Working and middle-class Americans, especially those of color, 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

  • Continuing an ongoing trend, many steel and automobile factories in the industrial Northeast and Midwest closed or moved overseas during the 1980s

• 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

Culture Wars of the 1980s

• The popular culture of the 1980s offered another venue in which conservatives and liberals waged a battle of ideas

  • The militarism and patriotism of Reagan’s presidency pervaded some parts of cinema (e.g. Top Gun) while others (e.g Platoon) offered searing condemnations of the war

  • Television shows like Dynasty and Dallas celebrated wealth and glamour while films like Wall Street and novels like Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero skewered the excesses of the rich

• The most significant aspect of much popular culture in the 1980s, however, was its lack of politics altogether

  • Cinematic escapism replaced the social films of the 1970s

• 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 for being “sexually suggestive” and “blasphemous”

• American women were pushed further into male-dominated spheres during the 1980s

  • The triumph of the right placed fundamental questions about women’s rights near the center of American politics

  • Religious conservatives took advantage of the Republican takeover of the White House and Senate in 1980 to push for new restrictions on abortion—with limited success

  • Reagan, more interested in economic issues than social ones, provided only lukewarm support for the anti-abortion movement

  • The 1976 Hyde Amendment prohibited the use of federal funds to pay for abortions\

The AIDS Epidemic

• The emergence of a deadly new illness, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), simultaneously devastated, stigmatized, and energized the nation’s homosexual community

  • When AIDS appeared in the early 1980s, most of its victims were gay men

  • The epidemic rekindled older pseudoscientific ideas about the inherently diseased nature of homosexual bodies.

• The Reagan administration met the issue with indifference

• Gay people were left to forge their own response to the crisis

  • The Gay Men’s Health Crisis demanded a more proactive response to the epidemic

  • The AIDS Memorial Quilt, a commemorative project begun in 1985, sought to humanize AIDS victims

• By the middle of the decade, the federal government began to address the issue haltingly

The New Right Abroad

• The conservative movement gained ground on gender and sexual politics, but it captured the entire battlefield on American foreign policy in the 1980s

• 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

    • To give this doctrine force, Reagan oversaw an enormous expansion in the defense budget

  • 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

• The Reagan administration made Latin America a showcase for its newly assertive policies

  • Reagan and his advisors focused on fighting communism, a term they applied to all Latin American left-wing movements

  • When communists with ties to Cuba overthrew the government of the Caribbean nation of Grenada in October 1983, Reagan dispatched the U.S. Marines to the island

    • Dubbed Operation Urgent Fury, the Grenada invasion overthrew the leftist government after less than a week of fighting

  • 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

• 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 (even after it became clear that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons)

  • Reagan’s 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’s decision demonstrated that, for all his talk of restoring American power, he took a pragmatic approach to foreign policy

• Reagan’s policy on nuclear weapons generated the most controversy

  • Although he initially followed the examples of presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter by pursuing arms limitation talks with the Soviet Union, Reagan began 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 a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a space-based system that could shoot down incoming Soviet missiles

  • These aggressive policies fed a growing nuclear freeze movement throughout the world

    • Protests in the streets were echoed by resistance in Congress

• In 1982, the House voted 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

  • The Reagan administration’s determination to flout these amendments led to a scandal that almost destroyed Reagan’s presidency

    • They raised money to support the contras by selling American missiles to Iran and funneling the money to Nicaragua and when the scheme was revealed it was hugely embarrassing

• Though the Iran-Contra scandal tarnished the Reagan administration’s image, it did not derail Reagan’s most significant achievement: easing tensions with the Soviet Union

  • In 1985, however, leadership of the Soviet Union was handed to Mikhail Gorbachev, who, while a true believer in socialism, nonetheless realized that the Soviet Union desperately needed to reform itself

    • He began restructuring the Soviet system and also reached out to Reagan in hopes of negotiating an end to the arms race, which was bankrupting the Soviet Union

    • This trust made possible the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, which committed both sides to a sharp reduction in their nuclear arsenal

  • By the late 1980s, the Soviet empire was crumbling, and Reagan successfully combined anticommunist rhetoric with a willingness to negotiate with Soviet leadership

    • But the most significant causes of collapse lay within the Soviet empire itself

    • Within the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s proposed reforms unraveled the decaying Soviet system rather than bringing stability

    • By 1991 the Soviet Union itself had vanished, dissolving into a Commonwealth of Independent States