Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n
- \r\n \t
- American Dream<\/strong> - Belief that anyone regardless of their background can have a happy and fulfilling life. Typically measured by financial and social mobility and home ownership. <\/li>\r\n
- New Right<\/strong> - Broad term to describe right-wing movements in nations over time. In the American context, this term emerges in the 1960s that included the growth of popularity and impact of libertarianism, traditionalism, and classical liberal economics along with socially conservative polices. <\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nSpeaking to Detroit autoworkers in October 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan described what he saw as the American Dream<\/strong> 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.\u201d[footnote]Ronald Reagan, quoted in Steve Neal, \u201cReagan Assails Carter On Auto Layoffs,\u201d Chicago Tribune, October 20, 1980, 5.[\/footnote] The charismatic former governor of California suggested that a once-proud nation 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.\u201d[footnote]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.[\/footnote] In November, Reagan\u2019s vision triumphed.\r\n\r\nReagan rode the wave of a powerful political movement referred to by historians as the New Right<\/strong>. More libertarian in its economics and more politically forceful in its conservative religious principles than the moderate brand of conservatism popular after World War II, the New Right had by the 1980s evolved into the most influential wing of the Republican Party. And it could claim increasing credit for Republican electoral successes. Building on the gradual unraveling of the New Deal political order in the 1960s and 1970s (see Chapter 28), the conservative movement not only enjoyed the guidance of skilled politicians like Reagan but drew tremendous energy from a broad range of grassroots activists. Countless ordinary citizens\u2014newly mobilized Christian conservatives, in particular\u2014helped the Republican Party steer the country 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, and the New Right attracted support from Reagan Democrats, blue-collar voters who had lost faith in the old liberal creed.\r\n\r\nThe 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 directed toward 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.\r\n\r\nIn many ways, however, the rise of the right promised more than it delivered. Battered but intact, the social welfare programs of the New Deal and Great Society (for example, social security, Medicaid, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children) survived the 1980s. Despite Republican vows of fiscal discipline, both the federal government and the national debt ballooned. At the end of the decade, conservative Christians viewed popular culture as more vulgar and hostile to their values than ever before. 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.\u201d[footnote]Robert Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 369.[\/footnote] Liberals and their programs and policies did not disappear, but they increasingly fought battles on terrain chosen by the New Right.\r\n
\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- What pendulum swings between left- and right-wing policies have you seen across US history so far? What causes these shifts? <\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
II. Conservative Ascendance<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Engel v. Vitale<\/em> (1962)<\/strong> - Supreme court case that ruled against mandatory prayer in public schools as a violation of the First Amendment. <\/li>\r\n
- Abington v. Schempp<\/em> (1963)<\/strong> - Supreme Court case that schools could not require students to read the Bible and recite the Lord\u2019s Prayer.\u00a0<\/li>\r\n
- Religious Right<\/strong> - Formed in the 1970s, this was largely comprised of Evangelical Christians in response to the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case that legalized abortion. Became a powerful voting block supporting conservative social issues.<\/li>\r\n
- Phyllis Schlafly (1924 \u2013 2016)<\/strong> - Conservative, anti-feminist American pundit. She campaigned heavily against the proposed Equal Rights Amendment and supported conservative, traditional gender roles.<\/li>\r\n
- Concerned Women for America<\/strong> - Founded in 1978 by Beverely LaHaye, it was a part of the burgeoning new Chrisitan Right movement. They support socially conservative and evangelical Christian viewpoints for women, often in opposition of mainstream feminism. <\/li>\r\n
- Roe v. Wade<\/em> (1973)<\/strong> - Ground shifting Supreme Court case that legalized abortion across the US. Before this, abortion was illegal in 30 states and legal only in certain circumstances in the other 20. Lead to a seismic rift between feminism and anti-feminist movements.<\/li>\r\n
- Moral Majority (1979-1988)<\/strong> - Connected to the Religious Right, this organization was founded in 1979 and lasted until the end of Reagan\u2019s second term in 1988. Their goal was to motivate conservative Christian Americans to become politically active. <\/li>\r\n
- Political Action Committees (PACs)<\/strong> - Organization that raises money for political causes. Could be to support or oppose political candidates or initiatives. <\/li>\r\n
- Neo Conservativism<\/strong> - Movement in the late 20th century in America that supported free-market capitalism, military expansion, and interventionist foreign policy.<\/li>\r\n \r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nThe 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 tapped into a deep vein of elite conservatism in 1955 by announcing in the first issue of National Review<\/em> that his magazine \u201cstands athwart history yelling Stop.\u201d[footnote]William F. Buckley, Jr., \u201cOur Mission Statement,\u201d National Review, November 19, 1955. http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/223549\/our-mission-statement-william-f-buckley-jr<\/a>.[\/footnote] 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<\/em> columnist James Reston wrote that Goldwater had \u201cwrecked his party for a long time to come.\u201d[footnote]James Reston, \u201cWhat Goldwater Lost: Voters Rejected His Candidacy, Conservative Cause and the G.O.P.,\u201d New York Times, November 4, 1964, 23.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nDespite 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 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.\r\n\r\nFormer 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. 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.\u201d[footnote]George Wallace, quoted in William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 377.[\/footnote] 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.\u201d[footnote]James Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945\u20131974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 735\u2013736.[\/footnote] 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.\r\n\r\nChristian conservatives also felt themselves under siege from liberalism. In the early 1960s, Supreme Court decisions prohibiting teacher-led prayer (Engel v. Vitale<\/strong><\/em>) and Bible reading in public schools (Abington v. Schempp<\/strong><\/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 so-called religious right<\/strong>.\r\n\r\nWith 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.[footnote]Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 227\u2013231.[\/footnote] Catholic activist Phyllis Schlafly<\/strong> 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<\/em> Christian book series) founded Concerned Women for America<\/strong>, which linked small groups of local activists opposed to the ERA, abortion, homosexuality, and no-fault divorce.\r\n\r\nActivists 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<\/strong><\/em> ruling outraged many devout Catholics and evangelicals (who had been less universally opposed to the procedure than their Catholic counterparts). Christian author Francis Schaeffer cultivated evangelical opposition to abortion through the 1979 documentary film Whatever Happened to the Human Race?<\/em>, arguing that the \u201cfate of the unborn is the fate of the human race.\u201d[footnote]Francis Schaeffer, quoted in Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (Episode I), Film, directed by Franky Schaeffer, (1979, USA, Franky Schaeffer V Productions). https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tRc0Szq_uWI<\/a>.[\/footnote] With abortion framed in stark, existential terms, many evangelicals felt compelled to combat the procedure through political action.\r\n\r\nGrassroots 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\u2014a Baptist minister and religious broadcaster from Lynchburg, Virginia\u2014founded the Moral Majority<\/strong>, 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<\/strong> (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.\r\n\r\nGrassroots 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<\/em> columnist, defined a neoconservative as a \u201cliberal who has been mugged by reality.\u201d[footnote]Walter Goodman, \u201cIrving Kristol: Patron Saint of the New Right,\u201d New York Times Magazine, December 6, 1981. http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1981\/12\/06\/magazine\/irving-kristol-patron-saint-of-the-new-right.html<\/a>.[\/footnote] Neoconservative journals like Commentary<\/em> and Public Interest<\/em> 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 left the United States vulnerable to the Soviet Union.\r\n\r\nIn 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.\r\n
III. The Conservatism of the Carter Years<\/h1>\r\n\r\nThe 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. With the infighting of the early 1970s behind them, many Democrats hoped the Carter administration would update and expand the New Deal. But Carter won the presidency on a wave of post-Watergate disillusionment with government that did not translate into support for liberal ideas.\r\n\r\nIn its early days, the Carter administration embraced several policies backed by liberals. It pushed an economic stimulus package containing $4 billion for public works, extended food stamp benefits to 2.5 million new recipients, enlarged the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income households, and expanded the Nixon-era Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA).[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 113.[\/footnote] But 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, most notably in response to the administration\u2019s proposal for a federal office of consumer protection.\r\n\r\nEvents outside Carter\u2019s control certainly helped discredit liberalism, but the president\u2019s own temperamental and philosophical conservatism hamstrung the administration and pushed national politics further to the right. In his 1978 State of the Union address, Carter lectured Americans that \u201cgovernment cannot solve our problems . . . it cannot eliminate poverty, or provide a bountiful economy, or reduce inflation, or save our cities, or cure illiteracy, or provide energy.\u201d[footnote]Jimmy Carter, 1978 State of the Union Address, January 19, 1978, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, https:\/\/www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov\/the-carters\/selected-speeches\/jimmy-carter-state-of-the-union-address-1978<\/a>.[\/footnote] The statement neatly captured the ideological transformation of the country. Rather than leading a resurgence of American liberalism, Carter became, as one historian put it, \u201cthe first president to govern in a post\u2013New Deal framework.\u201d[footnote]Jefferson Cowie, Stayin\u2019 Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 12.[\/footnote] Organized labor felt abandoned by Carter, who remained cool to several of their highest legislative priorities. The president offered tepid support for a national health insurance proposal and declined to lobby aggressively for a package of modest labor law reforms. The business community rallied to defeat the latter measure, in what AFL-CIO chief George Meany described as \u201can attack by every anti-union group in America to kill the labor movement.\u201d[footnote]George Meany, quoted in ibid., 293.[\/footnote] 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. The bill aimed not only to guarantee a job to every American but also to reunite the interracial, working-class Democratic coalition that had been fractured by deindustrialization and affirmative action.[footnote]Ibid., 268.[\/footnote] But Carter\u2019s 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.\r\n\r\nCarter 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. The rules only strengthened a policy instituted by the Nixon administration; however, the religious right accused Carter of singling out Christian institutions. Republican activist Richard Viguerie described the IRS controversy as the \u201cspark that ignited the religious right\u2019s involvement in real politics.\u201d[footnote]Richard Viguerie, quoted in Joseph Crespino, \u201cCivil Rights and the Religious Right,\u201d in Bruce J. Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 91.[\/footnote] Race sat just below the surface of the IRS fight. After all, many of the schools had been founded to circumvent court-ordered desegregation. But the IRS ruling allowed the New Right to rain down fire on big government interference while downplaying the practice of segregation at the heart of the case.\r\n\r\nWhile the IRS controversy flared, economic crises multiplied. Unemployment reached 7.8 percent in May 1980, up from 6 percent at the start of Carter\u2019s first term.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 148.[\/footnote] Inflation (the rate at which the cost of goods and services increases) jumped from 6 percent in 1978 to a staggering 20 percent by the winter of 1980.[footnote]Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 231.[\/footnote] In another bad omen, the iconic Chrysler Corporation appeared close to bankruptcy. The administration responded to these challenges in fundamentally conservative ways. First, Carter proposed a tax cut for the upper middle class, which Congress passed in 1978. Second, the White House embraced a longtime goal of the conservative movement by deregulating the airline and trucking industries in 1978 and 1980, respectively. Third, Carter proposed balancing the federal budget\u2014much to the dismay of liberals, who would have preferred that he use deficit spending to finance a new<\/em> New Deal. Finally, to halt inflation, Carter\u2019s appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, raised interest rates and tightened the money supply\u2014policies designed to reduce inflation in the long run but which increased unemployment in the short run. Liberalism was on the run.\r\n\r\nThe decade\u2019s second \u201cenergy crisis,\u201d which witnessed another spike in oil prices and oil shortages across the country, brought out the southern Baptist moralist in Carter. On July 15, 1979, the president delivered a nationally televised speech on energy policy in which he attributed the country\u2019s economic woes to a \u201ccrisis of confidence.\u201d Carter lamented that \u201ctoo many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.\u201d[footnote]Jimmy Carter, quoted in Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 453.[\/footnote] The country initially responded favorably to the push for energy conservation, yet Carter\u2019s emphasis on discipline and sacrifice and his spiritual diagnosis for economic hardship sidestepped deeper questions of large-scale economic change and downplayed the harsh toll inflation had taken on regular Americans.\r\n
\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- How did President Carter\u2019s policies highlight the transitioning relationship between the government and the economy since the Great Depression?<\/li>\r\n
- How did President Carter\u2019s handling of economic issues alienate both Democrats and Republicans? <\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
IV. The Election of 1980<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Iranian Hostage Crises (1979-81)<\/strong> - Diplomatic stand-off that lasted 444 days. Fifty-two American citizens were taken hostage from the embassy in Tehran in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. They were not released until Reagan took office. The event severely damaged Carter\u2019s reelection campaign and Iran-USA relations. <\/li>\r\n
- \u201cWelfare Queen\u201d<\/strong> - Derogatory, often racist, term used to refer to people perceived to live off the welfare system. Many times used to refer to Black single mothers, it exploited racist perceptions of people living luxurious lives on welfare dollars to support cutting social benefit budgets. <\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nThese domestic challenges, 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.\u201d[footnote]William Winpisinger, quoted in Cowie, Stayin\u2019 Alive, 261.[\/footnote] Angered by the White House\u2019s refusal to back national health insurance, 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.\r\n\r\nCarter\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 52 American hostages in Iran discredited Carter\u2019s foreign policy in the eyes of many Americans.\r\n\r\nThe incumbent fared no better on domestic affairs. Unemployment remained at nearly 8 percent.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 148.[\/footnote] Meanwhile the Federal Reserve\u2019s anti-inflation measures pushed interest rates to an unheard-of 18.5 percent.[footnote]Ibid. [\/footnote] 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.\u201d[footnote]Ibid. [\/footnote]\r\n\r\nSocial 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<\/em> magazine in 1976, telling the reporter he had \u201ccommitted adultery in my heart many times.\u201d[footnote]Jimmy Carter, quoted in \u201cCarter Tells of \u2018Adultery in His Heart,\u2019\u201d Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1976, B6. [\/footnote] Although Reagan was only a nominal Christian and rarely attended church, the religious right embraced him. Reverend 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.\u201d[footnote]Crespino, \u201cCivil Rights and the Religious Right,\u201d 103.[\/footnote] Early in the primary season, Reagan condemned the policy during a speech at South Carolina\u2019s Bob Jones University, which had recently sued the IRS after the school\u2019s ban on interracial dating led to the loss of its tax-exempt status.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_302\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"599\"]
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/29.2-229x300.jpg\")
Jerry Falwell, a wildly popular TV evangelist, founded the Moral Majority in the late 1970s. Decrying the demise of the nation\u2019s morality, the organization gained a massive following and helped to cement the status of the New Christian Right in American politics. Wikimedia.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nReagan\u2019s campaign appealed subtly but unmistakably to the racial hostilities of white voters. The candidate held his first post\u2013nominating convention 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 states\u2019 rights, 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 a \u201cwelfare queen<\/strong>\u201d in Chicago who drove a Cadillac while defrauding the government or a \u201cstrapping young buck\u201d purchasing T-bone steaks with food stamps.[footnote]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.[\/footnote] 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.\r\n\r\nWith the wind at his back on almost every issue, Reagan only needed 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.[footnote]Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974\u20132008 (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 124.[\/footnote] 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.)[footnote]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.[\/footnote] Despite capturing only a slim majority of the overall popular vote, Reagan scored a decisive 489\u201349 victory in the Electoral College.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 150.[\/footnote] 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 GOP picked up thirty-three House seats, narrowing the Democratic advantage in the lower chamber.[footnote]Ibid.[\/footnote] The New Right had arrived in Washington, D.C.\r\n\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- What is the impact of America\u2019s four-year election cycle have on foreign policy? <\/li>\r\n
- What impact do international events have on American election cycles? <\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
V. The New Right in Power<\/h1>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_303\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"743\"]
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/29.3-300x237.jpg\")
Ronald Reagan secured the presidency by appealing to the growing conservatism of much of the country. Here, Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy Reagan, wave from a limousine during the inaugural parade in Washington, D.C., in 1981. Wikimedia.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Supply-Side Economics<\/strong> - Macroeconomic theory that growth is best achieved by fostering production of goods and services. Government can achieve this through deregulation, tax cuts, and free trade. <\/li>\r\n
- Trickle-Down Economics<\/strong> - Theory that supports giving tax cuts and other financial incentives to the wealthiest individuals and biggest businesses will in turn lead to more investment and job creation. <\/li>\r\n
- Air Traffic Controller Strike (1981)<\/strong> - Twelve thousand workers went on strike after failing to reach agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration. Reagan responded by firing them\u2014as they were federal employees\u2014and banned them from future employment with the federal government. Seen as a pivotal moment where the government took a hard stance against labor. <\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\nIn his first inaugural address Reagan proclaimed that \u201cgovernment is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem.\u201d[footnote]Ronald Reagan, quoted in Jacobs and Zelizer, Conservatives in Power, 20.[\/footnote] 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<\/strong> 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.\u201d[footnote]Jack Kemp, quoted in Jacobs and Zelizer, Conservatives in Power, 21.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"914\"]
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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 United States. Wikimedia.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe 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.[footnote]Wilentz, Age of Reagan, 121.[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Jacobs and Zelizer, Conservatives in Power, 25\u201326. [\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Ronald Reagan, quoted in Neal, \u201cReagan Assails Carter,\u201d 5[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Stein, Pivotal Decade, 267.[\/footnote] 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.\r\n\r\nThe 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.[footnote]Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 474. [\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 159.[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 67.[\/footnote] The Fed\u2019s action increased the cost of borrowing money and stifled economic activity.\r\n\r\nAs 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.[footnote]Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 476.[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Ibid., 474.[\/footnote] 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.\u201d[footnote]Margaret Bush Wilson, quoted in Troy, Morning in America, 93.[\/footnote] Reagan also received 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 Tip O\u2019Neill in 1982 on a bill that restored $98 billion of the previous year\u2019s tax cuts.[footnote]Ibid., 210.[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Ibid., 110[\/footnote] The New Right appeared to be in trouble.\r\n\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- How do Reagan\u2019s policies reflect a shift from pre-WWII to post-WWII economic goals and priorities of the federal government? <\/li>\r\n
- In your opinion, what is the best way to stimulate and grow an economy? Focus on cutting costs or increasing demand? <\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
VI. Morning in America<\/h1>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_305\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"927\"]
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President Ronald Reagan, a master of the photo op, 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).[\/caption]\r\n\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Democratic Leadership Council (1985-2011)<\/strong> - Organization that pressured the Democratic party to move right in order to win back white middle-class voters. <\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\nReagan 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.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 163\u2013164.[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Troy, Morning in America, 208.[\/footnote] Unemployment dropped to 7.5 percent in 1984.[footnote]Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 477.[\/footnote] Meanwhile, the \u201charsh medicine\u201d of high interest rates helped reduce inflation to 3.5 percent.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 162. Many people used the term harsh medicine to describe Volcker\u2019s action on interest rates; see Art Pine, \u201cLetting Harsh Medicine Work,\u201d Washington Post, October 14, 1979, G1.[\/footnote] While campaigning for reelection in 1984, Reagan pointed to the improving economy as evidence that it was \u201cmorning again in America.\u201d[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 189.[\/footnote] His personal popularity soared. Most conservatives ignored the debt increase and tax hikes of the previous two years and rallied around the president.\r\n\r\nThe 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.[footnote]Ibid.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nMondale\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<\/strong> (DLC) as a vehicle for distancing the party from organized labor and Keynesian economics while cultivating the business community. Jesse 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.[footnote]Ibid., 190\u2013191. [\/footnote] The formation of the DLC illustrated the degree to which to the New Right had transformed American politics: New Democrats looked a lot like old Republicans.\r\n\r\nReagan 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, 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.[footnote]Troy, Morning in America, 210; Patterson, Restless Giant, 165.[\/footnote] 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.\r\n\r\nOne of Reagan\u2019s most far-reaching victories occurred through judicial appointments. He named 368 district and federal appeals court judges during his two terms.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 173\u2013174.[\/footnote] 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, 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 limits. 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<\/em> decision. After acrimonious confirmation hearings, the Senate rejected Bork\u2019s nomination by a vote of 58\u201342.[footnote]Ibid., 171.[\/footnote]\r\n
\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- In the 1980s, how are both major political parties shifting their goals and key demographics? <\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
VII. African American Life in Reagan's America<\/h1>\r\n\r\nAfrican Americans 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.[footnote]1988 Democratic Primaries, CQ Voting and Elections Collection, database accessed June 30, 2015. [\/footnote]\r\n\r\n \r\n
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_306\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"565\"]![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/29.6-197x300.jpg\")
Jesse Jackson, pictured here in 1983, was only the second African American to mount a national campaign for the presidency. His work as a civil rights activist garnered him a significant following in the African American community but never enough to secure the Democratic nomination. Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nThe 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<\/em> and achieved box office success with movies like 48 Hours<\/em> and Beverly Hills Cop<\/em>. In 1982, pop singer Michael Jackson released Thriller<\/em>, the best-selling 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 doctor and lawyer raising their four children drew the highest ratings on television for most of the decade. The popularity of The Cosby Show<\/em> revealed how class informed perceptions of race in the 1980s. Cosby\u2019s fictional TV family represented a 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 the poor and working-class 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.[footnote]The State of Black America, 1990 (New York: National Urban League, 1990), 34.[\/footnote] Black unemployment remained double that of whites throughout the decade.[footnote]Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Scribner, 1992), 102.[\/footnote] By 1990, the median income for Black families was $21,423, 42 percent below the median income for white households.[footnote]Ibid., 94.[\/footnote] The Reagan administration failed to address such disparities and in many ways intensified them.<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\nNew 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 Manufacturers\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.\r\n\r\nAmericans 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 that 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.\u201d[footnote]Troy, Morning in America, 91[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]American Social History Project, Who Built America? Vol. Two: Since 1877 (New York: Bedford St. Martin\u2019s, 2000), 723.[\/footnote] Although African Americans were most often the 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, Bernard 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.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 172\u2013173.[\/footnote] 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.\r\n\r\n\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- What are the impacts of the widening economic inequality within the Black population? How does this in turn inform the ways that white people make choices about race relations? <\/li>\r\n \r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
VIII. Bad Times and Good Times<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Deindustrialization<\/strong> - Process in the US during the 1980s and 90s where manufacturing jobs were moved overseas. Largely seen with automobile manufactures, towns like Detroit that had housed massive manufacturing facilities and employed large numbers of people suddenly found themselves in the new Rust Belt. <\/li>\r\n
- Black Monday<\/strong> - On October 19, 1987, the stock market lost 13% of its value and investors lost billions of dollars. Reasons for this drop include weaking of the value of the dollar, rising interest rates, overvaluation of stocks, and Reagan\u2019s deregulation. <\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nWorking- 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. The imbalance between American imports and exports grew from $36 billion in 1980 to $170 billion in 1987.[footnote]Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 487.[\/footnote] Foreign competition battered the already anemic manufacturing sector. The appeal of government bonds likewise drew investment away from American industry.\r\n\r\nContinuing 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 and \u201cMy Hometown,\u201d in which the narrator laments that his \u201cforeman says these jobs are going, boys \/ and they ain\u2019t coming back.\u201d[footnote]Bruce Springsteen, \u201cMy Hometown,\u201d Born in the USA (Columbia Records: New York, 1984). [\/footnote] Competition from Japanese carmakers spurred a \u201cBuy American\u201d campaign. Meanwhile, a \u201cfarm crisis\u201d 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\u2019s football stadium designed to raise money for struggling farmers.\r\n\r\nAt 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<\/strong>, the market plunged eight hundred points, erasing 13 percent of its value. Investors lost more than $500 billion.[footnote]Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 489.[\/footnote] An additional financial crisis loomed in the savings and loan (S&L) industry, and 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. The bill also allowed 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 S&Ls out at an eventual cost of $132 billion.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 175.[\/footnote]\r\n
\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Do you think we are still facing the consequences of deindustrialization, or has our economy shifted in a healthy way? <\/li>\r\n
- During deindustrialization and stock market crashes, who is left behind? Who gets negatively impacted from these systematic shocks? <\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
IX. Culture Wars of the 1980s<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome)<\/strong> - Disease that begins with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and can lead to AIDS. HIV is primarily spread through unprotected sex, it was first reported in the US in 1981 in a gay newspaper. The gay community was largely stigmatized by this disease, but it is not restricted to same-sex relations. <\/li>\r\n \r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nPopular 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<\/em> and the Rambo<\/em> series, starring Sylvester Stallone as a Vietnam War veteran haunted by his country\u2019s failure to pursue victory in Southeast Asia. In contrast, director Oliver Stone offered searing condemnations of the war in Platoon<\/em> and Born on the Fourth of July<\/em>. Television shows like Dynasty<\/em> and Dallas<\/em> 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 Wall Street<\/em> and novels like Bret Easton Ellis\u2019s Less Than Zero<\/em> skewered the excesses of the rich.\r\n\r\nThe most significant aspect of much popular culture in the 1980s, however, was its lack of politics altogether. Steven Spielberg\u2019s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial<\/em> and his Indiana Jones adventure trilogy topped the box office. Cinematic escapism 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 channels 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.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_307\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"828\"]
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/29.7-300x225.jpg\")
The Apple II was the smallest and sleekest personal computer model yet introduced. Indeed, it revolutionized both the substance and design of personal computers. Wikimedia.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe Apple II computer, introduced in 1977, was the first successful mass-produced microcomputer meant for home use. 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.[footnote]Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women\u2019s Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin, 2000), 337.[\/footnote] That same year, New York representative Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman to run on a major party\u2019s presidential ticket when Democratic candidate Walter Mondale named her his running mate. Yet the triumph of the right 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 did the same with pro-life orthodoxy 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 U.S. Constitution that defined life as beginning at conception. Both efforts failed.[footnote]Self, All in the Family, 376\u2013377.[\/footnote] Reagan, more interested in economic issues than social ones, provided only lukewarm support for the anti-abortion movement. He further 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 almost every state had its 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.\r\n\r\nThe emergence of a deadly new illness, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome<\/strong> (AIDS<\/strong>), 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.\u201d[footnote]Ibid., 387\u2013388. [\/footnote] 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.\u201d[footnote]Ibid., 384. [\/footnote]\r\n\r\nHomosexuals 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.[footnote]Ibid., 389. [\/footnote] 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.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_308\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"667\"]![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/29.8-198x300.jpg\")
The AIDS epidemic hit gay and African American communities particularly hard in the 1980s, prompting widespread social stigmatization, but also prompting awareness campaigns, such as this poster featuring singer Patti LaBelle. Wikimedia.[\/caption]\r\nX. The New Right Abroad<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START)<\/strong> - Series of negotiations with the USSR and later Russia aimed at reducing the number of nuclear weapons. START I in 1991 and START II in 1993 continued to shrink the number of weapons. <\/li>\r\n
- Strategic Defense Initiative<\/strong> - Plan proposed by Reagan in 1983. Nicknamed \u201cStar Wars\u201d after the movie franchise, the goal of the program was to build a space-based defense system capable of intercepting and destroying Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. <\/li>\r\n
- Iran-Contra Affair (1981-1986)<\/strong> - Once the public was aware, this was a highly controversial issue that raised huge criticisms of Reagan\u2019s administration, though he himself was able to deflect blame and direct responsibility. The Affair was a program that bypassed Congress on two fronts. First, Reagan sold weapons to Iran\u2014not permissible since the Iranian Revolution\u2014to perpetuate the Iran-Iraq War. The funds never hit American coffers, but instead went to support the Contras, and anti-communist group in Nicaragua that Congress had prohibited any continued aid. <\/li>\r\n
- Perestroika<\/strong> - One of Gorbachev\u2019s policies in the 1980s to restore and rebuild the USSR, it means \u201crestructuring.\u201d It allowed for more independent actions from separate ministries and allowed for more flexibility. The goal was to perpetuate socialism, though often explained as an initial cause of the breakdown of the USSR. <\/li>\r\n
- Glasnost<\/strong> - Meaning \u201copenness,\u201d this was a partner policy to Perestroika under Gorbachev. The goal was to increase openness and transparency within the Soviet government and allow citizens to publicly discuss issues with the Soviet system for the first time. <\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nThe conservative movement gained ground on gender and sexual politics, but it captured the entire battlefield on American foreign policy in the 1980s, at least for a time. Ronald Reagan entered office a committed Cold Warrior. He held the Soviet Union in contempt, denouncing it in a 1983 speech as an \u201cevil empire.\u201d[footnote]Wilentz, Age of Reagan, 163.[\/footnote] And he never doubted that the Soviet Union would end up \u201con the ash heap of history,\u201d as he said in a 1982 speech to the British Parliament.[footnote]Lou Cannon, \u201cPresident Calls for \u2018Crusade\u2019: Reagan Proposes Plan to Counter Soviet Challenge,\u201d Washington Post, June 9, 1982, A1.[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Conservative newspaper columnist Charles Krauthammer coined the phrase. See Wilentz, Age of Reagan, 157.[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 205. [\/footnote] 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.\r\n\r\nReagan\u2019s election came at a time when many Americans feared their country was in an 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 and warned, in 1976, that \u201cthis nation has become Number Two in a world where it is dangerous\u2014if not fatal\u2014to be second best.[footnote]Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974\u20131980 (New York: Norton, 2010), 166\u2013167.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_309\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"787\"]
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/29.9-300x205.jpg\")
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, pictured here at Camp David in December 1984, led two of the world\u2019s most powerful countries and formed an alliance that benefited both throughout their tenures in office. Wikimedia.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe 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 U.S. 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.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_310\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"767\"]![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/29.10-300x230.jpg\")
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.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nGrenada 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).[footnote]Ronald Reagan, \u201cAddress to the Nation on United States Policy in Central America,\u201d May 9, 1984. http:\/\/www.reagan.utexas.edu\/archives\/speeches\/1984\/50984h.htm<\/a>.[\/footnote] 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.\r\n\r\nThe 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.\r\n\r\nThough 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<\/strong> (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 a Strategic Defense Initiative<\/strong> (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 do this,\u201d secretary of state George Shultz told aides.[footnote]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.[\/footnote] 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.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_311\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"871\"]![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/29.11-300x186.jpg\")
President Reagan proposed new space- and ground-based defense systems to protect the United States from nuclear missiles in his 1984 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Scientists argued that it was technologically unfeasible, and it was lambasted in the media as the \u201cStar Wars\u201d program. Wikimedia.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nProtests 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.\u201d[footnote]Ronald Reagan, \u201cRemarks at the Annual Dinner of the Conservative Political Action Conference,\u201d March 1, 1985. https:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/documents\/remarks-the-annual-dinner-the-conservative-political-action-conference<\/a>. [\/footnote]\u00a0The Reagan administration\u2019s determination to flout these amendments led to a scandal that almost destroyed Reagan\u2019s presidency. Robert MacFarlane, 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<\/strong> 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.\r\n\r\nThough 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 instituted a program of perestroika<\/strong><\/em>, which referred to the restructuring of the Soviet system, and of glasnost<\/strong><\/em>, which meant greater transparency in government. 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 U.S.-Soviet relations. This trust made possible the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, which committed both sides to a sharp reduction in their nuclear arsenal.\r\n\r\nBy 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.[footnote]Lou Cannon, \u201cReagan Challenges Soviets to Dismantle Berlin Wall: Aides Disappointed at Crowd\u2019s Lukewarm Reception,\u201d Washington Post, June 13, 1987, A1.[\/footnote] 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. 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 a Commonwealth of Independent States.\r\n\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- How does Reagan navigate geopolitical goals in S. America, the Middle East, and Europe? Does he seem to take a similar or different approach? <\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
XI. Conclusion<\/h1>\r\nReagan left office in 1988 with the Cold War waning and the economy booming. Unemployment had dipped to 5 percent by 1988.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 163.[\/footnote] Between 1981 and 1986, gas prices fell from $1.38 per gallon to 95\u00a2.[footnote]Ibid. [\/footnote] The stock market recovered from the crash, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average\u2014which stood at 950 in 1981\u2014reached 2,239 by the end of Reagan\u2019s second term.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant.[\/footnote] Yet the economic gains of the decade were unequally distributed. The top fifth of households enjoyed rising incomes while the rest stagnated or declined.[footnote]Jacobs and Zelizer, Conservatives in Power, 32.[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 186.[\/footnote] Between 1985 and 1989 the number of Americans living in poverty remained steady at thirty-three million.[footnote]Ibid., 164.[\/footnote] Real per capita money income grew at only 2 percent per year, a rate roughly equal to the Carter years.[footnote]Ibid., 166.[\/footnote] The American economy saw more jobs created than lost during the 1980s, but half of the jobs eliminated were in high-paying industries.[footnote]Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 488.[\/footnote] 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.\r\n\r\nThe 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.[footnote]Jacobs and Zelizer, Conservatives in Power, 31.[\/footnote] Between 1980 and 1989 the national debt rose from $914 billion to $2.7 trillion.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 158.[\/footnote] 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<\/em> 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.\r\n\r\nYet 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.","rendered":"
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/29.1-300x150.jpg\")
Activist Phyllis Schlafly campaigns against the Equal Rights Amendment in 1977. Library of Congress<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n I. Introduction<\/h1>\n
\n\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\n<\/header>\n
\n- \n
- American Dream<\/strong> – Belief that anyone regardless of their background can have a happy and fulfilling life. Typically measured by financial and social mobility and home ownership. <\/li>\n
- New Right<\/strong> – Broad term to describe right-wing movements in nations over time. In the American context, this term emerges in the 1960s that included the growth of popularity and impact of libertarianism, traditionalism, and classical liberal economics along with socially conservative polices. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Speaking to Detroit autoworkers in October 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan described what he saw as the American Dream<\/strong> 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.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a> The charismatic former governor of California suggested that a once-proud nation 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.\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/a> In November, Reagan\u2019s vision triumphed.<\/p>\n
Reagan rode the wave of a powerful political movement referred to by historians as the New Right<\/strong>. More libertarian in its economics and more politically forceful in its conservative religious principles than the moderate brand of conservatism popular after World War II, the New Right had by the 1980s evolved into the most influential wing of the Republican Party. And it could claim increasing credit for Republican electoral successes. Building on the gradual unraveling of the New Deal political order in the 1960s and 1970s (see Chapter 28), the conservative movement not only enjoyed the guidance of skilled politicians like Reagan but drew tremendous energy from a broad range of grassroots activists. Countless ordinary citizens\u2014newly mobilized Christian conservatives, in particular\u2014helped the Republican Party steer the country 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, and the New Right attracted support from Reagan Democrats, blue-collar voters who had lost faith in the old liberal creed.<\/p>\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 directed toward 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
In many ways, however, the rise of the right promised more than it delivered. Battered but intact, the social welfare programs of the New Deal and Great Society (for example, social security, Medicaid, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children) survived the 1980s. Despite Republican vows of fiscal discipline, both the federal government and the national debt ballooned. At the end of the decade, conservative Christians viewed popular culture as more vulgar and hostile to their values than ever before. 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.\u201d[3]<\/sup><\/a> Liberals and their programs and policies did not disappear, but they increasingly fought battles on terrain chosen by the New Right.<\/p>\n
\n\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\n<\/header>\n
\n- \n
- What pendulum swings between left- and right-wing policies have you seen across US history so far? What causes these shifts? <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
II. Conservative Ascendance<\/h1>\n
\n\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\n<\/header>\n
\n- \n
- Engel v. Vitale<\/em> (1962)<\/strong> – Supreme court case that ruled against mandatory prayer in public schools as a violation of the First Amendment. <\/li>\n
- Abington v. Schempp<\/em> (1963)<\/strong> – Supreme Court case that schools could not require students to read the Bible and recite the Lord\u2019s Prayer.\u00a0<\/li>\n
- Religious Right<\/strong> – Formed in the 1970s, this was largely comprised of Evangelical Christians in response to the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case that legalized abortion. Became a powerful voting block supporting conservative social issues.<\/li>\n
- Phyllis Schlafly (1924 \u2013 2016)<\/strong> – Conservative, anti-feminist American pundit. She campaigned heavily against the proposed Equal Rights Amendment and supported conservative, traditional gender roles.<\/li>\n
- Concerned Women for America<\/strong> – Founded in 1978 by Beverely LaHaye, it was a part of the burgeoning new Chrisitan Right movement. They support socially conservative and evangelical Christian viewpoints for women, often in opposition of mainstream feminism. <\/li>\n
- Roe v. Wade<\/em> (1973)<\/strong> – Ground shifting Supreme Court case that legalized abortion across the US. Before this, abortion was illegal in 30 states and legal only in certain circumstances in the other 20. Lead to a seismic rift between feminism and anti-feminist movements.<\/li>\n
- Moral Majority (1979-1988)<\/strong> – Connected to the Religious Right, this organization was founded in 1979 and lasted until the end of Reagan\u2019s second term in 1988. Their goal was to motivate conservative Christian Americans to become politically active. <\/li>\n
- Political Action Committees (PACs)<\/strong> – Organization that raises money for political causes. Could be to support or oppose political candidates or initiatives. <\/li>\n
- Neo Conservativism<\/strong> – Movement in the late 20th century in America that supported free-market capitalism, military expansion, and interventionist foreign policy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\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 tapped into a deep vein of elite conservatism in 1955 by announcing in the first issue of National Review<\/em> that his magazine \u201cstands athwart history yelling Stop.\u201d[4]<\/sup><\/a> 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.
- Abington v. Schempp<\/em> (1963)<\/strong> – Supreme Court case that schools could not require students to read the Bible and recite the Lord\u2019s Prayer.\u00a0<\/li>\n
- Engel v. Vitale<\/em> (1962)<\/strong> – Supreme court case that ruled against mandatory prayer in public schools as a violation of the First Amendment. <\/li>\n
- New Right<\/strong> – Broad term to describe right-wing movements in nations over time. In the American context, this term emerges in the 1960s that included the growth of popularity and impact of libertarianism, traditionalism, and classical liberal economics along with socially conservative polices. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
- American Dream<\/strong> – Belief that anyone regardless of their background can have a happy and fulfilling life. Typically measured by financial and social mobility and home ownership. <\/li>\n
- Strategic Defense Initiative<\/strong> - Plan proposed by Reagan in 1983. Nicknamed \u201cStar Wars\u201d after the movie franchise, the goal of the program was to build a space-based defense system capable of intercepting and destroying Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. <\/li>\r\n
- Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START)<\/strong> - Series of negotiations with the USSR and later Russia aimed at reducing the number of nuclear weapons. START I in 1991 and START II in 1993 continued to shrink the number of weapons. <\/li>\r\n
- AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome)<\/strong> - Disease that begins with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and can lead to AIDS. HIV is primarily spread through unprotected sex, it was first reported in the US in 1981 in a gay newspaper. The gay community was largely stigmatized by this disease, but it is not restricted to same-sex relations. <\/li>\r\n \r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nPopular 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<\/em> and the Rambo<\/em> series, starring Sylvester Stallone as a Vietnam War veteran haunted by his country\u2019s failure to pursue victory in Southeast Asia. In contrast, director Oliver Stone offered searing condemnations of the war in Platoon<\/em> and Born on the Fourth of July<\/em>. Television shows like Dynasty<\/em> and Dallas<\/em> 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 Wall Street<\/em> and novels like Bret Easton Ellis\u2019s Less Than Zero<\/em> skewered the excesses of the rich.\r\n\r\nThe most significant aspect of much popular culture in the 1980s, however, was its lack of politics altogether. Steven Spielberg\u2019s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial<\/em> and his Indiana Jones adventure trilogy topped the box office. Cinematic escapism 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 channels 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.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_307\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"828\"]
- Black Monday<\/strong> - On October 19, 1987, the stock market lost 13% of its value and investors lost billions of dollars. Reasons for this drop include weaking of the value of the dollar, rising interest rates, overvaluation of stocks, and Reagan\u2019s deregulation. <\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nWorking- 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. The imbalance between American imports and exports grew from $36 billion in 1980 to $170 billion in 1987.[footnote]Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 487.[\/footnote] Foreign competition battered the already anemic manufacturing sector. The appeal of government bonds likewise drew investment away from American industry.\r\n\r\nContinuing 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 and \u201cMy Hometown,\u201d in which the narrator laments that his \u201cforeman says these jobs are going, boys \/ and they ain\u2019t coming back.\u201d[footnote]Bruce Springsteen, \u201cMy Hometown,\u201d Born in the USA (Columbia Records: New York, 1984). [\/footnote] Competition from Japanese carmakers spurred a \u201cBuy American\u201d campaign. Meanwhile, a \u201cfarm crisis\u201d 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\u2019s football stadium designed to raise money for struggling farmers.\r\n\r\nAt 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<\/strong>, the market plunged eight hundred points, erasing 13 percent of its value. Investors lost more than $500 billion.[footnote]Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 489.[\/footnote] An additional financial crisis loomed in the savings and loan (S&L) industry, and 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. The bill also allowed 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 S&Ls out at an eventual cost of $132 billion.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 175.[\/footnote]\r\n
- Deindustrialization<\/strong> - Process in the US during the 1980s and 90s where manufacturing jobs were moved overseas. Largely seen with automobile manufactures, towns like Detroit that had housed massive manufacturing facilities and employed large numbers of people suddenly found themselves in the new Rust Belt. <\/li>\r\n
- What are the impacts of the widening economic inequality within the Black population? How does this in turn inform the ways that white people make choices about race relations? <\/li>\r\n \r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
- In the 1980s, how are both major political parties shifting their goals and key demographics? <\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
- Democratic Leadership Council (1985-2011)<\/strong> - Organization that pressured the Democratic party to move right in order to win back white middle-class voters. <\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\nReagan 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.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 163\u2013164.[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Troy, Morning in America, 208.[\/footnote] Unemployment dropped to 7.5 percent in 1984.[footnote]Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 477.[\/footnote] Meanwhile, the \u201charsh medicine\u201d of high interest rates helped reduce inflation to 3.5 percent.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 162. Many people used the term harsh medicine to describe Volcker\u2019s action on interest rates; see Art Pine, \u201cLetting Harsh Medicine Work,\u201d Washington Post, October 14, 1979, G1.[\/footnote] While campaigning for reelection in 1984, Reagan pointed to the improving economy as evidence that it was \u201cmorning again in America.\u201d[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 189.[\/footnote] His personal popularity soared. Most conservatives ignored the debt increase and tax hikes of the previous two years and rallied around the president.\r\n\r\nThe 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.[footnote]Ibid.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nMondale\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<\/strong> (DLC) as a vehicle for distancing the party from organized labor and Keynesian economics while cultivating the business community. Jesse 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.[footnote]Ibid., 190\u2013191. [\/footnote] The formation of the DLC illustrated the degree to which to the New Right had transformed American politics: New Democrats looked a lot like old Republicans.\r\n\r\nReagan 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, 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.[footnote]Troy, Morning in America, 210; Patterson, Restless Giant, 165.[\/footnote] 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.\r\n\r\nOne of Reagan\u2019s most far-reaching victories occurred through judicial appointments. He named 368 district and federal appeals court judges during his two terms.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 173\u2013174.[\/footnote] 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, 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 limits. 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<\/em> decision. After acrimonious confirmation hearings, the Senate rejected Bork\u2019s nomination by a vote of 58\u201342.[footnote]Ibid., 171.[\/footnote]\r\n
- Trickle-Down Economics<\/strong> - Theory that supports giving tax cuts and other financial incentives to the wealthiest individuals and biggest businesses will in turn lead to more investment and job creation. <\/li>\r\n
- Supply-Side Economics<\/strong> - Macroeconomic theory that growth is best achieved by fostering production of goods and services. Government can achieve this through deregulation, tax cuts, and free trade. <\/li>\r\n
- \u201cWelfare Queen\u201d<\/strong> - Derogatory, often racist, term used to refer to people perceived to live off the welfare system. Many times used to refer to Black single mothers, it exploited racist perceptions of people living luxurious lives on welfare dollars to support cutting social benefit budgets. <\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nThese domestic challenges, 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.\u201d[footnote]William Winpisinger, quoted in Cowie, Stayin\u2019 Alive, 261.[\/footnote] Angered by the White House\u2019s refusal to back national health insurance, 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.\r\n\r\nCarter\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 52 American hostages in Iran discredited Carter\u2019s foreign policy in the eyes of many Americans.\r\n\r\nThe incumbent fared no better on domestic affairs. Unemployment remained at nearly 8 percent.[footnote]Patterson, Restless Giant, 148.[\/footnote] Meanwhile the Federal Reserve\u2019s anti-inflation measures pushed interest rates to an unheard-of 18.5 percent.[footnote]Ibid. [\/footnote] 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.\u201d[footnote]Ibid. [\/footnote]\r\n\r\nSocial 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<\/em> magazine in 1976, telling the reporter he had \u201ccommitted adultery in my heart many times.\u201d[footnote]Jimmy Carter, quoted in \u201cCarter Tells of \u2018Adultery in His Heart,\u2019\u201d Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1976, B6. [\/footnote] Although Reagan was only a nominal Christian and rarely attended church, the religious right embraced him. Reverend 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.\u201d[footnote]Crespino, \u201cCivil Rights and the Religious Right,\u201d 103.[\/footnote] Early in the primary season, Reagan condemned the policy during a speech at South Carolina\u2019s Bob Jones University, which had recently sued the IRS after the school\u2019s ban on interracial dating led to the loss of its tax-exempt status.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_302\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"599\"]
- Iranian Hostage Crises (1979-81)<\/strong> - Diplomatic stand-off that lasted 444 days. Fifty-two American citizens were taken hostage from the embassy in Tehran in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. They were not released until Reagan took office. The event severely damaged Carter\u2019s reelection campaign and Iran-USA relations. <\/li>\r\n
- Abington v. Schempp<\/em> (1963)<\/strong> - Supreme Court case that schools could not require students to read the Bible and recite the Lord\u2019s Prayer.\u00a0<\/li>\r\n
- Engel v. Vitale<\/em> (1962)<\/strong> - Supreme court case that ruled against mandatory prayer in public schools as a violation of the First Amendment. <\/li>\r\n
- New Right<\/strong> - Broad term to describe right-wing movements in nations over time. In the American context, this term emerges in the 1960s that included the growth of popularity and impact of libertarianism, traditionalism, and classical liberal economics along with socially conservative polices. <\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nSpeaking to Detroit autoworkers in October 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan described what he saw as the American Dream<\/strong> 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.\u201d[footnote]Ronald Reagan, quoted in Steve Neal, \u201cReagan Assails Carter On Auto Layoffs,\u201d Chicago Tribune, October 20, 1980, 5.[\/footnote] The charismatic former governor of California suggested that a once-proud nation 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.\u201d[footnote]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.[\/footnote] In November, Reagan\u2019s vision triumphed.\r\n\r\nReagan rode the wave of a powerful political movement referred to by historians as the New Right<\/strong>. More libertarian in its economics and more politically forceful in its conservative religious principles than the moderate brand of conservatism popular after World War II, the New Right had by the 1980s evolved into the most influential wing of the Republican Party. And it could claim increasing credit for Republican electoral successes. Building on the gradual unraveling of the New Deal political order in the 1960s and 1970s (see Chapter 28), the conservative movement not only enjoyed the guidance of skilled politicians like Reagan but drew tremendous energy from a broad range of grassroots activists. Countless ordinary citizens\u2014newly mobilized Christian conservatives, in particular\u2014helped the Republican Party steer the country 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, and the New Right attracted support from Reagan Democrats, blue-collar voters who had lost faith in the old liberal creed.\r\n\r\nThe 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 directed toward 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.\r\n\r\nIn many ways, however, the rise of the right promised more than it delivered. Battered but intact, the social welfare programs of the New Deal and Great Society (for example, social security, Medicaid, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children) survived the 1980s. Despite Republican vows of fiscal discipline, both the federal government and the national debt ballooned. At the end of the decade, conservative Christians viewed popular culture as more vulgar and hostile to their values than ever before. 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.\u201d[footnote]Robert Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 369.[\/footnote] Liberals and their programs and policies did not disappear, but they increasingly fought battles on terrain chosen by the New Right.\r\n