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Chapter 15 · pp. 476–522
This chapter follows the rise of the conservative movement known as the New Right, from its growth in the 1960s and 1970s to Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory and the policies of the 1980s and 1990s. It covers the economy, race, gender, sexuality, civil rights, foreign policy, and the end of the Cold War. It also shows how conservative ideas reshaped American politics even when conservatives did not get everything they wanted.
The New Right was a conservative movement that mixed free-market economics with forceful religious and moral conservatism. Historians use the name to set it apart from the milder conservatism most Americans knew after World War II. It was more libertarian about the economy and more openly religious in its politics. By the 1980s it was the most influential wing of the Republican Party, and it drove the party's election wins. Its backers ranged from skilled politicians like Reagan to ordinary Christian activists and business leaders (pp. 476–477).
The movement also drew in Reagan Democrats. These were blue-collar voters who left the Democratic Party because they no longer trusted postwar liberalism. Fights over race, economic policy, sexual politics, and foreign affairs had broken the liberal agreement that had held since Franklin Roosevelt. Many working-class voters then backed Reagan (pp. 477, 484).
In the short run, the New Right delivered less than it promised. Most New Deal and Great Society programs survived the 1980s and 1990s. Republicans vowed fiscal discipline, yet the federal government and the national debt both grew. Conservative Christians ended the century feeling that popular culture was more vulgar than ever (p. 477).
Still, the movement changed something deeper: the terms of political debate. Liberals and their programs did not vanish, but they increasingly had to argue on ground that conservatives chose. Bill Clinton shows this. He was a Democrat, yet as a "New Democrat" he backed free trade, deregulation, and privatization, which were once conservative causes (pp. 477–478).
When Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in 1964, many observers thought American conservatism was over. The New York Times columnist James Reston said Goldwater had badly damaged his party for a long time. That prediction was wrong. Conservatism grew through the late 1960s and 1970s (p. 478).
Several causes worked together:
Liberalism no longer seemed to offer a path to prosperity, so many voters looked elsewhere (p. 478).
Two politicians used white working-class anger before Reagan, but neither became the New Right's leader. George Wallace, a segregationist and former Alabama governor, won five Deep South states as a third-party candidate in 1968. He was the last third-party candidate to win any state's electoral votes. His message also reached blue-collar northerners, since he attacked hippies, protesters, and bureaucrats. Yet he also backed job training, a higher minimum wage, and protections for collective bargaining, which were New Deal-style ideas. In May 1972 an assassin's bullet paralyzed him and ended his campaign (p. 479).
Richard Nixon used the phrases "law and order" and "silent majority" to speak to similar grievances. But he and his successor Gerald Ford still worked within the New Deal order, so the New Right had no major public champion yet (p. 479).
Christian conservatives felt under attack from liberalism. In the early 1960s the Supreme Court banned teacher-led prayer (Engel v. Vitale) and Bible reading (Abington v. Schempp) in public schools. Some conservatives concluded that the courts threatened Christian values. The counterculture's openness about sex and drugs, and looser obscenity laws, convinced them that "permissive" liberalism encouraged immorality (p. 479).
Evangelical Protestants formed the core of the religious right. They believed in a personal relationship with Jesus, held that the Bible is infallible, and felt a duty to convert others (p. 479).
Women made up a large share of the movement's grassroots. They defended the "traditional" family through activism:
These women treated motherhood as women's highest calling (pp. 479–480).
Because these activists saw motherhood as central, abortion hit their sense of identity directly. It united the religious right more than any other issue, bringing together Catholics and Protestants, women and men. The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision outraged devout Catholics and evangelicals. Evangelicals had earlier been less uniformly opposed to abortion than Catholics. In their 1979 book, Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop described abortion as a question about the fate of humanity. That stark framing pushed many evangelicals into politics (p. 480).
Grassroots anger needed organization. In 1979 Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, an openly political group with a "pro-life, pro-family, pro-morality, and pro-American" agenda. It blended social and economic appeals and became a force in Republican politics. In 1980 it registered about two million new voters and put its full weight behind Reagan (pp. 480, 482).
Business leaders joined the attack on liberalism too. Stagflation and new regulators, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, angered them. They funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, which gave activists ready-made policy ideas. They also hired Washington lobbyists and formed political action committees (PACs). Between 1976 and 1980, the number of corporate PACs jumped from under 300 to over 1,200 (p. 480).
By the late 1970s, several groups were moving toward the Republican Party. One of them was the neoconservatives. These were intellectuals who had once been liberals or leftists but had turned against both and become Republicans (p. 481).
The writer Irving Kristol, a former Marxist who later defended free-market capitalism in the Wall Street Journal, gave the best-known description. A neoconservative, he said, is a "liberal who has been mugged by reality." The joke means that real-world results had changed their minds (p. 481).
They held two main complaints:
Neoconservatives joined other groups: northern blue-collar workers who were unhappy with the Democrats, white southerners, evangelicals and devout Catholics, and business leaders. Each group saw the Republican Party as the best tool for fighting liberalism and the New Deal political order. Then Carter's troubles at home and abroad gave the movement the push it needed to win national power (p. 481).
Carter entered the 1980 campaign badly weakened. He had failed to slow inflation or reduce unemployment. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis added to the damage (p. 481).
Problems on the economy. Unemployment was close to 8 percent. The Federal Reserve fought inflation by raising interest rates, and they reached a record 18.5 percent. Reagan used this skillfully. He joked that a recession is when your neighbor loses a job, a depression is when you lose yours, and a recovery is when Carter loses his (p. 482).
Problems on foreign policy. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage in Iran, and the Soviets were in Afghanistan. Carter called Reagan a warmonger, but many voters no longer trusted his own handling of world affairs (p. 482).
Problems inside his own party. Many Democrats were unhappy with Carter. Senator Ted Kennedy was angry that Carter would not support national health insurance, so he ran against him in the primaries. Kennedy appealed to labor unions and the party's left wing. Carter won, but the close result showed how weak he was (p. 481). One union leader even called Carter the best Republican president since Herbert Hoover (p. 481).
Carter called himself a born-again Christian and taught Sunday school. Reagan was only a nominal Christian who rarely went to church. Even so, the religious right backed Reagan (p. 482).
There were several reasons:
Reagan's campaign also reached white voters through racial messages that were indirect but clear (p. 482).
Like George Wallace before him, Reagan played on the racial and cultural resentments of struggling white working-class voters. Like Wallace, he won many blue-collar supporters (p. 484).
Reagan needed to show he was not an angry extremist. In the only debate he came across as calm and friendly. He closed by asking voters whether they were better off than four years earlier (p. 484).
The results were:
| Candidate | Popular vote | Electoral votes |
|---|---|---|
| Reagan | 51% | 489 |
| Carter | 41% | 49 |
| Anderson (independent) | 7% | none |
Reagan won only a slim majority of the popular vote, but the Electoral College result was lopsided (p. 484). Republicans won twelve Senate seats and took the Senate for the first time since 1955. Liberals such as George McGovern, Frank Church, Birch Bayh and Jacob Javits lost. Republicans also gained thirty-three House seats (p. 484).
In his inaugural address Reagan said that government was "the problem." In practice, he wanted to redirect government more than remove it (p. 484).
Supply-side economics. Postwar Keynesian economics tried to raise consumer demand. Supply-side economics took a different path. It said that lower personal and corporate tax rates would lead to more investment and production. Supporters said the new wealth would reach lower-income people through jobs and higher wages. Critics called this "trickle down" (p. 484).
Economist Arthur Laffer went further. He predicted that lower rates would produce so much activity that total federal revenue would rise. This idea is called the Laffer Curve. The administration used it to justify the tax cut. Congressman Jack Kemp, a co-sponsor of the bill, said it would release America's "creative genius" (p. 484).
Passing the bill. Some Democrats and Republicans doubted it. George H. W. Bush had called supply-side theory "voodoo economics" in the 1980 primaries (p. 485). Two things helped the bill pass. Reagan lobbied members of Congress one by one. Also, John Hinckley tried to assassinate him on March 30, 1981, and public sympathy for the wounded president grew (p. 485).
In July 1981 Congress approved a $675 billion tax cut, with significant Democratic support. Its main changes were:
In 1981 the air traffic controllers' union, PATCO, called a strike. This was a surprise test for Reagan, because PATCO was one of the few unions that had backed him in 1980. Reagan had also presented himself during the campaign as a friendly "old union man." He had once led the Screen Actors Guild, and he still spoke well of Franklin Roosevelt. (p. 486)
Despite that history, Reagan ordered the strikers back to work. More than 11,000 refused, and he fired them. The firings crippled PATCO. They also sent a message to employers across the country that the government would not protect strikers.
The results show how large the shift was:
Together with the 1981 tax cut, the PATCO defeat strengthened corporations and high earners. It also showed that a new conservative era had begun. (p. 486)
By the fall of 1981 the White House looked confident, but its economic predictions soon ran into trouble. Reagan raised tensions with the Soviet Union and asked for more military money. Congress approved $1.2 trillion in new defense spending. Lower taxes combined with higher defense budgets pushed the national debt up sharply. It equaled 33 percent of GDP in 1981 and 53 percent by the end of his first term. This was a surprising result for an administration that had promised to restrain spending. (pp. 486–487)
At the same time, Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker kept interest rates high to fight inflation. Rates went above 20 percent in June 1981. Borrowing became very expensive, and business activity slowed. The outcome was the 1981–82 recession. Unemployment rose to almost 11 percent, the highest level since the Great Depression. (p. 487)
Social welfare cuts made the recession harder on ordinary people. Congress cut funding for food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). It also removed about half a million people from the federal disability program. Low-income communities of color suffered most, and the NAACP's leader compared the effects to "war, pestilence, famine, and death." (p. 487)
Reagan's plan to cut Social Security benefits for early retirees met a strong backlash. The Senate voted unanimously to condemn it, and Democrats called it a cruel attack on the elderly. With a recession under way and the public angry, the White House backed off. In 1982 Reagan worked with House Speaker Tip O'Neill, a Democrat, on a bill that restored $98 billion of the earlier tax cuts. (p. 487)
Democrats still blamed the "Reagan Recession." They argued that his policies helped the already fortunate, a message they called the "fairness issue." It worked: they won twenty-six House seats in the 1982 elections. For a time the New Right seemed to be in trouble. (p. 487)
Reagan adjusted quickly. He named a bipartisan commission to study Social Security. In early 1983 it recommended:
The new tax money went into a trust fund. This changed Social Security from a pay-as-you-go system into one with large reserves. Congress passed the plan fast, and Reagan could claim credit for protecting a popular program. (pp. 487–488)
The economy also improved. Real disposable income grew 2.5 percent in 1983 and 5.8 percent in 1984. Unemployment fell to 7.5 percent in 1984. The painful high interest rates had brought inflation down to 3.5 percent. In his 1984 campaign, Reagan said it was "morning again in America." Most conservatives overlooked the growing debt and the tax increases of the previous two years. (p. 488)
In 1984 the Democrats were divided over what the party should stand for. Walter Mondale, a longtime ally of labor and civil rights and Carter's vice president, was the favorite. His challengers were:
Mondale won the nomination but lost badly. Reagan carried forty-nine of fifty states with 58.8 percent of the popular vote. Many Democrats concluded that moderates like Hart, who appealed to upwardly mobile white professionals and suburbanites, understood the voters better. In February 1985 centrists founded the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Its goals were to move away from organized labor and Keynesian economics and to win over business. Jackson mocked it as "Democrats for the Leisure Class," but its members included future leaders such as Bill Clinton. The DLC showed how far the New Right had changed politics, since New Democrats looked a lot like old Republicans. (p. 489)
Reagan began his second term with a stronger mandate, but his program stalled. Democrats retook the Senate in 1986 and stopped him from ending means-tested welfare programs. Congress did not raise benefit levels or the minimum wage, so their real value shrank. (p. 489)
Two bipartisan laws came out of this period:
Judicial appointments were among Reagan's most lasting victories. He named 368 federal district and appeals judges, almost all of them white men. He also chose three Supreme Court justices:
There were limits, though. In 1987 Reagan nominated Robert Bork, who had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, affirmative action, and Roe v. Wade. After bitter hearings, the Senate rejected him, 58 to 42. (p. 490)
The 1980s gave Black Americans both gains and setbacks. Many saw Bork's nomination as a sign of conservative hostility to Black progress. Political gains were real:
Black performers such as Eddie Murphy, Michael Jackson, and Oprah Winfrey also reached huge audiences. The Cosby Show, about a doctor and a lawyer raising four children, topped the ratings and reflected the growing Black middle class. Income for the top fifth of Black households rose faster than for white households for most of the decade. (p. 492)
Poor and working-class Black Americans did not share in this progress, so class often separated these experiences. In Reagan's last year in office the Black poverty rate was 31.6 percent, compared with 10.1 percent for whites. Black unemployment stayed about double the white rate. By 1990 the median Black family income was $21,423, 42 percent below the white median. The administration did not address these gaps and in many ways made them worse. (p. 492)
The 1980s gave Black Americans real gains and deep disadvantages at the same time, and the dividing line was often class. The top fifth of Black households saw their incomes rise faster than those of white households for most of the decade. The popular sitcom The Cosby Show, about a doctor and a lawyer raising four children, pictured this growing Black middle class. But in Reagan's last year in office the Black poverty rate was 31.6 percent, compared with 10.1 percent for whites. Black unemployment stayed about double the white rate all decade. By 1990, the median Black family earned $21,423, which was 42 percent less than the median white household. (p. 492)
The Reagan administration did little to close these gaps and in some ways widened them. It also tried to weaken the legal tools won in the civil rights era, but it met limits:
Still, many Americans came to treat diversity as a personal value rather than a problem of unequal systems. Budget cuts to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches, and job training hit Black households hard, because they relied on this support. In 1982 the National Urban League said Black economic rights had never faced such powerful attack. (pp. 492–493)
Fear of crime shaped politics in a way that harmed Black communities. Homicide was the leading cause of death for Black males aged fifteen to twenty-four. Yet African Americans were also the most common victims of violent crime. Sensational news stories nonetheless stressed Black-on-white crime in big cities and stoked white fear. (p. 493)
The Bernhard Goetz case shows how strong that fear was. In December 1984, Goetz, a white engineer, shot four Black teenagers on a New York subway, believing they were about to rob him. They carried screwdrivers. Polls found that 90 percent of white New Yorkers sympathized with him. (p. 493)
Both Democrats and Republicans continued the "law and order" approach of the 1960s and 1970s. They backed more aggressive policing of minority neighborhoods and longer mandatory prison sentences. The result was mass incarceration, which burdened African American communities for decades into the twenty-first century. (p. 493)
Race was never only a Black and white matter. The 1980s were called the "Decade of the Hispanic." The census added the category "Hispanic" in 1970 to count people of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or other Spanish-speaking origin. Hispanics rose from 5 percent of Americans in 1970 to 9 percent in 1990, more than a doubling in number. (p. 493)
Most were ethnic Mexicans, with large Puerto Rican and Cuban communities too. More than 100,000 Cubans reached Florida in 1980 in the Mariel Boatlift. US-backed military regimes in Central America produced chaos and sent refugees north, and churches formed the Sanctuary Movement to shield them from deportation. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 offered amnesty to nearly three million undocumented immigrants. Even so, migration from Latin America continued each year, and it grew as NAFTA-era changes in the 1990s disrupted the Mexican economy. (pp. 493–494)
Native Americans pushed their claims in court and won notable victories:
These gains came even as Reagan cut the Bureau of Indian Affairs by 40 percent, supporting extractive industries that challenged Native control of land and resources. (p. 494)
On March 3, 1991, a video recorded Los Angeles police beating Rodney King, a Black man, after a high-speed chase. When four officers were acquitted a year later, Los Angeles erupted. The 1992 riots left over sixty people dead, led to ten thousand arrests, and caused more than a billion dollars in damage. (p. 494)
In 1994, about ninety million Americans watched a highway police chase of O. J. Simpson, a former football star suspected of murdering his wife and another man. His eight-month trial, ending in acquittal, again exposed painful racial divisions left over from earlier decades. (pp. 494–495)
Reagan-era deficits had a chain of effects. The government borrowed heavily and raised interest rates to attract bond buyers. Foreign money flowed in, raising the value of the dollar and pulling in cheap imports. The gap between imports and exports grew from 170 billion in 1987. Government bonds also drew investment away from industry. (p. 495)
Manufacturing suffered. Many steel and auto plants in the Northeast and Midwest closed or moved abroad, and Bruce Springsteen's songs mourned lost Rust Belt jobs. Farmers were squeezed by new world competition and soaring interest rates on their debts, so foreclosures surged. In 1985, musicians such as Neil Young and Willie Nelson held Farm Aid to raise money. (p. 495)
Wealthy Americans did well. Financiers like Michael Milken made fortunes selling high-risk, high-yield "junk bonds." Speculation lifted the stock market until Black Monday, October 19, 1987, when it fell eight hundred points, losing 13 percent of its value and more than $500 billion for investors. (pp. 495–496)
Deregulation also caused the savings and loan (S&L) crisis. A 1982 law raised federal insurance on deposits and allowed S&Ls to make risky loans for the first time. Many bets failed, some managers stole money, and S&Ls collapsed regularly in the late 1980s. The government's bailout eventually cost $132 billion. (p. 496)
Conservatives and liberals also fought over popular culture. Top Gun, Red Dawn, and Rambo: First Blood Part II carried the patriotism and militarism of the Reagan years. Oliver Stone's Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July attacked the Vietnam War, and his Wall Street and Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero mocked the excesses of the rich. Dallas and Dynasty, meanwhile, celebrated wealth. (p. 496)
Most popular culture, though, had little politics. Escapist hits such as E.T. and the Indiana Jones films topped the box office, following Star Wars (1977) and pushing aside the socially minded films of the 1970s. Even the leftist Jane Fonda was on TV mainly to sell exercise videos. Cable television broke up the audience once held by NBC, ABC, and CBS, and MTV (1981) helped stars like Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson. Conservatives called music videos corrupting. Madonna's 1989 "Like a Prayer" drew protests for scenes some saw as sexual and blasphemous, and the religious right came to see pop culture as hostile to Christian values. (pp. 496–497)
Women moved further into male-dominated areas. By 1984, more women worked outside the home than inside it, and Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman on a major party's presidential ticket as Walter Mondale's running mate. (p. 497)
Feminism still faced a backlash. Susan Faludi's Backlash (1991) explained that many people saw feminism as outdated, since women supposedly had equality already, and even blamed it for falling fertility, poor mental health, poverty, eating disorders, and rising divorce. (pp. 497–498)
Poor Black women were targeted in attacks on welfare. Reagan's "welfare queen" image pictured a lazy cheat collecting government aid. This was a myth. Meanwhile, cuts to food and child development programs, and the end of programs against gender discrimination in schools and jobs, hurt poor women. Inequality grew among African Americans: single Black mothers lost ground as the economy moved from industrial jobs to low-wage retail and service work. Welfare programs survived but entered the 1990s weakened by constant attack. (p. 498)
Feminists also split in the "sex wars." Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that pornography expressed women's degraded status and pushed for laws to ban it. Other feminists warned that such bans would first hit queer and feminist writing and invite sexual repression. They were proved right when MacKinnon, Dworkin, and others worked with Attorney General Edwin Meese on a report that condemned pornography as a threat to "the family concept," not as a violation of women's bodily autonomy. (p. 498)
By the early 1990s, many Americans understood sexual harassment at work as a kind of sex discrimination. That made it a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bans job discrimination (p. 499). Not everyone agreed. Phyllis Schlafly, a leading anti-feminist, argued that the problem did not touch a "virtuous" woman. Public opinion went the other way. A 1992 poll found that 85 percent of Americans saw workplace harassment as a problem, and about one-third of working women said they had been harassed on the job (p. 499).
Anita Hill's story brought the issue into public view. Hill was a lawyer at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). She said her boss, Clarence Thomas, repeatedly talked about sex acts and made other unwanted remarks around her. In 1991 President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the Supreme Court. Hill then described her experience in a harsh Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Many people believed her and many belittled her. Thomas was confirmed by a narrow margin anyway (p. 499).
The hearings still changed behavior. About four in ten working men said they adjusted how they acted at work afterward (p. 499). The case shows that a political defeat can still shift everyday norms.
Histories of women's liberation often say the movement ended when second-wave feminism split apart in the 1980s "sex wars." This is a misconception. The movement kept going through new causes, new strategies, and new groups of women (pp. 499–500).
The 1980s were in fact a high point for multiracial feminism. Lesbian writers published works that became classics, including Audre Lorde's essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera (p. 499).
Feminists of color also built a new way of analyzing oppression. Racism and sexism, they argued, do not just sit side by side. They combine and make harms worse. Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw named this intersectionality at the end of the decade. Welfare cuts and violence against women are examples. Poor women of color faced:
These leaders wanted a broad idea of women's control over their own bodies, not a narrow one (p. 499). A movement that looked at only one kind of oppression would miss the needs of these women.
New organizations answered cuts to welfare and healthcare that threatened poor women of color. Examples include the National Black Women's Health Project, the National Latina Health Organization, the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center, and Sakhi for South Asian Women. Sakhi worked against domestic violence in New York (p. 499).
Many white feminists responded by focusing more on race. Attacks on immigrants and a partial revival of the Ku Klux Klan led white women in Austin, Texas, to form the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. Its chapters disrupted Klan and neo-Nazi rallies and protected Gay Pride marches (pp. 499–500).
A similar effort grew in punk culture. Anti-fascists in Minneapolis started Anti-Racist Action (ARA) to stop white-power groups from taking over the scene. By the end of the 1980s there were hundreds of ARA chapters. In the 1990s, women in punk who called themselves "riot grrrls" made music and homemade booklets called zines. These challenged macho punk culture and took back insulting words aimed at women. Other women organized against militarism, US interventions in the Middle East and Latin America, and the spread of nuclear weapons (p. 500).
As the conservative movement grew, questions about women's rights moved close to the center of national politics, especially abortion. The two parties sorted themselves. Pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans became rare. The National Abortion Rights Action League held the left to a pro-choice position, while the National Right to Life Commission had similar pull on the right (p. 500).
Religious conservatives hoped the 1980 Republican win of the White House and Senate would let them restrict abortion. Results were limited:
Anti-abortion forces did win some ground by cutting funds. The Hyde Amendment of 1976 barred federal money from paying for abortions, and by 1990 several states had passed their own versions. This limited access without overturning the right to abortion (p. 500).
Some activists wanted more. In 1988 the evangelical activist Randall Terry founded Operation Rescue. It went after clinics and pro-choice politicians with confrontational and sometimes violent tactics. It signaled that the fight would get hotter in the 1990s (p. 500).
Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) appeared in the early 1980s. Most early victims were gay men, so the disease was first called GRID, or gay-related immune deficiency (pp. 500–501). The label revived old pseudoscientific claims that gay bodies were naturally diseased. The Reagan administration was indifferent. Representative Henry Waxman charged that the response would have been far different if the disease had hit Americans of Norwegian descent. Some figures condemned gay people instead of helping. Patrick Buchanan, for example, said the sexual revolution was starting to "devour its children" (p. 501).
The response came in stages:
On abortion, gay rights, and racial equality, activists in the 1980s mostly guarded earlier gains rather than adding new ones. Conservatives did not erase the big advances, but they stopped new progress. Because liberals spent the decade defending the status quo, the New Right set the terms of the debate, which counted as a major victory for it (p. 501).
Cultural conservatives won political ground in the 1980s but lost ground in culture. American culture grew more open through the 1990s (p. 501). The Parents Music Resource Center won "Parental Advisory" labels on explicit music, and in 1985 it made rock musicians such as Frank Zappa and Dee Snider testify in the Senate. Soon its energy was nearly gone. Barbara Bush criticized The Simpsons in 1990, and Ice-T pulled "Cop Killer" in 1992. Yet the culture kept pushing past old limits (p. 501).
New targets for moral panic included:
Pat Buchanan called this a "cultural war" at the 1992 Republican National Convention, with the soul of America at stake. The fight gave conservatives strength and a shared purpose, but they were fighting a rearguard action. By the late 1990s American culture was broader, more diverse, and more explicit than before (p. 503).
Ronald Reagan took office as a committed Cold Warrior. He called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and predicted it would end up on the "ash heap of history." He also believed the US had a duty to hurry that outcome along (p. 503).
The Reagan Doctrine was the policy of giving US aid to anticommunist forces anywhere in the world. It meant the US would help rebels, governments, and armies that fought communism, whatever else they stood for (p. 503).
To back the doctrine with power, Reagan expanded the military. Defense spending rose from 229 billion in 1985, the highest level since the Vietnam War. His slogan for this was "peace through strength" (p. 503). The phrase appealed to people who had worried during the 1970s that the US was no longer the strongest nation. There is an irony here: despite his militarism, Reagan later helped end the Cold War through negotiation, a method he had once scorned (p. 503).
Reagan's rise was tied to a mood of national anxiety. Many Americans in the late 1970s believed their country was sinking in world affairs. Several events fed this feeling (pp. 503–504):
Reagan spoke directly to these worries. In 1976 he warned that the nation had become "Number Two" in a world where that was dangerous (p. 504). Voters who felt humiliated could see him as a leader who would restore strength and pride.
Latin America became the main showcase for the new assertive approach. President Carter had tried to promote human rights in the region. Reagan and his advisors dropped that goal and focused on fighting communism, a label they applied to all left-wing movements there (p. 504).
Grenada. In October 1983, communists with ties to Cuba seized power on the Caribbean island of Grenada. Reagan sent in the Marines. This was Operation Urgent Fury. The leftist government fell after less than a week of fighting. The mission was small, but the public strongly supported it. After the military failures of the previous two decades, Americans were hungry for a win, and Grenada gave them one (p. 504). It was the only time Reagan used the US military in Latin America (p. 505).
El Salvador. Elsewhere the US worked through allies. From 1981 to 1990 it gave more than $4 billion to El Salvador's government to fight the guerrillas of the FMLN, a largely futile effort. Salvadoran forces using American weapons committed atrocities. One example was the killing of almost a thousand civilians in the village of El Mozote in December 1981 (p. 505). This shows a cost of the Reagan Doctrine: aid to anticommunist forces could mean backing groups that abused civilians.
In the Middle East the administration was more cautious. Its policy mixed anticommunism with hostility toward Iran's Islamic government (p. 505). When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the US gave Saddam Hussein military intelligence and business credits. It kept doing so even after it was clear that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons (p. 505).
Reagan's biggest setback in the region came in Lebanon. In 1982, soon after Israel invaded Lebanon, he sent Marines to Beirut as peacekeepers. On October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines there. Pressure from Congress and anger from the public led Reagan to pull the Marines out in March 1984 (pp. 505–506).
The withdrawal shows that Reagan was pragmatic in foreign policy, whatever his tough talk about restoring American power. He did not want to risk another Vietnam by committing more troops to Lebanon (p. 506).
Nuclear policy caused more controversy than Reagan's actions in Central America or the Middle East (p. 506). It developed in steps:
Critics mocked SDI as "Star Wars," a fantasy. Scientists argued it was not technologically feasible. Even Secretary of State George Shultz privately said the technology did not exist (pp. 506–507).
These aggressive policies fueled a nuclear freeze movement around the world. Protesters feared the arms race was escalating. In the US, groups such as the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy organized demonstrations. They culminated in a June 1982 rally in New York City's Central Park that drew almost a million people (p. 507). The size of this protest shows how controversial nuclear policy was compared with Reagan's other foreign policies.
Reagan's tough Cold War policies drew resistance at home. Protests grew into a nuclear freeze movement, and Congress pushed back too. Democrats disagreed with the policies themselves. Many Republicans backed Reagan's anticommunism but disliked how often his administration tried to work around Congress (p. 507).
The Boland Amendment (1982). This law barred the US from funding the Contras. The Contras were a right-wing insurgency fighting Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. The House passed it 411–0, a sign of how uneasy even Reagan's allies were. Reagan still ignored the Contras' brutal tactics and praised them as the "moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers" (p. 507).
How the Iran-Contra affair worked. Officials found a way around the law. The steps were:
The scheme came out in 1986. It broke the Boland Amendment. It also undercut Reagan's public promise that America would never make concessions to terrorists, because it meant selling arms to Iran. People compared it to Watergate. But investigators never proved that Reagan knew about it. With no "smoking gun," impeachment stayed only talk (p. 507).
Glasnost and perestroika. In Reagan's first term, he traded harsh words with a quick series of Soviet leaders: Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Things changed in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev took power. He still believed in socialism, but he saw that the USSR had to reform. His two main policies were:
Gorbachev also wanted to end the arms race, which was bankrupting his country (pp. 507–508).
From summits to a treaty. Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva in 1985 and in Reykjavik in 1986. Neither summit produced a concrete agreement. But the two men built a level of trust that was new in US-Soviet relations. That trust made the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty possible. It committed both sides to sharp cuts in their nuclear arsenals (p. 508).
Misconception: Reagan alone did not defeat the USSR. Many people think Reagan's tough anticommunism caused the Soviet collapse. Reagan did mix strong words with talks. In his 1987 Berlin Wall speech he told Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!" But the most important causes were inside the Soviet empire:
A decisive moment came when Gorbachev refused to send troops to prop up Eastern European regimes (p. 508).
The collapse in stages. The fall came in two steps:
The 1988 election. Vice President George H. W. Bush ran against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Bush promised to continue the conservative work of the 1980s. He was a Connecticut aristocrat whom movement conservatives, especially the religious right, had never fully embraced. So he leaned on moral and cultural attacks. He claimed Dukakis had blocked the Pledge of Allegiance in schools and was a "card-carrying member" of the ACLU. His campaign also ran the Willie Horton ad. Horton, a Black convicted murderer, committed a rape after being released on a prison furlough while Dukakis was governor. Critics said the ad was "code word" politics, like the old Southern Strategy, which appealed to white racial resentment. Bush won by a large margin (p. 509).
The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). Liberalism was in retreat, but it still won some victories. In 1990, sixty disability activists crawled up the 78 marble steps of the Capitol without their mobility aids. One was eight-year-old Jennifer Keelan. Their protest made the need for accessibility visible and pressured Congress to pass the ADA (p. 509).
Capitalism seems triumphant. The Soviet collapse left the US as the only superpower. Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay "The End of History?" suggested the world might settle into a lasting agreement on peace and open markets. Eastern Europe privatized its assets. India began opening its economy in 1991. China's reforms under Deng Xiaoping sped up with more privatization and foreign investment (p. 510).
Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Iraq invaded oil-rich Kuwait in 1990, and Congress approved US action. The US built up its forces in Operation Desert Shield in August 1990. It began combat in Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. Americans feared another Vietnam. But laser-guided bombs, shown on CNN's round-the-clock coverage, impressed viewers. Iraq's army collapsed after about a hundred hours of ground fighting. Bush chose not to march on Baghdad, to avoid an occupation and an insurgency. His approval rating hit 89 percent, and many felt the "ghosts of Vietnam" were gone (p. 510).
Why Bush lost. Bush's high approval did not guarantee reelection. The New Right still distrusted him. Pat Buchanan challenged him in the primaries and painted him as too moderate to fight the culture war. Bush also broke his "Read my lips: no new taxes" pledge. Buchanan lost, but he weakened Bush. Then a sudden recession hurt Bush most (pp. 510–512).
Why Clinton won. Many top Democrats skipped the race, so the party nominated Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. He faced charges of infidelity and draft dodging, but he was charismatic and had a skilled team. He called himself a New Democrat, a centrist open to free trade, tax cuts, and welfare reform. He was the first baby boomer with a serious run at the presidency, and he framed the race as a generational choice. At the Houston convention, Buchanan and Pat Robertson attacked him as a threat to the family. Clinton's team answered with the focus "It's the economy, stupid." Clinton won, but his moderate approach showed that the Reagan Revolution still shaped politics (pp. 511–512).
Bill Clinton won in 1992 by promising to leave behind the "old liberalism" that had lost so many elections in the 1980s. He and running mate Al Gore were moderate southerners who called themselves New Democrats. Their approach is known as the Third Way: Democrats adopting policies that Republicans had long favored. Welfare reform, freer trade, and deregulation of financial markets are the main examples. It shows how far the Reagan Revolution had moved the whole political conversation to the right, even with a Democrat in the White House. (pp. 512–513)
NAFTA is the clearest case. It removed trade barriers among the US, Mexico, and Canada. Democrats had opposed free trade for decades, yet Clinton pushed it through. (p. 513)
NAFTA let goods and money cross borders freely, but people still faced strict legal limits. Critics in the Rust Belt argued that American workers would now compete with low-paid foreign workers. Many factories moved to maquilas, plants in northern Mexico that used cheap labor. Thousands of Mexicans came to work in them, and thousands more kept going north. (p. 513)
Planners had expected free trade to create jobs in Mexico so people would stay home. That did not happen. Poverty, corruption, violence, and higher US wages kept drawing migrants. Between 1990 and 2010, the foreign-born share of the US population rose from 7.9 to 12.9 percent, and the number of undocumented immigrants tripled, from 3.5 million to 11.2 million. Growth also spread to new states in the South, such as Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, where immigration more than doubled in the decade. (p. 513)
Fear of immigration was bipartisan, and policy turned toward enforcement:
Clinton's policy on gays in the military shows the Third Way compromise. Don't Ask, Don't Tell stopped recruiters from asking about sexual orientation, but required gay service members to keep it private. Neither side was happy: social conservatives were outraged, and liberals disliked the continued discrimination. (p. 514)
Clinton also tried to create universal healthcare, with Hillary Clinton playing a major role. The effort collapsed. Conservatives revolted, the healthcare industry ran a flood of attack ads, congressional Democrats were divided, and voters pushed back. (p. 514)
The backlash helped Republicans in the 1994 midterms. Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey offered the Contract with America, a conservative legislative plan that GOP candidates pledged on the Capitol steps to pass. Religious activists in the Christian Coalition, led by Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed, mobilized social conservatives. Robertson's 1988 presidential run had given him a huge mailing list, which became the group's base. Democrats lost the House for the first time since 1952. (p. 514)
In 1996 Clinton beat the 73-year-old Bob Dole. He was the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win two full terms. He eased conservative opposition by signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996). It cut welfare benefits, narrowed eligibility, and handed many duties to the states. Clinton said it would end the "cycle of dependency." (pp. 514–515)
The economy boomed in these years. Personal computers sold widely, the Internet became a mass phenomenon, and the dot-com boom brought both strong growth and heavy speculation. (p. 515)
Republicans, blocked at the polls, spent millions on investigations. Clinton denied "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky before a grand jury, and Republicans charged him with perjury. The House impeached him in December 1998. The step was unpopular: two thirds of Americans disapproved, and Clinton's approval rose to 78 percent. The Senate acquitted him in February 1999, mostly along party lines. (p. 515)
Al Gore ran as a moderate liberal and kept his distance from Clinton. George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical, promised "compassionate conservatism," faith-based politics, and a return of dignity to the Oval Office. (pp. 515–516)
Gore won the national popular vote by about 500,000, but the Electoral College depended on Florida. Media outlets called the state for Gore, then for Bush, and Gore first conceded and then took it back. The narrow margin triggered an automatic recount, and lawyers poured in to fight over manual recounts. In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the recount must stop. Bush won Florida by 537 votes and became president. (p. 516)
Many people think the Reagan years meant prosperity for all and the end of big government. The record is more mixed. (pp. 516–517)
Still, the tone of politics shifted. Democrats adapted to Reagan-era ideas, which is exactly what the Third Way shows. (p. 517)
