In 1984, I turned eighteen and voted for Ronald Reagan. I made the same choice as did about six of every ten American voters aged eighteen to twenty-four.1 Reagan affirmed values that attracted me: unqualified patriotism, national strength, and individual empowerment. I was not very interested in Reagan’s specific policy stands. I view many things about Reagan and the 1980s differently today. But now, just as I did then, I see the 1980s as an era of crucial choices for Americans—a time of political transformation and of alterations in social values and ways of life. At the center of these changes—their symbol, their champion—stood Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Reagan is part of a select group of political leaders, including Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, whose names became watchwords for political creeds and stances toward society, even toward the world. Judging Reaganism is more important than judging Ronald Reagan as an individual, although any sound guide to the 1980s must also show Reagan for who and what he truly was. Reaganism was a particular variety of American conservatism, and the 1980s were its heyday. None of Reaganism’s basic features was new in 1980, and several of them remained prominent in American conservatism after 1990. But in the decade of the 1980s, these elements came together in a specially cohesive and potent way, in response to the era’s political and social circumstances, forming a political identity that was also fueled and shaped by Reagan’s success.
Reaganism consisted of a few core components: an insistence that unfettered capitalism is both socially beneficial and morally good; a fierce patriotism that waves the flag, demands global military supremacy, and brooks no criticism of the United States; and a vision of society as an arena where individuals win or lose because of their own talents and efforts. On these articles of faith virtually all of Reaganism’s adherents agreed. On matters of culture, Reaganism was split down the middle, with the fault line the question of hedonism. Some conservatives in the 1980s reveled in conspicuous consumption, even decadence (a word that took on positive connotations in advertising copy during the 1980s). Others wished to quarantine hedonism in the economic realm, preserving culture and family life as redoubts of warmth, order, and piety against the tides of an individualistic, coarsening world. Both hedonists and traditionalists felt sure that their cultural stance was the authentically Reaganite one, which made Reaganism, on the question of culture, a kind of dual persuasion. But during the 1980s, this rift in conservative ranks was overshadowed by conservative unity on economics and foreign policy.
Reagan often presented himself as an eighteenth-century radical in the style of Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense. He was fond of Paine’s words of inspiration to the American rebels of 1776, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Reagan quoted Paine’s words in November 1979, in the speech formally announcing that he was running for the presidency in 1980; he did so again in his address to the Republican National Convention in July 1980, where he was nominated.2 By 1980, Reagan had been making the same case for nearly thirty years: that the American legacy of liberal idealism, grounded in the dream of individual freedom from tyranny, now had its natural home among conservatives.
In the 1980s, conservatives succeeded in remaking large parts of American life. They reshaped American politics, working an alchemy that transmuted conservative dogma—on the wisdom of low income taxes, the special virtue of entrepreneurs, the parasitic character of government, the need for overwhelming (rather than merely great) military strength, the dependence of social health on proper values, and the nuclear family as the building block of society—into common sense. Reagan and his followers scored many victories, large and small, in the U.S. political system during the 1980s. Along the way, they shifted American political debate onto Reagan’s chosen terrain, and Reagan’s liberal enemies found themselves permanently on the defensive.
The Reaganite mission to restore popular faith in capitalism and individualism as social norms made substantial headway in the 1980s—gains for American conservatism that liberals have not succeeded in reversing. That these invigorated norms were contradicted by the reality of widespread reliance on government assistance, and not only among the poor, may reveal ambivalence or even hypocrisy on a mass scale. But this contradiction does not erase the victory of political conservatism. Regarding more strictly cultural matters, Reaganism’s results in the 1980s were distinctly mixed, as were the sympathies of its supporters. Individualism could not be contained within the sphere of economics. Conservatives hailed the unadulterated individualism known as hedonism in economic life; many liberals and leftists celebrated individuals’ expanding choices regarding lifestyle and identity. The less restrained, sometimes crass, culture of the 1980s, featuring casual vulgarity and aggressive displays of sexuality, distressed the avowedly Christian and socially conservative wing of Reaganism. The cultural change that these behaviors reflected extended a process that had begun well before the 1980s. Nonetheless, this continuing cultural transformation was a big part of the Reagan era, one to which some self-styled conservatives and progressives both contributed.3
Abroad, America’s victory in the Cold War, which began during Reagan’s presidency and was completed during the succeeding administration of President George H. W. Bush, is a major legacy of the 1980s. The role of U.S. leadership in the Soviet retreat from superpower military competition remains a matter of controversy.4 Reagan personally offered unqualified statements of support for liberty and democracy for the peoples living under indirect Soviet rule in Eastern Europe (Bush was more equivocal, at least rhetorically), and, by 1990, this empire had fallen, along with the Berlin Wall that symbolized it. Reagan became president convinced that the USSR had gained a strategic edge over the United States, and he was determined to reverse that trend and put the United States on top through an enormous military buildup. Initially, he showed little interest in diplomacy with the Soviets, but his stance changed dramatically during his second term in office, when Reagan negotiated a breakthrough arms-reduction agreement with a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, a triumph that Gorbachev and Bush followed up at decade’s end. The Soviets retrenched at the end of the 1980s in a desperate effort to revive their economy and save their social system. It is not clear that the Reaganite method of enhanced military brawn caused this outcome. Nonetheless, Reagan’s goal of securing U.S. primacy was achieved—and the related Reaganite hope of reviving U.S. national pride and self-confidence, widely perceived to have faltered following the Vietnam War, was also realized.
Reaganism met with substantial resistance during the 1980s, but that resistance is not the heart of the era’s history as told here. Liberal and moderate opposition to some of Reagan’s initiatives was stiff and, indeed, prevented him from completely fulfilling his conservative goals.5 But liberals had little to cheer about in the 1980s. They found few opportunities to advance their own priorities. They spent their energies parrying powerful conservative thrusts and salvaging what they could of past liberal accomplishments. Some Americans dissented even more sharply than did liberal Democrats from the prevailing political trends of the day. The “front porch politics” of grassroots protest for social justice was vibrant and widespread in the 1980s, as Michael Stewart Foley shows in detail, even if such mobilizing efforts ended more in defeat than in victory.6 More Americans identified themselves as conservatives than as liberals during the 1980s; however, these proportions did not change over the course of the decade, a fact that should encourage caution in estimating Reaganism’s impact. After surveying the evidence, the political scientist Larry M. Bartels concludes, in his 2008 book, Unequal Democracy, that “while ideological debate among elected officials and public intellectuals does seem to have shifted to the right over the past 30 years, it is far from obvious that the political views of ordinary citizens have become noticeably more conservative.” Fewer Americans in 1990 said that government had too much power than had said so in 1980. This change reflected discontent with the neglect of important public duties by the government in the Reagan era. On the other hand, this shift may suggest satisfaction among Reagan’s followers that he had succeeded in curbing government’s powers.7
Although the evidence concerning the advance of conservative doctrine among the American population as a whole during the 1980s is ambiguous, there can be little doubt that the U.S. political system, ruled—like any such system—by elites, albeit with intermittent popular input, moved dramatically rightward in this decade. Conservatives framed public debate in the 1980s, making the era’s politics theirs, as liberals had done in the 1930s and 1960s. The influential and powerful members of the country’s major institutions were profoundly affected by Reaganism. Individualism and market forces found more—and more unrestrained—acolytes within academic life in the 1980s. Political sages arrived at a new consensus that America was “naturally” a conservative country.8 In significant part because of the success of Reaganism in elite circles, Reagan’s vision of America carried greater cultural force as a description of objective reality in 1990 than it had in 1980.
For all of its achievements and successes in the 1980s, Reaganism’s record was also marred by its limits and defects as a governing ideology. Some of these failings, like Reaganism’s accomplishments, were reflected and embodied in Reagan as an individual. Reagan authentically believed that the eighteenth-century radicalism of Paine, who held that “government even in its best state is but a necessary evil,” remained relevant to the late twentieth century.9 But Paine had done more than embrace economic liberty as the wellspring of social health and happiness. He also identified with those who felt the touch of the hangman’s noose, and generally protested the cruel treatment of the poor at the hands of the law.10 Reagan and his most fervent disciples all but scoffed at such sympathies; Reagan’s affinity for Paine was highly selective. Indeed, the 1980s was a decade when a long-term project of increased imprisonment in America took off. Money poured into prison construction and local police forces, turning the latter into miniature militaries. The numbers of people held prisoner by the fifty states and the federal government grew dramatically, with the rate climbing from 139 per 100,000 Americans in 1980 to 297 in 1990.11 This escalation addressed widespread anxiety about violent crime; many took satisfaction from this crusade for incarceration as a policy success, while others came to rue it as excessive, harmful, and unfair. The brunt of this project fell, unsurprisingly, on the poor, and very disproportionately on African American men, a great many of whom were jailed for nonviolent drug-related offenses. Conservatives who said they believed in small government, from Reagan on down, were untroubled by this large exception to their doctrine. They also had a lot of help waging this “war on crime,” a large part of it from Democrats.
In the name of freedom, Reaganites declaimed a creed with scant compassion for the disadvantaged. They believed that those lagging in the race of life had no real claim on society and should rely on private acts of beneficence. In the era of the welfare state and progressive taxation, Reaganites viewed the privileged, not the underprivileged, as society’s victims. The rich were exploited by the liberal state—they were the proverbial geese who laid the golden eggs. In major instances of widespread suffering during his presidency, Reagan was either an indifferent bystander, as with the deeply traumatic AIDS crisis that exploded in the 1980s, or a contributor to the problem, as with the expansion of homelessness. The hard hand of individualism, albeit gloved in earnest idealism, was placed near the heart of Reaganism.
“What I want to see above all,” Reagan said in 1983, “is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich.” With these words, he presented himself as had his namesake, Woodrow Wilson—as the patron of, in Wilson’s words, “the men who are on the make, rather than the men who are already made.”12 But in deeds, Reagan showed a special concern for “the men who are already made.” Reagan and his followers sought to unburden the rich from taxes and business regulations. Many of his appointees, often drawn from the business world, took a brazen smash-and-grab approach to government service, leading to an astounding array of corrupt practices, scores of criminal indictments, and the largest military procurement scandal in U.S. history. In a well-known affair, Reagan’s officials diverted funds meant for low-income housing into projects that enriched favored Republican insiders.13 Two of Reagan’s top three White House advisers during his first term, Edwin Meese and Michael Deaver, ended the decade disgraced over their corruption: Deaver convicted in court for lying under oath about his ill-concealed and prohibited lobbying activities, Meese only escaping criminal indictment for habitually using his government position to benefit himself because, it seemed, the nation’s capital had become exhausted by him and simply wanted him to go away. Too pronounced to ignore, this pattern of behavior betrays a deeper pattern of belief. Many Reaganites evidently felt entitled to fleece the public. Honest leadership could hardly defend such abuses of the nation’s trust. But Reagan’s tendency to ignore inconvenient facts was well known. His warm partisanship for moneyed men, and his impatience with criticism of his appointees’ misconduct, no doubt seemed a license for corruption to those with such proclivities. Reagan’s disdain for the truth and disregard for the law—revealed most starkly during the Iran-Contra scandal of 1986–1987—ended the interval in American life, corresponding roughly with the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, when honesty and probity in high office had been fashionable, even gainful.
Reaganism was also, serious historians must admit, the politics of the white “backlash” against the advance of racial equality. For young people in America’s inner cities who experienced depressionlike levels of unemployment and poverty throughout the 1980s, Reaganism was anything but a sunny vision of the future. For them, “Reaganism,” in the bitter words of one writer, “was all about tough love and denial and getting used to having nothing.”14 The increasing asperity of the criminal justice system toward the poor and black—which sometimes seemed the main response of the American state to worsening conditions in the nation’s cities in the 1980s—informed this view. This perspective from the underside of Reaganism should be neither neglected nor repressed. Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who met with Reagan to protest the president’s support for the apartheid white-supremacist government in that country, afterward pronounced Reagan “a racist pure and simple.”15 Reagan’s champions have always sharply repelled such charges, arguing that Reagan was personally free from prejudice. His heartfelt anger over antisemitism, for one thing, was well established. In the late 1930s, when Reagan discovered that his Hollywood country club excluded Jews, he confronted the club’s leadership and then resigned, joining a new club with a substantial Jewish membership.16 Later, he forced his sons to endure a home screening of film footage shot in 1945 of liberated Nazi death camps, so concerned was he with the possibility of Holocaust denial.17 Earlier in life, Reagan’s youthful actions suggested he might develop a similar sense of outrage over antiblack racism. As a college student, Reagan hosted two African American football teammates in his family home in downstate Illinois when they were barred from staying at a local hotel on account of their race.
But that was before Reagan became a conservative. His lifelong hatred of antisemitism, reflected in his impulse to challenge and denounce it—to stand shoulder to shoulder with bigotry’s victims—only throws into relief the almost total absence of any such feeling regarding racism and African Americans during most of his adult life. The budding pro-black feelings of his youth died early on the vine. Reagan never displayed a speck of support for the civil rights movement in its heyday during the 1960s. He opposed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed “Jim Crow” segregation laws, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Reagan fell in step with the conservative movement’s response to the black struggle, which was to seize on every reason and pretext, no matter how absurd, to denigrate it and deny that it held the moral high ground. It was no wonder that he had no sympathy for the movement against South Africa’s apartheid system; he had had none for the fight against America’s own version. In the ensuing decades, he never clearly disavowed his anti–civil rights position; it was more that he pretended he had not taken it. As a matter of political history, understanding that Reagan took this stance—and that he reaped great benefits from it—is far more important than plumbing the depths of Ronald Reagan’s heart.
Reagan was, perhaps, the most successful white backlash politician in American history. Both Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, who had also fished in these waters, fell short of the presidency. More impressive competition comes from Richard Nixon, who, like Reagan, won the White House twice. Many view Nixon as the pioneer of a fully successful appeal for “law and order,” racially coded but not explicitly race-baiting, and Nixon also plied his stance against court-ordered busing of schoolchildren—a policy intended to achieve racial integration—to good (for him) political effect. Reagan was at least Nixon’s match on this terrain, and as president his record on civil rights was more negative than Nixon’s, his appointees more hostile, his concessions only grudging nods to immovable political realities. Reagan is sometimes judged more generously than Nixon in this matter because, to many, he appears less cynical and calculating, more earnest in his positions. But if, in the words of Reagan’s biographer Lou Cannon, “Reagan was simply reluctant to use federal authority in the cause of punishing discrimination of any sort,” this conviction is hardly cause for a kind verdict on Reagan’s leadership.18 Reagan’s antipathy to federal civil rights laws was sincere, but Reagan was far from guileless in his tactical manipulation of racial division. He left a trail of comments charged with harsh racial connotations but no explicit racial content—as when he warned of a lawless “jungle” arising in the nation’s cities, or complained of seeing a “young buck” using food stamps, or confected a story about a “welfare queen” massively defrauding the taxpayers.19 The alleged offenses Reagan protested had a consistent racial subtext. Yet the care he took in leaving himself room to deny race-baiting intent reflected a discipline on the stump that his opponents often failed to appreciate.
As with America, so with the world. Reagan’s belief in the God-given freedom of all the world’s peoples was limited—by his version of anticommunism and, perhaps, by his cultural predispositions. Reagan saw America gripped in moral and mortal combat with a global communist enemy who knew no scruples. In waging this fight, he locked arms with violent enemies of human freedom, from Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and the military powers of El Salvador to the apartheid regime in South Africa. Democracy and peace would spread to many parts of the world during the 1980s. The United States, under the leadership of Reagan and, even more, under Bush, would stand unmatched in power, the Soviet Union vanquished and near collapse. But the relationship between the march of freedom and the United States in the 1980s was an ambiguous one.
Whatever the flaws of Reagan’s vision and the complexities of Reaganism’s impact, Ronald Reagan has maintained the aura of the winner, which is the greatest thing anyone can say about an American. As president, his job-approval rating swung wide between highs and lows. But he left office in 1989 a popular president, having emerged as a peacemaker with the Soviets, his last job-approval rating, according to the Gallup Poll, an enviable 63 percent.20 Yet in 1990, only 16 percent of respondents in one poll called Reagan “highly believable,” mainly because he had unconvincingly feigned ignorance about his administration’s secret sales of weapons to Iran.21 In the immediate aftermath of the 1980s, many lamented the toll taken by the driving ideas of the Reagan era, the price America had paid (according to liberals) in decrepitude, fiscal disarray, and moral derangement. Liberals considered the 1980s an era of “moral darkness”; Bill Clinton, the Democrat who unseated Bush in 1992, termed the decade “a gilded age of greed, selfishness, irresponsibility, excess and neglect.”22
But Reagan’s stock rose as time passed. Clinton himself agreed to honor Reagan by renaming National Airport in Washington, DC, after him in 1998. One Republican champion of Reagan’s at that time argued that “this man, Ronald Reagan, gave this country dignity, he gave it hope, he gave it optimism.”23 Reagan is now widely considered one of America’s great presidents. He has appeared on Gallup’s annual list of the ten most admired men at least thirty times—second only to evangelist Billy Graham.24 This upward revision is due partly to an energetic campaign by conservatives to burnish the image of their greatest modern leader. But it also registers a deeper reality. More than twenty years after the end of the 1980s, to many Americans, Reagan embodies staunch patriotism and national vitality, not overt conservative doctrine. Yet Reagan’s true triumph was that in his wake—at least to some—conservatism simply became equated with love of country.
Enough time has passed that we should be able to conduct a sober evaluation of Reagan and the era of American politics that he dominated, an evaluation that is critical but reasoned, fact-based, and not merely partisan. Neither hagiography nor scorn should satisfy us, although, as of this writing, the former is a greater blockage to clear vision than the latter. Reaganite conservatives in the 1980s notched achievements that continue to shape American public life decades later. How we remember Reagan and Reaganism colors our perception of many propositions that powerful Americans continue to proffer, whether concerning economic policy and performance, the place of the United States in the world, or morality and culture. If we wish to understand our contemporary public culture and its origins, to see our collective “common sense” for the construction that it is, and to arrive at sound judgments about the choices our society continues to face, we need to deliver the memory of the 1980s out of the realm of legend.
This is the story of the path that American politics and society traveled between 1980 and 1990. This is also a book primarily, although not wholly, about people favored with power and position; about the things they did; and about how we ought to remember them and their acts. Reagan and many other conservatives said they wanted to remake the world. They did not entirely succeed. Almost no one ever does. Yet their ambitions were not in vain. In only ten years, for Americans as a whole, some doors were closed and others were opened. If a new world did not loom, a changed one did.