Conservatives In Power The Reagan Years 1981 1989

Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency in 1980 marked a victory for conservatism. But, as Meg Jacobs and Julian Zelizer point out in their introduction, once in power, conservatives discovered that implementing their agenda and reversing the liberalism entrenched in American government would not be as easy as they had hoped. In this collection, Jacobs and Zelizer explore the successes and limitations of the so-called Reagan Revolution and chronicle its legacy through subsequent presidencies up to Barack Obama's election in 2008. More than 60 thematically organized documents -- some recently released -- illuminate conservatives' efforts to shift American politics to the right. These materials -- including speeches, memos, and articles from the popular press -- explore Reagan's personal evolution as a conservative leader, as well as Reaganomics, tax cuts, anticommunism, the arms race, the culture wars, and scandals such as Iran Contra. Photographs, document headnotes, a chronology, selected bibliography, and questions for consideration provide pedagogical support.

“Those who say that we’re in a time when there are no heroes, they just don’t know where to look.” –President Ronald Reagan, January 20, 1981 Hero. It was a word most Americans weren’t using much in 1980. As they waited on gas and unemployment lines, as their enemies abroad grew ever more aggressive, and as one after another their leaders failed them, Americans began to believe the country’s greatness was fading. Yet within two years the recession and gas shortage were over. Before the decade was out, the Cold War was won, the Berlin Wall came crashing down, and America was once more at the height of prosperity. And the nation had a new hero: Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan’s greatness is today widely acknowledged, but his legacy is still misunderstood. Democrats accept the effectiveness of his foreign policy but ignore the success of his domestic programs; Republicans cheer his victories over liberalism while ignoring his bitter battles with his own party’s establishment; historians speak of his eloquence and charisma but gloss over his brilliance in policy and clarity of vision. From Steven F. Hayward, the critically acclaimed author of The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, comes the first complete, true story of this misunderstood, controversial, and deeply consequential presidency. Hayward pierces the myths and media narratives, masterfully documenting exactly what transpired behind the scenes during Reagan’s landmark presidency and revealing his real legacy. What emerges is a compelling portrait of a man who arrived in office after thirty years of practical schooling in the ways of politics and power, possessing a clear vision of where he wanted to take the nation and a willingness to take firm charge of his own administration. His relentless drive to shrink government and lift the burdens of high taxation was born of a deep appreciation for the grander blessings of liberty. And it was this same outlook, extended to the world’s politically and economically enslaved nations, that shaped his foreign policy and lent his statecraft its great unifying power. Over a decade in the making, and filled with fresh revelations, surprising insights, and an unerring eye for the telling detail, this provocative and authoritative book recalls a time when true leadership inspired a fallen nation to pick itself up, hold its head high, and take up the cause of freedom once again.

US conservatives have repeatedly turned to classical Greece for inspiration and rhetorical power. In the 1950s they used Plato to defend moral absolutism; in the 1960s it was Aristotle as a means to develop a uniquely conservative social science; and then Thucydides helped to justify a more assertive foreign policy in the 1990s. By tracing this phenomenon and analysing these, and various other, examples of selectivity, subversion and adaptation within their broader social and political contexts, John Bloxham here employs classical thought as a prism through which to explore competing strands in American conservatism. From the early years of the Cold War to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Bloxham illuminates the depth of conservatives' engagement with Greece, the singular flexibility of Greek ideas and the varied and diverse ways that Greek thought has reinforced and invigorated conservatism. This innovative work of reception studies offers a richer understanding of the American Right and is important reading for classicists, modern US historians and political scientists alike.

In this concise yet thorough history of America in the 1980s, Doug Rossinow takes the full measure of Ronald Reagan's presidency and the ideology of Reaganism. Believers in libertarian economics and a muscular foreign policy, Reaganite conservatives in the 1980s achieved impressive success in their efforts to transform American government, politics, and society, ushering in the political and social system Americans inhabit today. Rossinow links current trends in economic inequality to the policies and social developments of the Reagan era. He reckons with the racial politics of Reaganism and its debt to the backlash generated by the civil rights movement, as well as Reaganism's entanglement with the politics of crime and the rise of mass incarceration. Rossinow narrates the conflicts that rocked U.S. foreign policy toward Central America, and he explains the role of the recession during the early 1980s in the decline of manufacturing and the growth of a service economy. From the widening gender gap to the triumph of yuppies and rap music, from Reagan's tax cuts and military buildup to the celebrity of Michael Jackson and Madonna, from the era's Wall Street scandals to the successes of Bill Gates and Sam Walton, from the first "war on terror" to the end of the Cold War and the brink of America's first war with Iraq, this history, lively and readable yet sober and unsparing, gives readers vital perspective on a decade that dramatically altered the American landscape.

Elections are, and always have been, the lifeblood of American democracy. Often raucous and sharply contentious, sometimes featuring grand debates about the nation's future, and invariably full of dramatic moments, elections offer insight into the character and historical evolution of American politics. America at the Ballot Box uses the history of presidential elections to illuminate American political democracy and its development from the early Republic to the late twentieth century. Some of the contributions in America at the Ballot Box focus on elections that resulted in dramatic political change, including Jefferson's defeat of Adams in 1800, the 1860 election of Lincoln, and Reagan's 1980 landslide victory. Others concentrate on contests whose importance lies more in the way they illuminate the broad, underlying processes of political change, such as the corruption controversy of Cleveland's acrimonious election in 1884 or the advent of television advertising during the 1952 campaign, when Eisenhower defeated Stevenson. Another set of essays takes a thematic approach, exploring the impact of foreign relations, Anglophobia, and political communications over long periods of electoral time. Uniting all of the chapters is the common conviction that elections provide a unique vantage point from which to view the American political system. Ranging from landmark contests to less influential victories and defeats, the essays by leading political historians seek to rehabilitate the historical significance of presidential elections and integrate them into the broader evolution of American government, policies, and politics. Contributors: Brian Balogh, Gareth Davies, Meg Jacobs, Richard R. John, Kevin M. Kruse, Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew Preston, Elizabeth Sanders, Bruce J. Schulman, Jay Sexton, Adam I. P. Smith, Sean Wilentz, Julian E. Zelizer.

The November issue is the special annual review of the U.S. Supreme Court's previous Term. Each year, the Supreme Court issue is introduced by noteworthy and extensive contributions from recognized scholars. In this issue, for the 2016 Term, articles include: • Foreword: "1930s Redux: The Administrative State Under Siege," by Gillian E. Metzger • Essay: "Unprecedented? Judicial Confirmation Battles and the Search for a Usable Past," by Josh Chafetz • Comment: "Churches, Playgrounds, Government Dollars — and Schools?," by Douglas Laycock • Comment: "Equality, Sovereignty, and the Family in Morales-Santana," by Kristin A. Collins In addition, the first issue of each new volume provides an extensive summary of the important cases of the previous Supreme Court docket, covering a wide range of legal, political, and constitutional subjects. Student commentary is thus provided on eighteen of the Leading Cases of the 2016 Term, including such subjects as racial gerrymandering, freedom of speech, regulatory takings, right to effective counsel, equal protection, appellate jurisdiction, fair housing, immigration law, insider trading, venue in patent cases, and remedies for constitutional violations. Complete statistical graphs and tables of the Court's actions and results during the Term are included; these summaries and statistics, including voting patterns of individual Justices, have long been considered very useful to scholars of the Court in law and political science. Finally, the issue includes a linked Index of Cases and citations for the discussed opinions. The Harvard Law Review is offered in a quality digital edition, featuring active Contents, linked footnotes, active URLs, legible tables, and proper ebook and Bluebook formatting. This current issue of the Review is November 2017, the first issue of academic year 2017-2018 (Volume 131). The Review is a student-run organization whose primary purpose is to publish a journal of legal scholarship. It comes out monthly from November through June and has roughly 2500 pages per volume. Student editors make all editorial and organizational decisions.

Several generations of historians figuratively abandoned the Oval Office as the bastion of out-of-fashion stories of great men. And now, decades later, the historical analysis of the American presidency remains on the outskirts of historical scholarship, even as policy and political history have rebounded within the academy. In Recapturing the Oval Office, leading historians and social scientists forge an agenda for returning the study of the presidency to the mainstream practice of history and they chart how the study of the presidency can be integrated into historical narratives that combine rich analyses of political, social, and cultural history. The authors demonstrate how "bringing the presidency back in" can deepen understanding of crucial questions regarding race relations, religion, and political economy. The contributors illuminate the conditions that have both empowered and limited past presidents, and thus show how social, cultural, and political contexts matter. By making the history of the presidency a serious part of the scholarly agenda in the future, historians have the opportunity to influence debates about the proper role of the president today. Contributors: Brian Balogh, University of Virginia; Michael A. Bernstein, Tulane University; Kathryn Cramer Brownell, Purdue University; N. D. B. Connolly, The Johns Hopkins University; Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut; Gareth Davies, University of Oxford; Darren Dochuk, Washington University; Susan J. Douglas, University of Michigan; Daniel J. Galvin, Northwestern University; William I. Hitchcock, University of Virginia; Cathie Jo Martin, Boston University; Alice O'Connor, University of California, Santa Barbara; Bruce J. Schulman, Boston University; Robert O. Self, Brown University; Stephen Skowronek, Yale University

Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Award The Nation's "Most Valuable Book" “[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic “This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.”—NPR An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution. Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.