Reagan Era - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Reagan Era or Age of Reagan is a periodization of recent American history used by historians and political observers to emphasize that the conservative "Reagan Revolution" led by President Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan

Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....

in domestic and foreign policy had a permanent impact. In Wilentz's (2008) view, Reagan dominated this stretch of American history in the same way that President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal legacy dominated the four decades that succeeded it. The Reagan Era included ideas and personalities beyond Reagan himself; he is usually characterized as the leader of a broadly based conservative movement whose ideas, whether good or bad, dominated national policy making in areas such as taxes, welfare, defense, the federal judiciary and the Cold War

Cold War

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

. Liberals generally lament the Reagan Era, while conservatives generally praise it and call for its revival in the 21st century.

Campaigning for the Democratic nomination in 2008, Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...

interpreted how Reagan changed the nation's trajectory:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think that people... he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

Dates

Most historians begin the era in 1980, when Reagan was elected president. Historians usually probe back into the 1970s for the origins of the Reagan Era. For example, Kalman (2010) explores multiple crises of the 1970s that eroded confidence in liberal solutions: the rise of the religious right and the reaction against feminism and the ERA

Equal Rights Amendment

The Equal Rights Amendment was a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution. The ERA was originally written by Alice Paul and, in 1923, it was introduced in the Congress for the first time...

, grass roots reactions against busing ordered by federal judges; the defeat in Vietnam, the collapse of détente and fears of Soviet power; the challenge of imported cars and textiles, the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt, soaring inflation, stagflation, and the energy crisis, as well as the humiliation the nation suffered during the Iran hostage crisis

Iran hostage crisis

The Iran hostage crisis was a diplomatic crisis between Iran and the United States where 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981, after a group of Islamist students and militants took over the American Embassy in Tehran in support of the Iranian...

and the sense of malaise as the nation wondered if it is glory days had passed. She shows step by step the process by which one political alternative after another collapsed, leaving Reagan standing. The ending point is usually seen as the election of Democrat Barack Obama

Barack Obama

in 2008. The Clinton presidency (1993-2001) is often treated as an extension of the Reagan Era, as is the Bush presidency (2001-2009). Historian Eric Foner

Eric Foner

Eric Foner is an American historian. On the faculty of the Department of History at Columbia University since 1982, he writes extensively on political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography, Reconstruction, and historiography...

noted that the Obama candidacy in 2008 "aroused a great deal of wishful thinking among those yearning for a change after nearly thirty years of Reaganism."

Popular culture

Tom Clancy

Thomas Leo "Tom" Clancy, Jr. is an American author, best known for his technically detailed espionage, military science, and techno thriller storylines set during and in the aftermath of the Cold War, along with video games on which he did not work, but which bear his name for licensing and...

wrote three best-selling novels that illuminate the Reagan era: The Hunt for Red October (1984), Red Storm Rising (1986), and The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988). They reflect Reagan-era Cold War values. The Soviet Union as an evil empire and the superiority of American values and technology are all themes both of Clancy's thrillers and Reagan's rhetoric. Policy elites used these novels (and the filming of one of them) to promote their ideas of national security to the American public.

International

Many scholars take an international perspective, linking the Reagan Era with the Thatcher Era in Britain. As socialist scholar explained,

Throughout many of the capitalist democracies in Western Europe and in North America, the recession that began with the sharp rise in petroleum prices in 1973-74 signaled an epochal shift in the patchwork of growth- based economic and social policies....The demise of Keynesianism which followed, meant far more than the obsolescence of an economic doctrine that had been used to justify a broad range of economic policies. It represented a significant retreat from a vision of society-the Keynesian welfare state-that had motivated state strategies to harmonise interests through social policy, to politically regulate the market economy and thereby reduce class and diverse social conflicts, and to promulgate for the state a tutelary role in securing business and trade union acquiescence (and less commonly approval) for a limited set of important economic policies.

Historiography

Historian Doug Rossinow reported in 2007, "As of this writing, among academic historians, the Reagan revisionists—who view the 1980s as an era of mixed blessings at worst, and of great forward strides in some renditions—hold the field." Other scholars agree on the importance of the Reagan Era.

Dates

Popular culture

International

Historiography

See also

Further reading