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Source: US History. Authored by: P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Paul Vickery, and Sylvie Waskiewicz. Provided by: OpenStax College. Located at: http://openstaxcollege.org/textbooks/us-history. License: CC BY: Attribution. License Terms: Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11740/latest/

Unit 4: The Rise of Conservatism

Introduction to the Reagan Era

Figure 31.1 This striking piece of graffiti from the Berlin Wall, now housed in the Newseum in

Washington, DC, contains the name of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a group formed in

1987 in New York City to combat the spread of AIDS and the perception that AIDS was the product of

immoral behavior.

“Act up!” might be called the unofficial slogan of the 1980s. Numerous groups were

concerned by what they considered disturbing social, cultural, and political trends in the

United States and lobbied for their vision of what the nation should be. Conservative

politicians cut taxes for the wealthy and shrank programs for the poor, while conservative

Christians blamed the legalization of abortion and the increased visibility of gays and

lesbians for weakening the American family. When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control

first recognized the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in 1981, the

Religious Right regarded it as a plague sent by God to punish homosexual men for their

“unnatural” behavior. Politicians, many of whom relied on religious conservatives for

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their votes, largely ignored the AIDS epidemic. In response, gay men and women formed

organizations such as ACT UP to draw attention to their cause (Figure 31.1).

Toward the end of the decade in 1989, protesters from both East and West Berlin began

“acting up” and tearing down large chunks of the Berlin Wall, essentially dismantling the

Iron Curtain. This symbolic act was the culmination of earlier demonstrations that had

swept across Eastern Europe, resulting in the collapse of Communist governments in both

Central and Eastern Europe, and marking the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981 with strongly conservative values but

experience in moderate politics. He appealed to moderates and conservatives anxious

about social change and the seeming loss of American power and influence on the world

stage. Leading the so-called Reagan Revolution, he appealed to voters with the promise

that the principles of conservatism could halt and revert the social and economic changes

of the last generation. Reagan won the White House by citing big government and

attempts at social reform as the problem, not the solution. He was able to capture the

political capital of an unsettled national mood and, in the process, helped set an agenda

and policies that would affect his successors and the political landscape of the nation.

REAGAN’S EARLY CAREER Although many of his movie roles and the persona he created for himself seemed to

represent traditional values, Reagan’s rise to the presidency was an unusual transition

from pop cultural significance to political success. Born and raised in the Midwest, he

moved to California in 1937 to become a Hollywood actor. He also became a reserve

officer in the U.S. Army that same year, but when the country entered World War II, he

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was excluded from active duty overseas because of poor eyesight and spent the war in the

army’s First Motion Picture Unit. After the war, he resumed his film career; rose to

leadership in the Screen Actors Guild, a Hollywood union; and became a spokesman for

General Electric and the host of a television series that the company sponsored. As a

young man, he identified politically as a liberal Democrat, but his distaste for

communism, along with the influence of the social conservative values of his second

wife, actress Nancy Davis, edged him closer to conservative Republicanism (Figure

31.3). By 1962, he had formally switched political parties, and in 1964, he actively

campaigned for the Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater.

Figure 31.3 In 1961, when Congress began to explore nationwide health insurance for

the elderly under Social Security, Reagan made a recording for the American Medical

Association in which he denounced the idea—which was later adopted as Medicare—as

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“socialized medicine.” Such a program, Reagan warned his listeners, was the first step to

the nation’s demise as a free society.

Reagan launched his own political career in 1966 when he successfully ran for governor

of California. His opponent was the incumbent Pat Brown, a liberal Democrat who had

already served two terms. Reagan, quite undeservedly, blamed Brown for race riots in

California and student protests at the University of California at Berkeley. He criticized

the Democratic incumbent’s increases in taxes and state government, and denounced “big

government” and the inequities of taxation in favor of free enterprise. As governor,

however, he quickly learned that federal and state laws prohibited the elimination of

certain programs and that many programs benefited his constituents. He ended up

approving the largest budget in the state’s history and approved tax increases on a

number of occasions. The contrast between Reagan’s rhetoric and practice made up his

political skill: capturing the public mood and catering to it, but compromising when

necessary.

REPUBLICANS BACK IN THE WHITE HOUSE After two unsuccessful Republican primary bids in 1968 and 1976, Reagan won the

presidency in 1980. His victory was the result of a combination of dissatisfaction with the

presidential leadership of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in the 1970s and the growth of

the New Right. This group of conservative Americans included many very wealthy

financial supporters and emerged in the wake of the social reforms and cultural changes

of the 1960s and 1970s. Many were evangelical Christians, like those who joined Jerry

Falwell’s Moral Majority, and opposed the legalization of abortion, the feminist

movement, and sex education in public schools. Reagan also attracted people, often

dubbed neoconservatives, who would not previously have voted for the same candidate

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as conservative Protestants did. Many were middle- and working-class people who

resented the growth of federal and state governments, especially benefit programs, and

the subsequent increase in taxes during the late 1960s and 1970s. They favored the tax

revolts that swept the nation in the late 1970s under the leadership of predominantly

older, white, middle-class Americans, which had succeeded in imposing radical

reductions in local property and state income taxes.

Voter turnout reflected this new conservative swing, which not only swept Reagan into

the White House but created a Republican majority in the Senate. Only 52 percent of

eligible voters went to the polls in 1980, the lowest turnout for a presidential election

since 1948. Those who did cast a ballot were older, whiter, and wealthier than those who

did not vote (Figure 31.4). Strong support among white voters, those over forty-five years

of age, and those with incomes over $50,000 proved crucial for Reagan’s victory.

Figure 31.4 Ronald Reagan campaigns for the presidency with his wife Nancy in South

Carolina in 1980. Reagan won in all the Deep South states except Georgia, although he

did not come from the South and his opponent Jimmy Carter did.

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REAGANOMICS Reagan’s primary goal upon taking office was to stimulate the sagging economy while

simultaneously cutting both government programs and taxes. His economic policies,

called Reaganomics by the press, were based on a theory called supply-side economics,

about which many economists were skeptical. Influenced by economist Arthur Laffer of

the University of Southern California, Reagan cut income taxes for those at the top of the

economic ladder, which was supposed to motivate the rich to invest in businesses,

factories, and the stock market in anticipation of high returns. According to Laffer’s

argument, this would eventually translate into more jobs further down the socioeconomic

ladder. Economic growth would also increase the total tax revenue—even at a lower tax

rate. In other words, proponents of “trickle-down economics” promised to cut taxes and

balance the budget at the same time. Reaganomics also included the deregulation of

industry and higher interest rates to control inflation, but these initiatives preceded

Reagan and were conceived in the Carter administration.

Many politicians, including Republicans, were wary of Reagan’s economic program;

even his eventual vice president, George H. W. Bush, had referred to it as “voodoo

economics” when competing with him for the Republican presidential nomination. When

Reagan proposed a 30 percent cut in taxes to be phased in over his first term in office,

Congress balked. Opponents argued that the tax cuts would benefit the rich and not the

poor, who needed help the most. In response, Reagan presented his plan directly to the

people (Figure 31.5).

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Figure 31.5 Ronald Reagan outlines his plan for tax reduction legislation in July 1981.

Data suggest that the supply-side policies of the 1980s actually produced less investment,

slightly slower growth, and a greater decline in wages than the non–supply side policies

of the 1990s.

Reagan was an articulate spokesman for his political perspectives and was able to garner

support for his policies. Often called “The Great Communicator,” he was noted for his

ability, honed through years as an actor and spokesperson, to convey a mixture of folksy

wisdom, empathy, and concern while taking humorous digs at his opponents. Indeed,

listening to Reagan speak often felt like hearing a favorite uncle recall stories about the

“good old days” before big government, expensive social programs, and greedy

politicians destroyed the country (Figure 31.6). Americans found this rhetorical style

extremely compelling. Public support for the plan, combined with a surge in the

president’s popularity after he survived an assassination attempt in March 1981, swayed

Congress, including many Democrats. On July 29, 1981, Congress passed the Economic

Recovery Tax Act, which phased in a 25 percent overall reduction in taxes over a period

of three years.

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Figure 31.6 President Ronald Reagan signs economic reform legislation at his ranch in

California. Note the blue jeans, denim jacket, and cowboy boots he wears.

Reagan was successful at cutting taxes, but he failed to reduce government spending.

Although he had long warned about the dangers of big government, he created a new

cabinet-level agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the number of federal

employees increased during his time in office. He allocated a smaller share of the federal

budget to antipoverty programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC),

food stamps, rent subsidies, job training programs, and Medicaid, but Social Security and

Medicare entitlements, from which his supporters benefited, were left largely untouched

except for an increase in payroll taxes to pay for them. Indeed, in 1983, Reagan agreed to

a compromise with the Democrats in Congress on a $165 billion injection of funds to

save Social Security, which included this payroll tax increase.

But Reagan seemed less flexible when it came to deregulating industry and weakening

the power of labor unions. Banks and savings and loan associations were deregulated.

Pollution control was enforced less strictly by the Environmental Protection Agency, and

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restrictions on logging and drilling for oil on public lands were relaxed. Believing the

free market was self-regulating, the Reagan administration had little use for labor unions,

and in 1981, the president fired twelve thousand federal air traffic controllers who had

gone on strike to secure better working conditions (which would also have improved the

public’s safety). His action effectively destroyed the Professional Air Traffic Controllers

Organization (PATCO) and ushered in a new era of labor relations in which, following

his example, employers simply replaced striking workers. The weakening of unions

contributed to the leveling off of real wages for the average American family during the

1980s.

Reagan’s economic policymakers succeeded in breaking the cycle of stagflation that had

been plaguing the nation, but at significant cost. In its effort to curb high inflation with

dramatically increased interest rates, the Federal Reserve also triggered a deep recession.

Inflation did drop, but borrowing became expensive and consumers spent less. In

Reagan’s first years in office, bankruptcies increased and unemployment reached about

10 percent, its highest level since the Great Depression. Homelessness became a

significant problem in cities, a fact the president made light of by suggesting that the

press exaggerated the problem and that many homeless people chose to live on the

streets. Economic growth resumed in 1983 and gross domestic product grew at an

average of 4.5 percent during the rest of his presidency. By the end of Reagan’s second

term in office, unemployment had dropped to about 5.3 percent, but the nation was nearly

$3 trillion in debt. An increase in defense spending coupled with $3.6 billion in tax relief

for the 162,000 American families with incomes of $200,000 or more made a balanced

budget, one of the president’s campaign promises in 1980, impossible to achieve.

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The Reagan years were a complicated era of social, economic, and political change, with

many trends operating simultaneously and sometimes at cross-purposes. While many

suffered, others prospered. The 1970s had been the era of the hippie,

and Newsweek magazine declared 1984 to be the “year of the Yuppie.” Yuppies, whose

name derived from “(y)oung, (u)rban (p)rofessionals,” were akin to hippies in being

young people whose interests, values, and lifestyle influenced American culture,

economy, and politics, just as the hippies’ credo had done in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Unlike hippies, however, yuppies were materialistic and obsessed with image, comfort,

and economic prosperity. Although liberal on some social issues, economically they were

conservative. Ironically, some yuppies were former hippies or yippies, like Jerry Rubin,

who gave up his crusade against “the establishment” to become a businessman.

Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 suggested to conservatives that the days of liberalism

were over and the liberal establishment might be dismantled. Many looked forward to the

discontinuation of policies like affirmative action. Conservative Christians sought to

outlaw abortion and stop the movement for gay and lesbian rights. Republicans, and

some moderate Democrats, demanded a return to “traditional” family values, a rhetorical

ploy to suggest that male authority over women and children constituted a natural order

that women’s rights and the New Left had subverted since the 1960s. As the conservative

message regarding the evils of government permeated society, distrust of the federal

government grew, inspiring some to form organizations and communities that sought

complete freedom from government control.

CREATING CONSERVATIVE POLICY Ronald Reagan’s popularity and effectiveness as a leader drew from his reputation as a

man who fought for what he believed in. He was a very articulate spokesperson for a

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variety of political ideas based on conservative principles and perspectives. Much of the

intellectual meat of the Reagan Revolution came from conservative think tanks (policy or

advocacy groups) that specifically sought to shape American political and social

dialogues. The Heritage Foundation, one such group, soon became the intellectual arm

of the conservative movement.

Launched in 1973 with a $250,000 contribution from Joseph Coors (of Coors Brewing

Company) and support from a variety of corporations and conservative foundations, the

Heritage Foundation sought to counteract what conservatives believed to be Richard

Nixon’s acceptance of a liberal consensus on too many issues. In producing its policy

position papers and political recommendations to conservative candidates and politicians,

it helped contribute to a sanitization of U.S. history and a nostalgic glorification of what

it deemed to be traditional values, seemingly threatened by the expansion of political and

personal freedoms. The foundation had lent considerable support and encouragement to

the conservative dialogues that helped carry Ronald Reagan into office in 1980. Just a

year later, it produced a document entitled Mandate for Leadership that catalogued some

two thousand specific recommendations on how to shrink the size and reach of the

federal government and implement a more consistent conservative agenda. The newly

elected Reagan administration looked favorably on the recommendations and recruited

several of the paper’s authors to serve in the White House.

CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANS AND FAMILY VALUES Among the strongest supporters of Ronald Reagan’s campaign for president were

members of the Religious Right, including Christian groups like the Moral Majority, 61

percent of whom voted for him. By 1980, evangelical Christians had become an

important political and social force in the United States (Figure 31.7). Some thirteen

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hundred radio stations in the country were owned and operated by evangelicals. Christian

television programs, such as Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club and Jim Bakker’s The

PTL (Praise the Lord) Club, proved enormously popular and raised millions of dollars

from viewer contributions. For some, evangelism was a business, but most conservative

Christians were true believers who were convinced that premarital and extramarital sex,

abortion, drug use, homosexuality, and “irreligious” forms of popular and high culture

were responsible for a perceived decline in traditional family values that threatened

American society.

Figure 31.7 This fundraising card was used by Anita Bryant, singer and beauty pageant

winner, to gather support for Save Our Children Inc., a political coalition she formed in

the late 1970s to overturn a Florida ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual

orientation. Many of the group’s strategies were soon embraced by the Moral Majority.

Despite the support he received from Christian conservative and family values voters,

Reagan was hardly an ideologue when it came to policy. Indeed, he was often quite

careful in using hot button, family-value issues to his greatest political advantage. For

example, as governor of California, one of the states that ratified the Equal Rights

Amendment (ERA) in its first year, he positioned himself as a supporter of the

amendment. When he launched his bid for the Republican nomination in 1976, however,

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he withdrew his support to gain the backing of more conservative members of his party.

This move demonstrated both political savvy and foresight. At the time he withdrew his

support, the Republican National Convention was still officially backing the amendment.

However, in 1980, the party began to qualify its stance, which dovetailed with Reagan’s

candidacy for the White House.

Reagan believed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was sufficient protection

for women against discrimination. Once in office, he took a mostly neutral position,

neither supporting nor working against the ERA. Nor did this middle position appear to

hurt him at the polls; he attracted a significant number of votes from women in 1980, and

in 1984, he polled 56 percent of the women’s vote compared to 44 percent for the

Democratic ticket of Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, the first female candidate

for vice president from a major party.

Reagan’s political calculations notwithstanding, his belief that traditional values were

threatened by a modern wave of immoral popular culture was genuine. He recognized

that nostalgia was a powerful force in politics, and he drew a picture for his audiences of

the traditional good old days under attack by immorality and decline. “Those of us who

are over thirty-five or so years of age grew up in a different America,” he explained in his

farewell address. “We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And

we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. . .

. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that

America was special.” But this America, he insisted, was being washed away. “I’m

warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an

erosion of the American spirit.”

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Concern over a decline in the country’s moral values welled up on both sides of the

political aisle. In 1985, anxiety over the messages of the music industry led to the

founding of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), a bipartisan group formed by

the wives of prominent Washington politicians including Susan Baker, the wife of

Reagan’s treasury secretary, James Baker, and Tipper Gore, the wife of then-senator Al

Gore, who later became vice president under Bill Clinton. The goal of the PMRC was to

limit the ability of children to listen to music with sexual or violent content. Its strategy

was to get the recording industry to adopt a voluntary rating system for music and

recordings, similar to the Motion Picture Association of America’s system for movies.

The organization also produced a list of particularly offensive recordings known as the

“filthy fifteen.” By August 1985, nearly twenty record companies had agreed to put

labels on their recordings indicating “explicit lyrics,” but the Senate began hearings on

the issue in September (Figure 31.8). While many parents and a number of witnesses

advocated the labels, many in the music industry rejected them as censorship. Twisted

Sister’s Dee Snider and folk musician John Denver both advised Congress against the

restrictions. In the end, the recording industry suggested a voluntary generic label. Its

effect on children’s exposure to raw language is uncertain, but musicians roundly mocked

the effort.

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Figure 31.8 Tipper Gore, wife of then-senator (and later vice president) Al Gore, at the

1985 Senate hearings into rating labels proposed by the PMRC, of which she was a

cofounder.

THE AIDS CRISIS In the early 1980s, doctors noticed a disturbing trend: Young gay men in large cities,

especially San Francisco and New York, were being diagnosed with, and eventually

dying from, a rare cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. Because the disease was seen almost

exclusively in male homosexuals, it was quickly dubbed “gay cancer.” Doctors soon

realized it often coincided with other symptoms, including a rare form of pneumonia, and

they renamed it “Gay Related Immune Deficiency” (GRID), although people other than

gay men, primarily intravenous drug users, were dying from the disease as well. The

connection between gay men and GRID—later renamed human immunodeficiency

virus/autoimmune deficiency syndrome, or HIV/AIDS—led heterosexuals largely to

ignore the growing health crisis in the gay community, wrongly assuming they were safe

from its effects. The federal government also overlooked the disease, and calls for more

money to research and find the cure were ignored.

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Even after it became apparent that heterosexuals could contract the disease through blood

transfusions and heterosexual intercourse, HIV/AIDS continued to be associated

primarily with the gay community, especially by political and religious conservatives.

Indeed, the Religious Right regarded it as a form of divine retribution meant to punish

gay men for their “immoral” lifestyle. President Reagan, always politically careful, was

reluctant to speak openly about the developing crisis even as thousands faced certain

death from the disease.

With little help coming from the government, the gay community quickly began to

organize its own response. In 1982, New York City men formed the Gay Men’s Health

Crisis (GMHC), a volunteer organization that operated an information hotline, provided

counseling and legal assistance, and raised money for people with HIV/AIDS. Larry

Kramer, one of the original members, left in 1983 and formed his own organization, the

AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), in 1987. ACT UP took a more militant

approach, holding demonstrations on Wall Street, outside the U.S. Food and Drug

Administration (FDA), and inside the New York Stock Exchange to call attention and

shame the government into action. One of the images adopted by the group, a pink

triangle paired with the phrase “Silence = Death,” captured media attention and quickly

became the symbol of the AIDS crisis (Figure 31.9).

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Figure 31.9 The pink triangle was originally used in Nazi concentration camps to

identify those there for acts of homosexuality. Reclaimed by gay activists in New York as

a symbol of resistance and solidarity during the 1970s, it was further transformed as a

symbol of governmental inaction in the face of the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s.

THE WAR ON DRUGS AND THE ROAD TO MASS INCARCERATION As Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, violent crime in the United States was reaching an

all-time high. While there were different reasons for the spike, the most important one

was demographics: The primary category of offenders, males between the ages of sixteen

and thirty-six, reached an all-time peak as the baby-boomer generation came of age. But

the phenomenon that most politicians honed in on as a cause for violent crime was the

abuse of a new, cheap drug dealt illegally on city streets. Crack cocaine, a smokable type

of cocaine popular with poorer addicts, was hitting the streets in the 1980s, frightening

middle-class Americans. Reagan and other conservatives led a campaign to “get tough on

crime” and promised the nation a “war on drugs.” Initiatives like the “Just Say No”

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campaign led by First Lady Nancy Reagan implied that drug addiction and drug-related

crime reflected personal morality.

Nixon had first used the term in 1971, but in the 1980s the “war on drugs” took on an

ominous dimension, as politicians scrambled over each other to enact harsher sentences

for drug offenses so they could market themselves as tough on crime. State after state

switched from variable to mandatory minimum sentences that were exceedingly long and

particularly harsh for street drug crimes. The federal government supported the trend with

federal sentencing guidelines and additional funds for local law enforcement agencies.

This law-and-order movement peaked in the 1990s, when California introduced a “three

strikes” law that mandated life imprisonment without parole for any third felony

conviction—even nonviolent ones. As a result, prisons became crowded, and states went

deep into debt to build more. By the end of the century, the war began to die down as the

public lost interest in the problem, the costs of the punishment binge became politically

burdensome, and scholars and politicians began to advocate the decriminalization of drug

use. By this time, however, hundreds of thousands of people had been incarcerated for

drug offenses and the total number of prisoners in the nation had grown four-fold in the

last quarter of the century. Particularly glaring were the racial inequities of the new age of

mass incarceration, with African Americans being seven times more likely to be in prison

(Figure 31.10).

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Figure 31.10 This graph of the number of people in jail, prison, and juvenile detention by

decade in the United States shows the huge increase in incarceration during the war on

drugs that began in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration. (Prisons are long-term

state or federal facilities; jails are local, short-term facilities.)

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Introduction to the Reagan Era
REAGAN’S EARLY CAREER
REPUBLICANS BACK IN THE WHITE HOUSE
REAGANOMICS
CREATING CONSERVATIVE POLICY
CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANS AND FAMILY VALUES
THE AIDS CRISIS
THE WAR ON DRUGS AND THE ROAD TO MASS INCARCERATION