Chapter 40: The Resurgence of Conservatism

I. The Election of Ronald Reagan 1980

2. He skillfully mobilized political resentments in a manner reminiscent of his early political hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both Roosevelt and Reagan championed the “common man” against vast impersonal menaces that overshadowed the individual. But where the Democratic Roosevelt had branded big business the foe of the “forgotten man,” the Republican Reagan depicted big government as the archvillain.
3. Ronald Reagan was well suited to lead the gathering conservative crusade. Reared in a generation whose values were formed well before the upheavals of the 1960s, he naturally sided with the new right on social issues.
5. He preached a “populist” political philosophy that condemned federal intervention in local affairs, favoritism for minorities, and the elitism of arrogant bureaucrats.
7. Though Reagan was no intellectual, he drew on the ideas of a small but influential group of thinkers known as “neoconservatives.” 
8. Their ranks included Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, and Irving Kristol, editor of The Public Interest.

II. The Reagan Revolution

• Reagan’s arrival in Washington was triumphal. The Iranians contributed to the festive mood by releasing the hostages on Reagan’s Inauguration Day, January 20, 1981, after 444 days of captivity.
• Reagan assembled a conservative cabinet of the “best and the rightest” and relied on these and other advisers to make important decisions. 
• The cabinet included a highly controversial Coloradan, James Watt, as secretary of the interior. Watt was a product of the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” a fiercely anti-Washington movement that had sprung up to protest federal control over the rich mineral and timber resources in the western states. 
• Environmentalists howled loudly about Watt’s schemes to hobble the Environmental Protection Agency and to permit oil drilling in scenic places. After bitter protests they succeeded in halting Watt’s plan to allow oil exploration off the California coastline.
•  Watt blithely rebuffed critics by saying, “I make lots of mistakes because I make lots of decisions.” He made one mistake too many in 1983, when he thoughtlessly told an offensive ethnic joke in public and was forced to resign.
• By the early 1980s, this antigovernment message found a receptive audience. In the two decades since 1960, federal spending had risen from about 18 percent of gross national product to nearly 23 percent. At the same time, the composition of the federal budget had been shifting from defense to entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare.
•  In 1973 the budget of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare surpassed that of the Department of Defense.

III. The Battle of the Budget

• Swept along on a tide of presidential popularity,Congress swallowed Reagan’s budget proposals approving expenditures of some $695 billion, with a projected deficit of about $38 billion.Reagan’s triumph amazed political observers,especially defeated Democrats. 

1. The new president had descended upon Washington like an avenging angel of conservatism, kicking up a blinding whirlwind of political change. 
2. He sought nothing less than the dismantling of the welfare state and the reversal of the political evolution of the preceding half-century. His impressive performance demonstrated the power of the presidency with a skill not seen since Lyndon Johnson’s day. 
3. Out the window went the textbooks that had concluded, largely on the basis of the stalemated 1970s, that this office had been eclipsed by a powerful, uncontrollable Congress.

IV. Reagan Renews the Cold War

1. Reagan took a get-tough stance against the USSR, especially when they continued to invade Afghanistan, and his plan to defeat the Soviets was to wage a super-expensive arms race that would eventually force the Soviets into bankruptcy and render them powerless.
   • He began this with his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly known as “Star Wars,” which proposed a system of lasers that could fire from space and destroy any nuclear weapons fired by Moscow before they hit America—a system that many experts considered impossible as well as upsetting to the “balance of terror” (don’t fire for fear of retaliation) that had kept nuclear war from being unleashed all these years. SDI was never built.
2. Late in 1981, the Soviets clamped down on Poland’s massive union called “Solidarity” and received economic sanctions from the U.S.
   • The deaths of three different aging Soviet oligarchs from 1982-85 and the breaking of all arms-control negotiations in 1983 further complicated dealings with the Soviets.

V. Troubles Abroad

1. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to destroy guerilla bases, and the next year, Reagan sent U.S. forces as part of an international peace-keeping force. But, when a suicide bomber crashed a bomb-filled truck into U.S. Marine barracks on October 23, 1983 killing over 200 marines, Reagan had to withdraw the troops, though he miraculously suffered no political damage.
   • Afterwards, he became known as the “Teflon president,” the president to which nothing harmful would stick.
2. Reagan accused Nicaraguan “Sandinistas,” a group of leftists that had taken over the Nicaraguan government, of turning the country into a forward base from which Communist forces could invade and conquer all of Latin America.
   • He also accused them of helping revolutionary forces in El Salvador, where violence had reigned since 1979, and Reagan then helped “contra” rebels in Nicaragua fight against the Sandinistas.
   • In October 1983, Reagan sent troops to Grenada, where a military coup had killed the prime minister and brought communists to power. The U.S. crushed the communist rebels.

VI. Round Two for Reagan

1. Reagan was opposed by Democrat Walter Mondale and V.P. candidate Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to appear on a major-party presidential ticket, but won handily.
2. Foreign policy issues dominated Reagan’s second term, one that saw the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, a personable, energetic leader who announced two new Soviet policies: glasnost, or “openness,” which aimed to introduce free speech and political liberty to the Soviet Union, and perestroika, or “restructuring,” which meant that the Soviets would move toward adopting free-market economies similar to those in the West.
3. At a summit meeting at Geneva in 1985, Gorbachev introduced the idea of ceasing the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF). At a second meeting at Reykjavik, Iceland, in November 1985, there was stalemate. At the third one in Washington D.C., the treaty was finally signed, banning all INF’s from Europe.
   • The final summit at Moscow saw Reagan warmly praising the Soviet chief for trying to end the Cold War.
4. Also, Reagan supported Corazon Aquino’s ousting of Filipino dictator, Ferdinand Marcos.
5. He also ordered a lightning raid on Libya, in 1986, in retaliation for Libya’s state-sponsored terrorist attacks, and began escorting oil tankers through the Persian Gulf during the Iran—Iraq War.

VII. The Iran-Contra Imbroglio

1. In November 1986, it was revealed that a year before, American diplomats led by Col. Olive North had secretly arranged arms sales to Iranian diplomats in return for the release of American hostages (at least one was) and had used that money to aid Nicaraguan contra rebels.
• This brazenly violated the congressional ban on helping Nicaraguan rebels, not to mention Reagan’s personal vow not to negotiate with terrorists.
• An investigation concluded that even if Reagan had no knowledge of such events, as he claimed, he should have. This scandal not only cast a dark cloud over Reagan’s foreign policy success, but also brought out a picture of Reagan as a somewhat senile old man who slept through important cabinet meetings.
• Two foreign-policy problems seemed insoluble to Reagan: the continuing captivity of a number of American hostages, seized by Muslim extremist groups in bleeding, battered Lebanon; and the continuing grip on power of the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

VIII. Reagan's Economic Legacy

                    Ronald Reagan had taken office vowing to invigorate the American economy by rolling back government regulations, lowering taxes, and balancing the budget. He did ease many regulatory rules, and he pushed major tax reform bills through Congress in 1981 and 1986. But a balanced budget remained grotesquely out of reach. Supply-side economic theory had promised that lower taxes would actually increase government revenue because they would so stimulate the economy as a whole. But in fact the combination of tax reduction and huge increases in
military spending opened a vast “revenue hole” of $200 billion annual deficits. In his eight years in
office, President Reagan added nearly $2 trillion to the national debt—more than all of his predecessors combined, including those who had fought protracted global wars.

• Yet another legacy of the 1980s was a sharp reversal of a long-term trend toward a more equitable distribution of income and an increasing squeeze on the middle class. In the early 1990s, median household income (in 1993 dollars) actually declined, from about $33,500 in 1989 to about $31,000 in 1993. Whether that disturbing trend should be attributed to Reagan’s policies or to more deeply running economic currents remained controversial.

IX. The Religious Right

2. Religion pervaded American politics in the 1980s.
3. Especially conspicuous was a coalition of conservative, evangelical Christians known as the religious right. In 1979 the Reverend Jerry Falwell, an evangelical minister from Lynchburg, Virginia, founded a political organization called the Moral Majority. Falwell preached with great success against sexual permissiveness, abortion, feminism, and the spread ofgay rights. In its first two years, the Moral Majority registered between 2 million and 3 million voters.
4. Using radio, direct-mail marketing, and cable TV, “televangelists” reached huge audiences in the 1980s, collected millions of dollars, and became aggressive political advocates of conservative causes.
5. Beginning in the 1980s, energized religious conservatives began to exert their political muscle in a cultural war.
   • Rev. Jerry Falwell started the Moral Majority, consisting of evangelical Christians.
   • 2-3 million registered as Moral Majority voters in its first two years.
   • Using the power of media, they opposed sexual permissiveness, abortion, feminism, and homosexuality.
6. In large part, the conservative movement of the 80s was an answer to the liberal movement of the 60s. The pendulum was swinging back.
   • Conservatives viewed America as being hijacked in the 60s by a minority of radicals with political aims; the conservatives saw themselves as taking back America.

X. Conservatism in the Courts

1. Reagan used the courts as his instrument against affirmative action and abortion, and by 1988, the year he left office, he had appointed a near-majority of all sitting federal judges.
   • Included among those were three conservative-minded judges, one of which was Sandra Day O’Connor, a brilliant Stanford Law School graduate and the first female Supreme Court justice in American history.
2. In a 1984 case involving Memphis firefighters, the Court ruled that union rules about job seniority could outweigh affirmative-action concerns.
3. In Ward’s Cove Packing v. Arizona and Martin v. Wilks, the Court ruled it more difficult to prove that an employer practiced discrimination in hiring and made it easier for white males to argue that they were victims of reverse-discrimination.
4. The 1973 case of Roe v. Wade had basically legalized abortion, but the 1989 case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services seriously compromised protection of abortion rights.
   • In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Court ruled that states could restrict access to abortion as long as they didn’t place an “undue burden” on the woman.

XI. Referendum on Reaganism in 1988

1. Democrats got back the Senate in 1986 and sought to harm Reagan with the Iran-Contra scandal and unethical behavior that tainted an oddly large number of Reagan’s cabinet.
   • They even rejected Robert Bork, Reagan’s ultraconservative choice to fill an empty space on the Supreme Court.
2. The federal budget and the international trade deficit continued to soar while falling oil prices hurt housing values in the Southwest and damaged savings-and-loans institutions, forcing Reagan to order a $500 million rescue operation for the S&L institutions.
   • On October 19, 1987, the stock market fell 508 points, sparking fears of the end of the money culture, but this was premature.
3. In 1988, Gary Hart tried to get the Democratic nomination but had to drop out due to a sexual misconduct charge while Jesse Jackson assembled a “rainbow coalition” in hopes of becoming president. But, the Democrats finally chose Michael Dukakis, who lost badly to Republican candidate and Reagan’s vice president George Herbert Walker Bush, 112 to 426.

XII. George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War

1. Bush had been born into a rich family, but he was committed to public service and vowed to sculpt “a kindler, gentler America.”
2. In 1989, it seemed that Democracy was reviving in previously Communist hot-spots.
   • In China, thousands of democratic-seeking students protested in Tiananmen Square but they were brutally crushed by Chinese tanks and armed forces.
   • In Eastern Europe, Communist regimes fell in Poland (which saw Solidarity rise again), Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Romania.
     • Soon afterwards, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.
   • In 1990, Boris Yeltsin stopped a military coup that tried to dislodge Gorbachev, then took over Russia when the Soviet Union fell and disintegrated into the Commonwealth of Independent States, of which Russia was the largest member. Thus, the Cold War was over.
     • This shocked experts who had predicted that the Cold War could only end violently.
3. Problems remained however, as the question remained of who would take over the U.S.S.R.’s nuclear stockpiles or its seat in the U.N. Security Council? Eventually, Russia did.
4. In 1993, Bush signed the START II accord with Yeltsin, pledging both nations to reduce their long-range nuclear arsenals by two-thirds within ten years.
   • Trouble was still present when the Chechnyen minority in Russia tried to declare independence and was resisted by Russia; that incident hasn’t been resolved yet.
5. Europe found itself quite unstable when the economically weak former communist countries re-integrated with it.
6. America then had no rival to guard against, and it was possible that it would revert back to its isolationist policies. Also, military spending had soaked up so much money that upon the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon closed 34 military bases, canceled a $52 billion order for a navy attack plane, and forced scores of Californian defense plants to shut their doors.
7. However, in 1990, South Africa freed Nelson Mandela, and he was elected president 4 years later.
   1. Free elections removed the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990, and in 1992, peace came to Ecuador at last.

XIII. The Persian Gulf Crisis

1. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded oil-rich Kuwait with 100,000 men, hoping to annex it as a 19th province and use its oil fields to replenish debts incurred during the Iraq—Iran War, a war which oddly saw the U.S. supporting Hussein despite his bad reputation.
2. Saddam attacked swiftly, but the U.N. responded just as swiftly, placing economic embargoes on the aggressor and preparing for military punishment.
3. Fighting “Operation Desert Storm”
   • Some 539,000 U.S. military force members joined 270,000 troops from 28 other countries to attack Iraq in a war, which began on January 12, 1991, when Congress declared it.
     • On January 16, the U.S. and U.N. unleashed a hellish air war against Iraq for 37 days.
     • Iraq responded by launching several ultimately ineffective “scud” missiles at Saudi Arabia and Israel, but it had far darker strategies available, such as biological and chemical weapons and strong desert fortifications with oil-filled moats that could be lit afire if the enemy got too close.
   • American General Norman Schwarzkopf took nothing for granted, strategizing to suffocate Iraqis with an onslaught of air bombing raids and then rush them with troops.
     • On February 23, “Operation Desert Storm” began with an overwhelming land attack that lasted four days, saw really little casualties, and ended with Saddam’s forces surrender.
     • American cheered the war’s rapid end and well-fought duration and was relieved that this had not turned into another Vietnam, but Saddam Hussein had failed to be dislodged from power and was left to menace the world another day.
4. The U.S. found itself even more deeply ensnared in the region’s web of mortal hatreds.

XIV. Bush on the Home Front

1. President Bush’s 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act was a landmark law that banned discrimination against citizens with disabilities.
2. Bush also signed a major water projects bill in 1992 and agreed to sign a watered-down civil rights bill in 1991.
3. In 1991, Bush proposed Clarence Thomas (a Black man) to fill in the vacant seat left by retiring Thurgood Marshall (the first Black Supreme Court justice), but this choice was opposed by the NAACP since Thomas was a conservative and by the National Organization for Women (NOW), since Thomas was supposedly pro-abortion.
   • In early October 1991, Anita Hill charged Thomas with sexual harassment, and even though Thomas was still selected to be on the Court, Hill’s case publicized sexual harassment and tightened tolerance of it (Oregon’s Senator Robert Packwood had to step down in 1995 after a case of sexual harassment).
   • A gender gap arose between women in both parties.
4. In 1992, the economy stalled, and Bush was forced to break an explicit campaign promise (“Read my lips, no new taxes”) and add $133 billion worth of new taxes to try to curb the $250 billion annual budget.
   • When it was revealed that many House members had written bad checks from a private House “bank,” public confidence lessened even more.
5. The 27th Amendment banned congressional pay raises from taking effect until an election had seated a new session of Congress, an idea first proposed by James Madison in 1789.