1 gen 1990 anni - summary

Descrizione:

Two central developments marked the years from 1980 to 1991: the rise of the New Right in U.S. politics and the end of the Cold War. Domestically, the New Right, which had been building in strength since the mid-1960s, rejected the liberalism of the Great Society and the perceived permissiveness of feminism and the sexual revolution. Shifting their allegiance from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan, right-wing Americans built a political movement from the ground up and in 1980 came to national power with Reagan’s first election as president. His predecessor, the Democrat Jimmy Carter, had championed centrist liberalism domestically and human rights abroad. But with a weak economy and mounting inflation, as well as a major conflict with Iran, Carter was no match for Reagan, the rising star of conservatism. Advocating free-market economics, lower taxes, and fewer government regulations, Reagan became a champion of the New Right. His record as president did not fully deliver on his rhetoric: initial tax cuts were followed by tax hikes, and he frequently dismayed the Christian Right by not pursuing their interests forcefully enough, especially regarding abortion and school prayer.

Reagan also backed off an initially aggressive stance toward the USSR. His shifting approaches to the Soviets did contribute to the end of the Cold War. An already overstretched Soviet economy strained to keep up with Reagan’s massive military buildup in the early 1980s. Reagan then agreed to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in several summits between 1985 and 1987, lending support to Gorbachev’s reform agenda. More important than Reagan’s actions, however, were the contradictions of the Soviet economic structure itself. Gorbachev instituted the first significant reforms in Soviet society in half a century, which loosened Communist Party control and allowed popular movement to rise up within the USSR and both its own republics and nearby satellite states. The reforms stirred popular criticism of the Soviet Union, which finally broke apart in 1991. That same year, the United States defeated Iraq in the Gulf War — the prelude to a decades-long series of conflicts in the Middle East.

1984 Republican National Convention

Ronald Reagan delivers his acceptance speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention. Reagan’s political rise captured the spirit of conservative politics in the late 1970s and 1980s.


The 1970s began with Americans already divided by Vietnam and social strife. A decade defined by economic malaise, political scandal, and rapid change only intensified a widespread uneasiness. As a result, many ordinary Americans developed a deep distrust of the expansive liberalism of the Great Society. A revived Republican Party thrived as an alternative. With a movement known as the New Right leading the way, conservatives offered the nation a new political order based on deregulation, low taxes, Christian morality, and a reenergized Cold War foreign policy. The election of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States in 1980 marked the ascendance of this political formula, and his presidency reshaped government in the mold of this decidedly conservative republicanism.

The New Right revived confidence in “free markets” and called for a less activist government role in economic regulation and social welfare. Like the New Right generally, Reagan was profoundly skeptical of the liberal ideology that had underpinned American public policy since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Reagan famously said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” and he duly sought to slash regulation and government programs. His conservative, domestic economic agenda was paired with aggressive anticommunism abroad — rekindling dormant tensions with the Soviet Union before Reagan, in his second term, helped orchestrate a thawing of the Cold War.

Reagan became the face of conservative ascendancy, but he did not create the New Right groundswell that brought him into office. Grassroots activists in the 1960s and 1970s built a formidable right-wing movement, and by 1980 resurgent conservatives were ready to contend for national power. Their chance came with Democratic president Jimmy Carter’s mismanagement of two national crises. Raging inflation and the Iranian seizure of American hostages in Tehran undid Carter and provided an opening for the New Right, which would shape the nation’s politics for the remainder of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first.

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