Reviews in American History

Nearly twenty years after leaving the White House, Ronald Reagan remains a highly controversial and polarizing figure—a hero to conservatives, who yearn for the emergence of another politician of “Reaganesque” stature, but a malign revanchist in the eyes of many liberals and leftists, who blame him for setting the nation on a disastrous new course. These sharply divergent views of Reagan have also colored perceptions of the 1980s, a period that has only recently attracted the attention of historians. In most accounts of post–World War II U.S. history, the 1980s appear as coda to the more tumultuous and consequential 1960s and 1970s, when conservative currents that had been rising since Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign finally overwhelmed liberalism and inaugurated a new era in American politics.

But now, with the publication of a spate of new books specifically on the 1980s, it is possible to see the decade from a new vantage point and appreciate it on its own terms. This literature not only casts a welcome light on a misunderstood and often caricatured period. It also raises new questions about the relationship between the 1960s and the 1980s and complicates the conventional “rise of conservatism” narrative that has long informed our understanding of recent U.S. history.

The books under review here are among the latest products of this new interest in the “Age of Reagan” and its aftermath. All three have interesting and important things to say about Reagan and his influence on American politics. And each, in its own way, argues that political debate shifted markedly to [End Page 303] the right during the 1980s, a shift that was not substantially reversed during the Clinton era. But they also suggest that this shift did not represent a complete victory for the political right and that the 1980s witnessed a number of significant trends that confounded and enraged many conservatives—despite their increasing domination of mainstream politics.

For John Ehrman, the 1980s were an important period of transition in many areas of American life. It was in the 1980s, he contends, that liberalism, in decline since the mid-1960s, was finally repudiated by a majority of voters, while conservatism gained supporters and became the nation’s most influential ideology. Economic developments in the decade were equally important, as business launched initiatives that would lead to the birth of the “new economy” in the 1990s. Important social and cultural changes occurred in the 1980s as well. Many of these, like the continued influx of women into the workforce, were a continuation of trends that began the 1960s and 1970s and were far from conservative in their implications. By the end of the 1980s, notes Ehrman, the United States had become a more diverse, tolerant, and individualistic society, an outcome that perplexed staunch liberals and die-hard conservatives but was appealing to a broad “center” that included most Americans.

Ehrman insists that Reagan played a key role in encouraging many of these changes. Though inspired by conservative principles, he was, above all, a pragmatist who knew when to compromise and retreat—something he was forced to do regularly after 1982, when he recognized that pressing forward with the conservative “revolution” sought by many of his supporters would alienate much of the public and probably doom his prospects for re-election in 1984. A supremely skilled politician, he was nonetheless able to “nudge” political discourse to the right, enabling his successors to continue the struggle to advance conservative aims. Ehrman argues that Reagan was more moderate than many people at the time recognized, especially with regard to social issues. Eager to maintain the support of the center...