Introduction for Chapter 30

CHAPTER 30 Conservative America in the Ascent, 1980–1991

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA

What factors made the rise of the New Right possible, and what ideas about freedom and citizenship did conservatives articulate in the 1980s?

The decade of the 1970s saw Americans divided by the Vietnam War, wearied by social unrest, and unmoored by economic drift. As a result, many ordinary citizens developed a deep distrust of the muscular Great Society liberalism of the 1960s. Seizing political advantage amid the trauma and divisions, a revived Republican Party, led by the New Right, offered the nation a fresh way forward: economic deregulation, low taxes, Christian morality, and a reenergized Cold War foreign policy. The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 symbolized the ascendance of this new political formula, and the president himself helped shape the era.

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

The New Right revived confidence in “free markets” and called for a smaller government role in economic regulation and social welfare. Reagan famously said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Like the New Right generally, Reagan was profoundly skeptical of the liberal ideology that had informed American public policy since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. His presidency combined an economically conservative domestic agenda with aggressive anticommunism abroad. Reagan’s foreign policy brought an end to détente — a lessening of tensions — with the Soviet Union (which had begun with Richard Nixon) and then, unexpectedly, a sudden thawing of U.S.-Soviet relations, laying the groundwork for the end of the Cold War.

Reagan defined the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s, but he did not create the New Right groundswell that brought him into office. Grassroots conservative activists in the 1960s and 1970s built a formidable right-wing movement that awaited an opportune political moment to challenge for national power. That moment came in 1980, when Democratic president Jimmy Carter’s popularity plummeted as a result of his mismanagement of two national crises. Raging inflation and the Iranian seizure of U.S. 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 first decade of the twenty-first.