Chapter 40: The
Resurgence of Conservatism ~ 1980 – 1996 ~.
I.
The Election of Ronald Reagan, 1980
Ronald Reagan was a man whose values had been formed
before the turbulent sixties, and in a style resembling his early political
hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Reagan adopted a stance that depicted “big government” as bad, federal
intervention in local affairs as condemnable, and favoritism for minorities as
negative. He drew on the ideas of a group called the “neoconservatives,” a group that included Norman Podhortz, editor of Commentary magazine, and Irving Kristol, editor of Public
Interest, two men who championed free-market capitalism. Reagan had grown
up in an impoverished family, become a B-movie actor in Hollywood I the 1940s,
become president of the Screen Actors
Guild, purged suspected “reds” in the McCarthy era, acted as
spokesperson for General Electric,
and become Californian governor. Reagan’s photogenic personality and good looks
on televised debates, as well as his attacks on President Carter’s problems,
helped him win the election of 1980 by a. Also, Republicans regained control of
the Senate. Carter’s farewell address talked of toning down the nuclear arms
race, human rights, and protecting the environment (one of his last acts in
office was to sign a bill protecting 100 million acres of Alaskan land for a
wildlife preserve.
II.
The Reagan Revolution
Reagan’s inauguration day coincided with the release
by the Iranians of their hostages, and Reagan also assembled a cabinet of the
“best and brightest,” including Secretary of the Interior James Watt, a controversial man with
little regard to the environment. Watt tried to hobble the Environmental Protection Agency and
permit oil drilling in scenic places, but finally had to resign after telling
an insulting ethnic joke in public. For over two decades, the government budget
had slowly and steadily risen, much to the disturbance of the tax-paying
public, and by the 80s, the public was tired of the New Deal and the Great
Society and ready to slash bills, just as Reagan proposed. His federal
budget had cuts of some $35 billion, and he even wooed some Southern Democrats
to abandon their own party and follow him, but on March 30, 1981, the president
was shot and wounded, but he recovered in only twelve days, showing his
devotion to physical fitness despite his age (near 70) and gaining massive sympathy
and support.
III.
The Battle of the Budget
Reagan’s budget cost $695 million, and the vast
majority of budget cuts fell upon social programs, not on defense, but there
were also sweeping tax cuts of 25% over three years. The president appeared on
national TV pleading for passage of the new tax-cut bill, and bolstered by “boll weevils,” or Democrats who
defected to the Republican side, Congress passed it. The bill used “supply side” economics to lower
individual taxes, almost eliminate federal estate taxes, and create new
tax-free savings plans for small investors. However, this theory backfired as
the nation slid into its worst recession since the Great Depression, with unemployment reaching nearly 11% in 1982
and several banks failing. Critics (Democrats) yapped that Reagan’s programs
and tax cuts had caused this mayhem, but in reality, it had been Carter’s “tight money” policies that had led to
the recession, and Reagan and his advisors sat out the storm, waiting for a
recovery that seemed to come in 1983. However, during the 1980s, income gaps
widened between the rich and poor for the first time in the 20th
century (this was mirrored by the emergence of “yuppies”), and it was massive
military spending (a $100 billion annual deficit in 1982 and nearly $200
million annual deficits in the later years) that upped the American dollar (as
well as the trade deficit, which reached a record $152 billion in 1987) and
made America the world’s biggest borrowers.
IV.
Reagan Renews the Cold War
Reagan took a denunciative 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. 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 dealing with the
Soviets.
V.
Troubles Abroad
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. army barracks on October 23, 1983, killing over 200 marines, Reagan had to
withdraw troops, though he miraculously suffered no political damage. Afterwards,
he became known as the “Teflon president,” to which nothing harmful would
stick. 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 then helped
“contra” rebels in Nicaragua. In October 1983, Reagan sent troops to Grenada,
where a military coup had killed the prime minister and brought Marxists to
power, to crush the rebels, which happened.
VI.
Round Two for Reagan
Reagan was opposed by Democrat Walter Mondale and VP candidate Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to appear on a major-party
presidential ticket, but won handily. 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 adopt free-market
economies similar to those in the West. 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 one at Reykjavik, Iceland, in November 1985,
there was stalemate; but at the third one in Washington D.C., the treaty was
finally signed, banning all INF’s from Europe. The final one at Moscow saw
Reagan warmly praising the Soviet chief for trying to end the Cold War. Also, Reagan supported Corazon Aquino’s ousting of Filipino
dictator, Ferdinand Marcos,
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
In November 1986, it was revealed that a year before,
American diplomats 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, and this scandal not only cast a dark cloud over Reagan’s foreign policy
success but also brought out a picture of Reagan as a senile old man who slept
through important cabinet meetings. Still, Reagan remained ever popular.
VIII.
Reagan’s Economic Legacy
Supply-side economics claimed that cutting taxes would
actually increase government revenue, but instead, during his eight
years in office, Reagan accumulated a $2 trillion debt—more than all his
presidential predecessors combined. Much of the debt was financed by foreign
bankers like the Japanese, ensuring that future Americans would have to work
harder or have lower standards of living to pay off such debts for the United
States. Reagan did triumph in containing the welfare state by incurring debts
so large that future spending would be difficult, thus prevent any more welfare
programs from being enacted successfully. Another trend of “Reaganomics” was the widening of the
gap between the rich and the poor.
IX.
The Religious Right
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. In a 1984 case
involving Memphis firefighters, the Court ruled that union rules about job
seniority could outweigh affirmative-action concerns. In Ward’s Cove Packing vs. Arizona
and Martin vs. Wilks, the
Court ruled made it more difficult to prove that an employer practice
discrimination in hiring and made it easier for white males to argue that they
were victims of reverse-discrimination. The 1973 case of Roe vs. Wade had basically
legalized abortion, but the 1989 case of Webster vs. Reproductive Health Service seriously compromised
protection of abortion rights. In Planned
Parenthood vs. Casey (1992), the Court ruled that states couldn’t
restrict access to abortion as long as they didn’t place an “undue burden” on
the woman.
X.
Referendum on Reaganism in 1988
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. 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. 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 Bush.
XI.
George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War
Bush had been born into a rich family, but he was
committed to public service and vowed to sculpt “a kinder, gentler America.” 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 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 ending the Cold
War. This shocked experts who had predicted that the Cold War could only end
violently. Problems remained, for who would take over the USSR’s nuclear
stockpiles or its seat in the UN Security Council (eventually, Russia did). 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. Europe found itself quite unstable when
the economically weak former communist countries re-integrated with it. America
now 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. However, in 1990, South
Africa freed Nelson Mandela,
then elected him president four years later; free elections removed the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990, and in 1992, peace came to Ecuador at last.
XII.
The Persian Gulf Crisis
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. Saddam
attacked swiftly, but the UN responded just as swiftly, placing economic
embargoes on the aggressor and preparing for military punishment. 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
to 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 surrender. American cheered the war’s rapid
end and well-fought duration, relieved that this had not turned into another
Vietnam, but Saddam Hussein had failed to be dislodged and was left to menace
the world another day. The U.S. found itself even more deeply ensnared in the
region’s web of mortal hatreds.
XIII.
Bush on the Home Front
President Bush’s 1990 American with Disabilities Act was a landmark law that banned
discrimination against citizens with disabilities. Bush also signed major water
projects bill in 1992 and agreed to sign a watered-down civil rights bill in
1991. In 1991, Bush proposed Clarence
Thomas to fill in the vacant seat left by retiring Thurgood Marshall,
but this choice was opposed by the NAACP and 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. In 1992, the
economy stalled, and Bush was forced to break an explicit campaign promise 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. 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.
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