Was there a Reagan Revolution?

The two terms of the Reagan Presidency from 1981 to 1989 represented in many important respects, the most significant transformation in American politics and of the presidency since the age of Franklin Roosevelt 50 years before. By the end of this eight year period, the ‘liberal consensus’ adhered to by both Democratic and Republican Presidents prior to Reagan had been shattered, with the political centre and terms of debate shifting decisively to the right for at least the next 20 years.

The Reagan presidency transformed the federal government itself too. It halted the expansion of the incipient American welfare state, wasting no time in dismantling significant numbers of Johnson’s Great Society initiatives, as well as bringing into executive departments and the judiciary a new generation of conservative officials and advisors, many of them highly sceptical of the utility of the very departments and agencies they were supposed to be heading.

Whilse there are plenty of grounds to regard the Reagan presidency as a transformative one in both political, economic and electoral terms, there is also much to suggest that it fell short of the ‘revolution’ which Reagan had promised during his presidential campaign. In his first State of The Union Address on the 18th of February, the new president articulated what he called “four common-sense fundamentals” of his economic programme: Reductions in the growth of government spending; Individual and business tax reductions to stimulate saving and investment; Elimination of government regulation considered harmful to business; Maintaining a consistent monetary policy that would maintain the value of the dollar.

Though primarily economic (dubbed Reaganomics), these aims had a wider, political purpose.

They were designed to “curb the size and influence of the federal establishment”, promoting in its place a new ethic of restored American self-confidence, individualism and entrepreneurship as the drivers of economic growth and prosperity. Measured in these terms, the Reagan presidency did not resemble a ‘revolution’ in any practical sense. In the event, government grew in the Reagan years. By the time his successor, George HW Bush left office, government debt was higher than at all other periods in American history combined. The share of national income diverted into federal taxes stood at just 0.1% lower than when Reagan had come into office, whilst total spending on welfare programmes in 1989 exceeded 1981 levels.

Although from 1982 onwards Americans did enjoy one of the longest periods of economic growth in American history, the rate of growth itself was no higher than it had been during the Carter years, and indeed, much of it can be credited, ironically, to Keynsian-style deficit spending by the federal government rather than the ‘Reaganomics’ of which so much was made. Though Reagan years brought with them significant change, they were far less successful in overturning the old order than the president and his supporters had promised. Because of this, Reagan’s presidency is far better understood as a transformation than a revolution.

With this in mind, we must weigh up the reasons for the failure and limitations of the self-proclaimed ‘Reagan Revolution’, and consider the questions it raises. Were these problems with their origins in the many contradictions and oversights of New Conservative philosophy, or might a President of different qualities to Reagan have been more successful? Even under different leadership, how far would the United States Constitution and political system, designed to constrain and counterbalance federal and executive power, have allowed a true ‘revolution’ to take place? Finally, in a system so sensitive to the ebb and flow of Presidential prestige, we must allow for contingency and the role that it played in assisting or hindering the President’s objectives.

It is clear that the contradictions within the philosophy underlying the ‘Reagan revolution’ themselves contributed to its limitations, as did divisions within the broad electoral coalition created to deliver him the Presidency. As Hodgson explains in his history of the ascendancy of the ‘religious right’, Reagan was the first president to explicitly endorse the aims of the evangelical protestant movement, with its commitment to overturning abortion rights and restoring prayer in schools.

In electoral terms they had become a politically significant force by 1980, with 23% of voters regarding themselves as ‘evangelical’ Protestants, peaking at 32% in 1987. These religious voters were just one component, however, in a wildly diverse political coalition. Hodgson notes the “oddity” of their support for a once-divorced movie star, “a ‘light drinker’” and a man “fond of telling off-colour stories”. Reagan, he writes, “had a family life that was in several respects by no means a model of evangelical purity” .

These social conservatives sat alongside Reagan’s ‘kitchen cabinet’ of California businessmen, architects of the very permissive modernity that they deplored. At the same time, anti-Communists such as Reagan’s supporters within the Committee on the Present Danger were urging astronomical increases in military spending, whilst the fiscal conservatives within the coalition were urging the President to decisively reduce the size of the federal government.

The coalition which delivered Reagan into office in 1980, therefore, was one of seemingly insurmountable contradictions and competing interests, with the ‘Reagan Revolution’ meaning a vast number of different things to different people. It set out to restore American self-confidence in the federal government whilst substantially reducing its capabilities, cutting the budget whilst seeking to outspend the Soviet Union in arms on a scale with which they could not possibly compete. Social conservatives sough to restore American morality whilst competing with those who wished to remove restrictions on business and media activity.Reaganite rhetoric emphasised individual liberties whilst condemning federal activism to prevent corporate abuses at home and supported authoritarian regimes in Argentina and Nicaragua.

Though broad electoral coalitions of the sort which delivered Franklin Roosevelt victory remained a constant and necessary feature of the bipolar American political system, the Reagan coalition was unique in that it contained not just diverse groups, but those with explicitly contradictory political objectives. In light of this fact, it seems rather unsurprising that the ‘Reagan Revolution’ failed to satisfy any of these groups in their entirety and that the programme, whilst clear in its headline objectives, lacked the coherence necessary to fully deliver upon them.

In many respects, therefore, Reagan’s ability to bring together such diverse groups is clear evidence of his political skill, and attributes as a leader. Leuchtenberg has made much of Reagan’s stylistic parallels with FDR and the way in which he used the warmth of his personality in order to inspire confidence amongst his fellow citizens . Reagan’s 1980 campaign began with Reagan proclaiming “”a troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading with us to keep our rendezvous with destiny ” , drawing clear parallels to FDR’s appeal to the inner strength of the American people in the days of the Great Depression, and earning him the headline “Franklin Delano Reagan” from the New York Times.

Reagan’s 1984 campaign became known for the ‘Morning in America’ advert, which announced that America was “prouder and stronger and better” , at the end of Reagan’s first term in office. Through a mastery of the medium of television learned during his Hollywood career, meticulous planning of public appearances (Donald Regan, his Chief of Staff remembered how “every place where Reagan was expected to stand was chalked with toe marks”) and warm personality, he succeeded in achieving levels of personal popularity not seen since the days of Roosevelt, which, in many respects transcended the success or failure of his policies. Dallek has made much of Reagan’s “extraordinary mastery of public symbols that resonated so effectively with millions of Americans”.

The value of such skills to the success of the ‘Reagan Revolution’ is put into clear relief by a comparison with Barry Goldwater, who foreshadowing Reagan, had in 1964 railed against “the encroachment of individual freedom by Big Government”. The aggressiveness and perceived instability of a Goldwater presidency turned out to be fatal, gifting Johnson a resounding victory in the 1964 election. In contrast, Dallek notes that Reagan’s gift was to articulate similar objectives “not by being a loud and threatening figure but by making wisecracks or poking fun at his enemies”.

To at least some degree, therefore, Reagan must personally be credited for taking broadly similar ideas and presenting them in a way which was appealing to the electorate.

Just as Reagan himself was central to the successes achieved by the ‘Reagan revolution’, however, many of its shortcomings and the struggle to implement it can be attributed both to his personality and style of government. Gareth Davies has referred to him as a “a pragmatic ideologue, willing to compromise and accept partial victories”, a judgement evidenced by the ease with which he compromised on the centrepiece of his first term, the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act, which sought to restore growth to the American economy through tax cuts and reductions in federal spending.

Through such willingness to compromise in his first term in office, Reagan harmed the overall coherence and weakened the prospects of success of the Reagan revolution. Whilst delivering cuts in regulations for business and taxation, for example, he shied away from substantial attacks on Great Society and New Deal programmes such as Medicare and Social Security, which between them accounted for almost half of the federal budget.

This oversight appears to go to the core of the flaws in Reagan’s style of leadership. Whilst his predecessor Carter had become known for his pessimism and appeals to frugality, the ebullient Reagan’s appeal lay in the fact that he made so few demands upon the electorate. New York Times reporter Bill Keller remarked that, “Reagan asked Americans to dream great dreams, but he rarely asked them to give up anything”.

By espousing a populist agenda which lay the nation’s ills at the foot of a mythical ‘big government’, the Reagan Presidency engineered a situation in which aspects of federal activity which had relatively few vocal advocates, such as business regulation, were easily overturned, while more popular and substantially more expensive aspects of the great Society, such as Social Security and Medicare were left largely untouched. The Reagan Revolution’s progress was curtailed by the President’s unwillingness to make difficult decisions, and by his lack of a mandate to do it.

The most substantial constraints on the wholesale implementation of the Reagan Revolution, however, were political and structural. As activist presidents throughout American history have discovered, the US Constitution established a system of government which was, quite intentionally, resistant to rapid political change, and even less so to change initiated by the Executive. Reagan’s efforts to use presidential leadership to cut back federal programmes differed from Roosevelt and Johnson’s efforts to extend them not just in intent, but also in the fact that he never enjoyed the support of both houses of Congress.

Whilst Roosevelt and Johnson could rely on significant majorities in both the House of Representatives and Senate in order to pass their legislative agendas, Reagan faced Democratic majorities in the House and, from 1987 onwards, in the Senate as well. Even beyond such structural political obstacles, the very nature of the president’s agenda of cuts provoked Congressional opposition from Republicans and Democrats alike. Democratic Majority Leader Tip O’Niel called the President’s proposals to penalize those who opted for early retirement as “despicable”, whilst bipartisan majorities overturned attempts to reduce school meal sizes and to classify ketchup as a vegetable.

In broader terms, therefore, the representative and pluralistic nature of the US federal government, with features such as the Connecticut Compromise giving smaller, rural states a greater voice, made it extremely problematic for the Reagan administration to overturn federal programmes or revoke programmes upon which, through their popularity, had become retrenched. Had the President maintained a more direct and assertive style of Congressional leadership rather than the delegation of authority to a small circle of confidants as he did, the odds of overcoming such obstacles would undoubtedly been greater. Nonetheless, the structural opposition to any retrenchment of the federal government was always bound to be broad and bipartisan.

With these philosophical, personal, political and structural considerations in mind, we should be impressed that Reagan achieved as much of his so-called ‘revolution’ as he did. Whilst its success in reversing the expansion of the federal government and freeing a greater share of the economy for private enterprise is highly dubious, Reagan’s period in office nonetheless saw a serious takeover of the instruments of government by conservatism for the first time since the middle of the century.

Religious fundamentalists such as James Watt inhabited Theodore Roosevelt’s Department of the Interior, and soon set to work dismantling much of what it sought to achieve. Economic policy fell into the hands of men such as David Stockman who was ideologically committed to bankrupting the federal government. Nonetheless, the damage that such figures were able to inflict was restrained by Reagan’s failure to capture Congress, and by the responsiveness of Congressmen to the interests of their constituents.

In these respects, therefore, the Reagan Administrations brought about a transformation, rather than revolution. The real revolution was an electoral one. Through his rhetoric, personal appeal and the electoral coalition he created, Reagan has transformed the terms of American political discourse to the present day, forcing Democratic and Republican presidents alike to pay lip service to the rhetoric of ‘small government’ and social conservatism. This remarkable achievement meant that although the Reagan Revolution did not achieve its goals within the lifetime of Reagan’s time in office, they would be adopted and continued by his successors of both parties in the years to come.