The American Yawp — Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Triumph of the Right
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

In October 1980, Ronald Reagan told Detroit autoworkers that under Jimmy Carter, American families still had two cars in the garage — “both Japanese, and out of gas.” Promising to make America a “city upon a hill” again, Reagan rode a conservative wave called the New Right: pro-business economics plus Christian moral values. It drew working-class “Reagan Democrats” from the Democratic Party and shattered the liberal consensus since Franklin Roosevelt.

The New Right had been building for years through grassroots activism. After Barry Goldwater’s crushing 1964 defeat, conservatives blamed the Great Society, court-ordered busing, and rising taxes. George Wallace won five states as a third-party candidate in 1968 before an assassin’s bullet paralyzed him in 1972. Evangelical Christians mobilized against abortion after Roe v. Wade (1973), and in 1979 preacher Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority.

Carter entered the 1980 race weakened by inflation, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Reagan, a former actor and Cold War hawk, asked voters, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” He praised “states’ rights,” a slogan with deep segregationist roots, and attacked “welfare queens.” Reagan won 51 percent of the vote and a 489–49 Electoral College landslide; Republicans took the Senate for the first time since 1955.

Reagan declared, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” His team promised that cutting taxes on businesses and the wealthy would let prosperity “trickle down” to everyone. Congress passed a $675 billion tax cut in 1981, dropping the top rate from 70 to 50 percent. But tax cuts plus a military buildup exploded the federal deficit, and high interest rates triggered a brutal 1981–82 recession. Cuts to food stamps and welfare hit the poor hardest.

By 1984 the economy had recovered, and Reagan campaigned on “Morning Again in America,” crushing Walter Mondale in forty-nine of fifty states. Congress passed the bipartisan Tax Reform Act of 1986 and an immigration law granting amnesty to nearly three million undocumented immigrants. Reagan reshaped the courts, appointing Sandra Day O’Connor and Antonin Scalia, though the Senate rejected his nominee Robert Bork.

The decade’s prosperity was uneven. Black unemployment stayed double the white rate, and one-third of Black and Latino Americans lived in poverty. Yet Black political power grew. The 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police, and the officers’ acquittal, sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which killed more than sixty people. The AIDS epidemic devastated gay communities as the Reagan administration largely ignored it.

Abroad, Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and launched a massive military buildup. His Reagan Doctrine pledged aid to anticommunist fighters worldwide, a policy that produced the Iran-Contra scandal, in which officials sold arms to Iran to fund Nicaraguan rebels. But Reagan also negotiated: after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced reforms, they signed a 1987 treaty eliminating intermediate nuclear missiles. When communism collapsed in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the Cold War ended.

George H. W. Bush won the presidency in 1988 but broke his “no new taxes” pledge, and a recession doomed him. In 1992, Bill Clinton, a centrist “New Democrat,” beat Bush by focusing on the economy: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Clinton embraced free trade, reformed welfare, and presided over the dot-com boom — but the House voted for impeachment in 1998 over the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the Senate acquitted him. The disputed 2000 election ended when the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount, handing the presidency to George W. Bush by 537 votes.

The triumph of the right was real but incomplete. The national debt tripled, most New Deal and Great Society programs survived, and inequality widened. Yet conservatism had changed American politics permanently: even Democrats like Clinton governed as centrists.