Enemies of the State by Darren J. Mulloy

Author:Darren J. Mulloy [Mulloy, Darren J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, Washington, D.C., in 1986. Despite its practical limitations, Reagan’s rhetorical assault on “big government” made him a hero to the radical right, as well as to conservatives more broadly. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Carol M. Highsmith Archive, LC-DIG-highsm-14732.

Assessing Reagan’s overall legacy, especially from the perspective of the radical right and its goals during this period, is difficult. On the one hand, the misery index was down to 9.6 percent by 1989. The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) had doubled, close to eighteen million new jobs had been created, and billions of dollars of new wealth generated (although not very evenly distributed). Indeed, under Reagan’s stewardship, the nation had witnessed the longest period of peacetime growth in its history. But he had not ushered in an era of small government or successfully reined in the social welfare spending of the New Deal state. Far from it. Federal taxes accounted for 19.4 percent of the national income in 1981; in 1989, the figure was 19.3 percent. The federal government actually employed more people in 1989 than it had in 1981 (3.1 million compared to 2.9 million). Federal spending as a percentage of GDP was also higher—at 21.2 percent—than it had been when the president took office. Meanwhile, the national debt had metastasized to $2.7 trillion dollars (53 percent of GDP, compared to 33 percent in 1981)—Reagan’s “greatest failure,” according to his biographer Lou Cannon.

On the other hand, Reagan had not just demonstrated the broad appeal and electoral viability of a more radical right-wing conservatism; he had helped to fundamentally transform American political life. “What Reagan ushered in was a skepticism toward government solutions to every problem, a suspicion of command-and-control, top-down social engineering. . . . That’s a lasting legacy of the Reagan era and the conservative movement, starting with Goldwater,” noted Barack Obama, when asked about his predecessor in 2009. After Reagan, questions about taxation, government spending, welfare, and the appropriate size of the state became central to U.S. politics, with “big government” liberals pushed increasingly onto the defensive. He had also successfully continued the “southern strategy” initiated by Goldwater, Wallace, and Nixon, drawing millions of former Democrats into the Republican Party, hastening the breakup of FDR’s New Deal coalition, and pushing the GOP itself further to the right.

As for the New Right and the New Christian Right, the second half of the 1980s were not good years. Not just their influence but their energies waned. Having bound themselves firmly to the Reagan presidency, they found it very difficult to pull away when the administration started to disappoint them. The movement itself also suffered setbacks. Terry Dolan died in 1986. Both Viguerie’s RAVCO company and Falwell’s Moral Majority were beset with financial problems, and leading televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were underdone by scandals in their respective ministries. Pat Robertson made an abortive bid for the presidency by entering the Republican primaries in 1988, but having finished second in Iowa’s caucus and third in South Carolina, he was soon forced to drop out of the race.

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