Ronald Reagan at his California ranch. He was governor from 1967 to 1975 and president from 1981 to 1989.

It was no accident. Indeed, candidate Ronald Reagan knew exactly what he was doing. It was August 1980, at the height of presidential election fever. Visiting Mississippi, once a symbol of the solid Democratic South, Reagan chose the Neshoba County Fair for a key campaign speech. To beat incumbent President Jimmy Carter, he would have to turn the Deep South Republican. The fair was in the same county as Philadelphia, Miss., and only seven miles from that town, forever associated with the murder of three civil rights activists (one black and two white) just 16 years earlier. It was a bold move by Reagan. Stepping up for the occasion, he railed about big government and thundered in ever-so-coded language, “I believe in states’ rights.” In a state that still proudly flew the Confederate Battle Flag, no doubt the mostly white crowd of some 15,000 knew, and loved, the racial undertones of such a statement. The states’ rights mantra had long amounted to little more than a justification of racism by another name. The only right many states tended to focus on was their right to suppress black voting and maintain the segregation of public life.

Reagan’s performance at the fair was an insult to the memory of the once vibrant civil rights movement. And it was understood as such.

The tactic worked. Reagan all but swept the South in the 1980 race, and the region has essentially remained Republican ever since. (Among Southern states, only West Virginia and Georgia went for the Georgian who occupied the Oval Office.) The Sunbelt, that vast southern expanse from Florida to California, would prove to be a stronghold of Republican loyalty for decades to come. Though President Richard Nixon inaugurated the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy,” it was Reagan who perfected it.

The presidency of Reagan, like that of many of the chief executives of the United States, was complex. He was undoubtedly conservative and had run to the right of his primary opponents in 1980. Political ideology aside, he was an astute politician, willing to compromise and never so doctrinaire as liberals feared. On foreign policy he could shift from hawk to dove on a dime, exuding “toughness” but also, at times, demonstrating restraint. He cut taxes and some social programs but was smart enough not to dismantle the highly popular Social Security and Medicare programs, held dear by liberals before and afterward. Though far more ideological than Dwight Eisenhower and—even—Nixon, he was at root a pragmatist. For the left, he was ultimately something much scarier than those two earlier Republican presidents: a charming, effective and highly popular figure of the right. He bent with the prevailing winds and harnessed their energy in continuing the gradual rightward policy shift that had been occurring since the end of the presidency of Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson.

By the time he left office in 1989, he had not quite transformed Washington, but he had nudged it farther to the right. The game had changed during his tenure, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s old liberal coalition was more fractured than ever. Democrats sensed trouble in Reagan’s peculiar popularity and would rarely run a zealously liberal presidential candidate over at least the next 30 years. After the tumult of the 1970s, white America had indeed grown more conservative, or at least more cynical. Faith in the transformative power of federal intervention was replaced by a sense that government was “the problem.” Sick of the identity politics and the countless causes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, many had grown nostalgic for traditional (read: conservative) values and gradually had turned more socially conservative. America hadn’t quite abandoned the Democrats, per se, but it greatly weakened their traditional political grip. Henceforth, increasingly more conservative candidates ran for local and national office on the GOP ticket. The Republican Party, quite certainly, was revolutionized by Reagan.

Though he clearly was a conservative, Reagan is difficult to nail down. He slashed taxes and some social programs yet left others untouched and even raised taxes on one occasion. He was a remarried divorcé who voiced the values of the evangelical right. (His first marriage, a union of eight and a half years with actress Jane Wyman, had ended in 1949.) He benefited greatly from support of the right-wing Christian group Moral Majority but shied away from its demand that abortion be outlawed. He was a Cold Warrior who promised to bury détente but later negotiated substantial nuclear reductions and oversaw a thaw in the dangerous conflict with the Soviet Union. He was elected as a hawk’s hawk but rarely put American soldiers in harm’s way, instead using airpower and local proxies to kill hundreds of thousands. Indeed, decades later, President Barack Obama would adopt a formula of Reagan-like “restraint.”

When it comes to Reagan, what he did is often less sweeping than what he allowed, and made possible eventually. He implemented a rightward sea change that would carry both parties in a more conservative direction, often with tragic results. One cannot understand America’s present without grappling with the realities of its Reaganite past.

Reagan was never simple and rarely consistent but always confident. Throughout his two terms one can track the widening political gap between truth and fiction, the reality of limitations and the fantasy of the “more” culture. Reagan won two elections and control of his own legacy for one major reason: He told Americans what they wanted to hear, consequences be damned.

A Republican Tide?: The Election of 1980
Reagan won the 1980 election by portraying Carter—who had already shifted rightward—of being weak on national security and hopelessly liberal in economics and on various cultural issues. He built a winning coalition that rivaled FDR’s liberal alliance. First came his hardcore base—white Southerners and an increasing vocal and powerful religious right. The organizing potential of evangelicals was impressive. In 1979-80 alone, the famous Baptist minister Jerry Falwell, a leader of the burgeoning movement, raised some $100 million for the causes of Moral Majority, which he and associates had founded. That alone was more money than the Democratic National Committee raised for the entire election of 1980. So it was that Reagan and other Republicans, who traditionally were unconcerned about abortion, learned to speak “pro-life” language (although they did not actually do much about the issue itself). The abortion debate also motivated Reagan’s advisers to put devout Catholics on his campaign team. Add to this two other key, longtime constituencies—corporate interests and national security hawks—and the Reagan coalition looked fearsome. But it was a new, different constituency—white, Northern, ethnic blue-collar workers sick of what they perceived as liberal excesses—that would remake the picture. With these voters on board, Reagan could hardly lose. Some of these supporters, voting Republican for the first time, came to be called “Reagan Democrats.”

In addition to his political team-building, Reagan’s personality was a plus. He had been a famous movie actor and even at almost 70 years of age looked healthy and fit. Unsurprisingly, then, Reagan with his soothing baritone voice proved an effective communicator. He seemed everything President Carter was not. Most of all, Reagan exuded self-confidence and extraordinary optimism. His own daughter admitted that his boundless buoyancy and cheerfulness were “enough to drive you nuts.” But it was the struggling economy and Carter’s seeming inability to rejuvenate it—though this was often out of his control—that sank the incumbent president once and for all.

Reagan campaigned against the government with a vigor rarely seen. “Government,” he would say, “is like baby, an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.” He promised deregulation and local control over social programs. He even vowed (though he didn’t ultimately do so) to dismantle the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. Reagan cloaked these harsh positions in restrained, populist soundbites. He would ask audiences during his campaign against Carter, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” and he fed Republican crowds a favorite line: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job, and a depression is when you lose your job, and recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”

Although Reagan defeated Carter by almost 10 percentage points in the popular vote and took a lopsided victory in the Electoral College, he hardly had the mandate he claimed. He gained only 50.7 percent of the popular vote in a three-way race (independent candidate John B. Anderson captured 6.6 percent), and only 52.8 percent of Americans of voting age cast ballots, the lowest such figure since 1948. Thus it was less than 27 percent of eligible voters who actually chose Reagan. Clearly a majority of Americans had not voiced support for the indelible transformation the candidate planned for the governmental system.

A gender and racial gap was growing. Women were far less likely than men to support Reagan. Almost all minorities generally voted Democratic. The great fault lines of American political life were expanding and hardening.

Republicans won control of the Senate in 1980, despite Democrats maintaining a majority in the House. Key Democratic liberals lost their congressional seats, including Sen. George McGovern, who had been the 1972 presidential candidate, and Sen. Frank Church, who had led hearings on excesses in the areas of national security and intelligence operations. Even if Reagan’s “revolution” wasn’t total, it was profound. Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, lamenting the damage done to his party, observed that a “great tidal wave hit us from the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Great Lakes.” If Reagan seemed unsophisticated on policy issues, it hardly mattered. As Bill Moyers, a former top aide to Lyndon Johnson, put it, “We didn’t elect this guy because he knows how many barrels of oil are in Alaska. We elected him because we want to feel good.”

Critics, with some justification, saw Reagan as more show than substance. Nonetheless, they underestimated the extent of his political acumen. He ran on the mythology of America and on the nation’s limitless horizons. He urged Americans to “believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds, to believe … we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us.” “Why,” he asked, “shouldn’t we believe that? We’re Americans!”

Patriotic pageantry was another Reagan tactic. Michael Deaver, a top Reagan aide, would later describe Reagan’s successful 1984 re-election campaign by saying “[w]e kept apple pie and the flag going the whole time,” and that could well be applied to Reagan’s entire tenure.

Reagan would earn his legendary nickname of the Great Communicator by seamlessly explaining complex issues in simple, plain language. Speaker O’Neill praised the former actor’s skills in politics, saying that Reagan “might not be much of a debater, but with a prepared text he’s the best public speaker I’ve ever seen.”

Reagan’s communications team was a smooth-running machine. Top aides would start each morning with the “line of the day,” a single theme that would infuse all presidential business and public relations for the coming hours. “We had to think like a television producer,” White House spokesman Larry Speakes explained, because favorable public exposure for the president on TV would consist of only “a minute and thirty seconds of pictures to tell the story, a good solid sound bite.” With a Hollywood star in the Oval Office it seemed an unbeatable communications strategy. In the aftermath of Reagan’s 1980 victory, The Washington Post’s Haynes Johnson declared “it was clear to all the wise men in Washington what historic shift had occurred. A Reagan Revolution … had altered the American political landscape with profound implications for the nation and the world.” That remained to be seen.

Reaganomics: How to Craft an Oligarchy
The newly inaugurated president, who in large part had won the election by berating Jimmy Carter about the nation’s financial woes, knew he would live or die on the state of the economy. It received immediate attention as Reagan set out, it seemed, to restructure the whole system. He focused on three main areas: increased military spending, lower income taxes, and deregulation of the financial system and other facets of the vast federal bureaucracy. All of this was grounded in Reagan’s interpretation of newly popular “supply-side economics.” Theoretically, so went the thinking, lower taxes would stimulate economic growth once individuals and corporations had more cash in hand. Thus, federal tax revenue would not fall and might actually rise because of increased incomes stemming from greater entrepreneurial spirit. The problem turned out to be that the theory didn’t work as advertised.

Probably a majority of economists were skeptical of supply-side theory—which came to be known as “Reaganomics”—and many claimed Reagan’s ideas were unrealistic, a “have your cake and eat it too” delusion. Could Americans be made to believe that lower taxes and simultaneous raises in military spending would have no negative consequences? When he was competing for the Republican presidential nomination, George H.W. Bush, now the vice president, had complained about Reagan’s “voodoo economics.” With Reagan in office and trying to implement his economic plan, many Americans were on the fence regarding the supply-side notion. In addition, the Democrats still held the House. By March 1981, it was unclear whether Reagan had the votes to push through his tax-cut bill.

Then, on March 30, a deranged young man nearly killed the president when he fired six shots at him. A ricocheted bullet lodged in Reagan’s left lung. Through it all, the president seemed to handle his fate with grace, courage and humor. Just before surgeons began to operate, Reagan quipped to them, “Please tell me you’re all Republicans.” His popularity soared in the aftermath of the assassination attempt. Thus the passage of Reagan’s ambitious tax bill was virtually assured. House Speaker O’Neill would admit as much, declaring, “Because of the attempted assassination the president has become a hero. We can’t argue with a man as popular as he is.” There was more to it than sympathy votes for a wounded president. Reagan knew how to work the Congress, and work it he did. During the first hundred days (some of which he spent in recovery) Reagan met with 467 members of Congress, and, though he rejected large changes to his tax bill, he proved amenable to compromise. O’Neill admitted he had underestimated the man and complained of “getting the shit whaled out of me!”

Reagan promised to cut income taxes 30 percent over three years and eventually managed to lower the top income tax bracket from 70 percent to 28 percent (though he would marginally raise tax rates before then). The comprehensive budget bill also cut social spending—in food stamps and public assistance—and canceled a Carter-era jobs program that had provided work for 300,000 people. This particularly irked some liberals, especially when such frugality was juxtaposed with the expensive clothing that Nancy Reagan wore to public functions. The first lady attended the 1981 inaugural balls in an ensemble that reportedly cost $25,000. For the 1985 galas, the cost of her outfit was said to have almost doubled, to $46,000.

After President Reagan cut some 350,000 Americans from the rolls of Social Security disability payments, a wounded Vietnam veteran and Medal of Honor recipient, Sgt. Roy Benavidez, testified before Congress in June 1983 that the “administration that put this medal around my neck is curtailing my benefits.”

All told, Reagan ushered in $140 billion in social spending cuts in his first three years alone. New restrictions reduced the number of children eligible for subsidized school lunches by half a million. And, by lowering the highest federal tax bracket to 28 percent, Reagan had created an economy in which, according to reporter and author Donald L. Bartlett, “In 1988, a school teacher, factory worker, and billionaire can all pay 28% [in taxes].” Reaganomics seemed to affect the “two Americas” very differently, and its excesses could appear quite coarse. For example, in 1981 Reagan’s Agriculture Department changed regulations to classify condiments such as relish and ketchup as vegetables in free school lunches, thus saving money on fresh produce. That same week the White House ordered $209,508 worth of china with the presidential seal embossed in gold. Regressive taxation and inequality seemed triumphant.

That was the point, according to Reagan administration Budget Director David Stockman. Unlike the cozy rhetoric employed by other supply-siders, Stockman’s assessment was harsh and clear. He knew that tax cuts would never sufficiently increase productivity and thus government revenue. He knew there would be deficits, and he welcomed them, knowing that legislators would then come under pressure to cut domestic spending rather than take the politically unpopular step of raising taxes. Stockman called it the “starve the beast” strategy. He explained that the beast is big government and it should be starved by cutting taxes and reducing revenues so programs have to be cut back. (Years later, Stockman would disown Reaganomics.)

Reagan tended to soften Stockman’s tone in his own public pronouncements, but even the president could seem heartless, as in a television interview where he claimed that the “homeless … are homeless, you might say, by choice.”

Many working and middle-class Americans went along with the deep cuts to poverty reduction programs. They had been hammered time and again by conservatives with the message that welfare was bankrupting the nation and most of its recipients were unworthy. This was simply false. Welfare, such as it was, accounted for only 8 percent of government outlays in 1986, compared with 32 percent for defense.

In addition to cutting taxes and slashing certain aspects of the social safety net, Reagan also deregulated various industries and federal agencies. “Government,” after all, as he repeatedly said, is “not the solution, it’s the problem.” The consequences of Reagan’s deregulation bonanza was severe at times. The lack of oversight encouraged risky behavior on Wall Street and ushered in a savings and loan crisis. The federal government had to bail out key financial institutions in what became the costliest financial scandal up to that point in U.S. history.

In addition to the financial sector, Reagan also deregulated environmental restrictions. He personally believed the environment was not in serious danger and ignored scientific evidence of global warming, setting a precedent for Republican orthodoxy for decades to come. Indeed, his administration cut research funding for renewable energies by some 90 percent. And why not? Just after he took office, 23 oil industry executives contributed $270,000 to redecorate the White House. As Jack Hodges, the Oklahoma City-based owner of Core Oil and Gas, bluntly put it, “The top man of this country ought to live in one of the top places. Mr. Reagan has helped the energy business.”

Reagan had a particularly nasty habit of appointing officials who were hostile to the very government agencies they led. His secretary of the interior, James Watt, believed that protecting the environment was far less important than Christ’s imminent return, divided people into two categories—liberals and “Americans”—and vowed to “mine more, drill more, cut more timber.” To lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Reagan chose a Florida businessman, Thorne Auchter, whose construction company had regularly been fined by OSHA. Auchter proceeded to cut OSHA inspections by more than 20 percent. A Reagan appointee who was the first ever female head of the Environmental Protection Agency believed that the EPA regulated businesses too aggressively. With such appointees atop these agencies, Reagan created a self-fulfilling prophecy in which government did appear broken and inherently problematic.

Reagan, though once the president of a labor union, the Screen Actors Guild, was a veritable union buster. When tens of thousands of air traffic controllers threatened to strike for better pay and benefits, Reagan gave them a 48-hour ultimatum to return to work. Only 38 percent returned to the job, and the president followed through, fired 11,000 others and sent military controllers to fill the gap. Reagan single-handedly destroyed the controllers union and sent an unmistakable message to many others. Greatly demoralized, organized labor was on the retreat during the 1980s as membership rates and the number of annual strikes plummeted to record lows.

Reaganomics’ consequences were mixed but mainly negative. After an initial recession and increasing unemployment in 1981-82, the economy would essentially right itself and growth would return. Inflation did stabilize, largely thanks to the tight-money schemes of the Carter-appointed head of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, whose harsh austerity measures may have caused a recession but did level out inflation over time. Unemployment averaged 9.7 percent during what Democrats labeled the “Reagan recession,” the highest rate since the Great Depression. In the long run, however, the painful Volcker medicine cured runaway inflation. Nevertheless, when Reagan left office in 1989 he left the new president, his former vice president, with an economy in which one-quarter of children still lived in poverty.

After all, a growing economy is not necessarily a healthy economy, and Reaganomics no doubt did some structural damage. Lower taxes and greater military spending turned out just as one might suspect. During Reagan’s two terms the national debt tripled. His administration never balanced a budget in eight years. Federal debt as a percentage of GDP jumped from 33 percent in 1981 to 53 percent in 1989. Reagan adviser David Stockman admitted in late 1981 that “[n]one of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”

Even more concerning was that income inequality—the gap between the rich and the poor—was on the rise during the Reagan years. House Speaker O’Neill saw the problem and fired a salvo of dissent. “When it comes to giving tax breaks to the wealthy in this country,” he said, “the president has a heart of gold.” During Reagan’s tenure, the income of the top 20 percent of families rose by an average of $10,000 per year, whereas for the bottom 20 percent wages slowly declined. In 1980, CEOs earned an average salary 40 times higher than a factory worker’s. By 1989, they were making 93 times as much. Such excesses bordered on the absurd. The Reagan tax cuts only aggravated the inequity. The taxes that stayed put, like the Social Security payroll tax, were often highly regressive, with most of the weight falling on low-income people. This only contributed to rising economic inequality. CEOs of major corporations saw their average salaries quadruple between 1980 and 1988, from $3 million to $12 million annually. The “Forbes 400” list saw tripling of the net worth of the richest Americans.

Corporate leaders would pay Reagan back in spades. During the 1984 election campaign, political action committees (PACs) favoring the GOP raised $7.2 million, compared with other PACs raising just $650,000 for the Democrat presidential candidate, former Vice President Walter Mondale. Reagan won in a near-record landslide. Shaken by this defeat, the Democratic Party began a rightward shift of its own, with “New Democrats”—such as Southern governor Bill Clinton and Missouri’s U.S. Rep. Richard Gephardt—in the vanguard. Democrats, the insurgents realized, would need to start sounding like Republicans if they hoped to ever win again. For the Democratic Party this began the long streak of neoliberalism that remained dominant for decades to come.

It mattered little that Mondale was correct in many of his assessments and predictions. The former vice president accurately noted that Reaganomics, if continued, would hollow out the middle class, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Indeed, in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Mondale clamored, “Four years ago, many of you voted for Mr. Reagan because he promised you’d be better off. And today the rich are better off. But working Americans are worse off, and the middle class is standing on a trap door.” While it wasn’t true that all working Americans were worse off in the increasingly prosperous ’80s, Mondale’s warning was a prescient harbinger.

Nevertheless, most Americans were attracted to Reagan’s “Make American Great Again” rhetoric and the ubiquitous, soothing 1984 Reagan TV advertisement popularly known as “Morning in America.” The ad, carefully produced by experts in Radio City Music Hall, featured Norman Rockwell-like, suburban nostalgia and patriotic pageantry. The ad’s effectiveness demonstrated that most Americans were captivated by Reagan’s unflinching positivity. During his re-election campaign, Reagan even co-opted the decidedly antiwar anthem “Born in the USA,” by Bruce Springsteen, and played it at rallies for audiences who clearly knew only the chorus and not the verse lyrics. Springsteen reacted angrily to the misappropriation of his song, saying, “You see in the Reagan election ads on TV, you know, ‘It’s morning in America,’ and you say, well, it’s not morning in Pittsburgh. Its not morning above 125th Street in New York [Harlem]. It’s midnight and there’s, like, a bad moon rising.” Decades later, the musician deftly summarized what had occurred: “This [when Reagan used the song and even directly praised its ‘message of hope’] was when the Republicans first mastered the art of co-opting anything and everything that seemed fundamentally American, and if you’re on the other side, you were somehow unpatriotic.” Through it all, though, the outcome in 1984 seemed a fait accompli.

Reaganomics may have eventually killed the inflation monster, but it didn’t seriously reduce poverty. In 1989, 31.5 million Americans lived below the poverty line. Also, the number of homeless Americans doubled in the Reagan years, from 200,000 to 400,000. What’s more, despite the supposedly miraculous Reagan-induced economic turnaround, overall increases in real per capita income averaged only 2 percent per year, much more modest than during the immediate postwar Good Old Days, and not much greater than growth had been in the late 1970s. The highest increases, of course, were among the wealthiest economic quintiles. Even the federal minimum wage remained stagnant, at $3.15 per hour, throughout Reagan’s tenure. By the late 1980s, some 14 percent of Americans lacked health insurance and the corporate interests backing Reagan would hardly countenance any legislative action to improve these rates. When he left office, the U.S. was the only developed nation in the West without universal health coverage.

The real wages of working people, meanwhile, were stalled, and the fastest-growing occupations tended to be low paying and in the service sector. Farm foreclosures rose. Furthermore, due in part to foreign competition, the United States shifted from being one of the world’s largest creditors to the world’s largest debtor. All this contributed to the growth of a consumerist culture in the 1980s. The president encouraged such behavior, stating in 1983, “What I want to see above all is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich.”

It seemed that young, upwardly mobile professionals, “yuppies,” had become the role models of the Reagan era. A best-selling memoir/business-advice book was published under the name of a young real estate magnate, Donald Trump, and it became a symbol of the yuppie culture. The consumerist values manifested even in popular films, such as Oliver Stone’s 1987 “Wall Street,” in which a rather Trump-like character famously declares “Greed is good.” It seemed that onetime socially conscious and liberal baby boomers had become increasing conservative and obsessed with the accumulation of wealth. According to one report, a third of all Yale seniors graduating in 1985 applied for jobs at First Boston Corp., a leading Wall Street investment house. These developments represented a dramatic change from the progressive activism of the 1960s-70s.

Race was a factor in economic inequality. References to cutting the social welfare assistance of black Americans were generally coded in the Reagan years as cuts in “unearned” benefits. Reagan regularly denounced “welfare queens”—meaning inner-city unwed black mothers—and exaggerated the magnitude of welfare fraud. It should be noted that the New Deal and Great Society programs—such as Social Security and Medicare—that he left undamaged are broadly associated with huge (read: mostly white) segments of the population. African-Americans resented Reagan’s relative disinterest in the urban issues of crime, poverty and unemployment. The spreading crack cocaine epidemic gave greater urgency to black pleas for attention. It seemed Northern urban blacks faced a perfect storm of declining manufacturing jobs, de facto segregation, failing schools and rising street crime. In 1985, a series in the Chicago Tribune described the situation:

The existence of an underclass is not new. … What appears to be different … is the permanent entrapment of significant numbers of Americans, especially urban blacks, in a world apart at the bottom of society. And for the first time, much of the rest of America seems to be accepting a permanent underclass as a sad, if frightening, fact of life.

• H.W. Brands, “The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War” (1993).
• Gary Gerstle, “American Crucible: Race and Nation in the 20th Century” (2001).
• Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, “Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974” (2019).
• Jill Lepore, “These Truths: A History of the United States” (2018).
• James T. Patterson, “Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore” (2005).
• Howard Zinn, “The Twentieth Century” (1980).