scholarly journals A white men’s agony: the rise and fall of the Reagan coalition through the perspective of american scholars (1940-2016) * A agonia do homem branco: a ascensão e queda da coalizão Reagan através da perspectiva dos intelectuais norte-americanos (1940-2016)

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 287
Author(s):  
Bruno Henz Biaseto

The American Conservative movement saw a huge rise following Reagan’s ascent to the residency. The Reagan Coalition managed to make the Republican Party the dominating force for almost thirty years, empowering certain social groups that supported its rise since its beginning, during the New Deal era. Following deep economic and social changes seen in the early 21st century, Barack Obama managed to craft a new political coalition, one that managed to end the Republican dominance. As the Democrats were able to craft a new coalition, the answer came in the rise of an authoritarian/populist right embodied by Donald Trump and the Tea Party. The goal of this essay is to understand this political process through the lens of American scholars, focusing on their analysis of how the rise and fall of the Reagan Revolution shaped the troubled political scenario seen in America today.

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth White

Donald Trump’s presidency is likely to become what Stephen Skowronek once labeled as a “disjunctive presidency.”  Trump’s election in 2016 and the issue positions he has taken mark the end of the Reagan Era.  Just as Jimmy Carter’s one-term signaled the end of the New Deal era begun by Franklin D. Roosevelt, so, too, does Trump’s already troubled presidency signify the end of Reagan’s conservatism. Changing demographics have hastened the end of the Reagan era, and the next presidential contest is likely to be one that James David Barber called a “politics as conscience,” not a conflict election to which Trump was well-suited.  Trump’s victory, along with the end of the Reagan era, also signals a moment of significant danger for the Republican Party, despite the present unified GOP control of the federal government and recent gains that the party has made at the state and local levels.


2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 15-33
Author(s):  
Niels Bjerre-Poulsen

The article analyzes the emergence of the American conservative movement as a postwar reaction to the New Deal order and the new role of the federal government. It discusses the different concepts, and the sometimes conflicting aims of the various strains of the conservative movement, as well as the inherent tension between political populism and the quest for intellectual respectability. It also takes a comparative view of the “Radical Right” of the 1960s and the current “Tea Party movement,” and discusses how the conditions for “ideological gatekeeping” have changed.


1968 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 494-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Shapiro

Much of the business of the U.S. Congress in the post war period has involved issues concerning the size and scope of activities of the federal government. The legislation in this area can be traced, for the most part, to measures which originated during the period of the New Deal in response to the Great Depression and to measures enacted during World War II to meet the short-run exigencies attendant to rapid economic and social mobilization. From the point of view of the expansion of the federal role, the Eisenhower years are of some moment. While they marked a lull in the expansionist trend witnessed under the Democratic presidencies of Roosevelt and Truman, their significance lies in the fact that despite the change in adminsitrations, there was no reversal of the policies begun during the Roosevelt years. While most of the Republican legislators were on record in opposition to the expansion of the federal role, the failure of the Republican Party to introduce and enact legislation to reverse the trend of federal expansion resulted in a new plateau of federal activity from which the congressional dialogue was to proceed during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.While the 87th Congress, meeting during Kennedy's first two years in the White House, did not enact the quantity of legislation expanding the federal role that Kennedy had called for in his inaugural, In the 88th Congress both parties supported a larger federal role to a greater extent than they had previously. In fact the first sessions of the 88th Congress as it bears on the federal role has been summed up as follows: “At no time did the majority of both parties reject a larger federal role.” (Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1963, p. 724) With two exceptions, the statement holds true for the second session in 1964.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-405
Author(s):  
Mark McLay

Abstract:During 1966, the Republican Party launched a largely successful challenge to Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Republican candidates pursued an anti–War on Poverty midterm strategy, which made antipoverty programs the symbol of Great Society liberalism, rather than its more popular programs, such as Medicare or the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Moreover, in Congress and on the campaign trail, Republicans offered well-crafted alternatives—such as their “Opportunity Crusade”—to offset charges of negativism and elitism that had dogged the Grand Old Party (GOP) since the creation of the New Deal in the 1930s. Significantly, while the War on Poverty survived the year, the Republican minority was unexpectedly successful in making important changes to the Economic Opportunity Act during the antipoverty legislation’s renewal. Overall, the Republican challenge to the War on Poverty in 1966, boded ill for the program’s longevity when the GOP finally secured the levers of power.


2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel T. Rodgers

Charles Evans Hughes's career ran along the fault lines of most of the major political events of his lifetime. Muckraking catapulted him to fame. He governed New York during four key years of the Progressive era as an effective administrator and earnest reformer. He stayed with the Republican Party when the Progressives bolted in 1912. He ran for the presidency in 1916 but missed the prize, albeit by a narrower electoral college margin than any other contender until the very end of the century. He was instrumental in negotiating the international naval disarmament accords of 1921–22, landmarks of progressive internationalism in their day that fell under sharp criticism a decade later. He presided over the U.S. Supreme Court during the key years of the New Deal, though in most histories of the 1930s Court he comes across as something of an also-ran behind its more memorable shapers: Brandeis, Cardozo, Sutherland, Black, even Roberts. Hard to pin to any achievement or distinct idea, slipping in and out of the dramatic movements of his day, he was the kind of man who makes history but easily falls out of the history books.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 241-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Gerstle

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that the last eighty years of American politics can be understood in terms of the rise and fall of two political orders. The first political order grew out of the New Deal, dominating political life from the 1930s to the 1970s. The history of this order (the New Deal Order) is now well known. The other order, best understood as ‘neoliberal’ in its politics, emerged from the economic and political crises of the 1970s. This paper is one of the first to elucidate the political relationships, ideological character and moral perspective that were central to this neoliberal order's rise and triumph. The paper's narrative unfolds in three acts: the first chronicles the 1980s rise of Ronald Reagan and the laissez-faire Republican party he forced into being; the second shows how the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s accelerated the globalization of capitalism and elevated neoliberalism's prestige; and the third reveals how a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, facilitated his party's capitulation to neoliberal imperatives. Political orders encourage such capitulation, the paper argues, by universalizing their own ideological principles and making alternative ideologies seem marginal and unworkable. A coda shows how the Great Recession of 2008 fractured America's neoliberal order, diminishing its authority and creating a space in which different kinds of politics, including the right-wing populism of Donald Trump and the left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders, could flourish.


Never Trump ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Robert P. Saldin ◽  
Steven M. Teles

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the emergence of the “#nevertrump” hashtag on Twitter. Like any meme, #nevertrump had a variety of meanings to those who deployed it. However, for the elite Republicans and conservatives who embraced it, #nevertrump signaled horror and incomprehension at the rise of Donald Trump and how it had turned their political world upside down. #Nevertrump was also a way of signaling that Trump represented something more sinister than normal quadrennial Republican and conservative movement primary politics. Once they recognized the threat, the strongest adherents to Never Trump relentlessly and desperately searched for ways to frustrate Trump's takeover of the Republican Party. Shocking even themselves, a number of these lifelong Republicans, who had spent their careers battling Democrats, ended up voting for someone other than their party's nominee, up to and including their former nemesis, Hillary Clinton. Even after his election, a remnant of these Never Trumpers have kept up rear guard efforts to expose the deceitfulness of the Trump administration and to call their former allies away from the siren song of Trumpian populism.


1995 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harvey C. Mansfield

THE AMERICAN ELECTION OF 1994, A SMASHING NATIONAL victory for the Republican Party, was both unusual and momentous. It produced a result of startling clarity, which is unusual in the American constitutional scheme, especially for a non-presidential election; and it promises enduring dominance for the Republicans, which is momentous. The change that President Bill Clinton said he would bring in 1992, and did not bring, has been imposed on him.Not since 1946, when Harry Truman was presented with a Republican Congress, has an incumbent president been treated so roughly by the voters. But Truman lived in the era of New Deal dominance and was able to recover and be re-elected in 1948. The better analogy for the 1994 election, unfortunately for the Democrats, is probably 1930, when Herbert Hoover was repudiated by the voters and a new Democratic Congress become the prelude to the New Deal dominance that began in 1932 and now seems to have come to an end.


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