April 25: Reagan’s America

Read:

·         Give Me Liberty 1053-1066

·         Voices of Freedom, 263-266

·         Reagan and the Welfare Queen story

·         Steelworkers Face A Bleak Future After Layoffs

·          Yuppies in the 1980s 

·         The “Big Black Rapist” and the 1988 Presidential Campaign 

 

 What was the significance of the Reagan presidency, according to Foner? What is Foner’s key argument about the contradictions in modern conservative thought?  How do you respond to this? Do you see the same contradictions? Why or why not? What was Reagan’s definition of freedom in his inaugural address, and what do you think about those ideas in respect to the record of his administration? What do the other articles suggest about the way that polarization continued to be a strategy and theme? What is Ehrenreich’s arguments about the popular image about yuppies vs. what was really happening among the middle class? What does she argue is wrong with the popular image that comes from the 1980s? What does this article suggest about the connection between economics and popular culture?

 

Recommended: 

·           Reagan’s Administration’s Spending Pattern (in respect to other administrations)

·            Reagan’s Morning in America Ad: http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/candidates/ad.archive/reagan_morning.mov

·            Kevin Phillips, Reagan’s America: A Capital Offense – the originator of Nixon’s southern strategy and former Republican excoriates the President’s role in stratifying wealth in the US

·           The Reagan example

·          James Watt on the Environment

·          Excerpt from National Review on the virtues of the Reagan Years

·         Whatever became of Jude Wanniski, of famous Laffer curve fame? (The Laffer curve was the much heralded but totally unfounded basis of the Reagan Administration’s economic policies) Now he’s viewed as a crank even by the right-wing

·        The Tax Revolt by Thomas Edsall  --the story behind the revolt

·          Bruce Shulman, The Reagan Culmination – a recent retrospective

·         Candidate Ronald Reagan speaks against regulation (1980)

·         The Education of David Stockman (David Stockman shaped Reagan's first budget, here he reveals some of the startling class-conscious basis for that administration's decision-making—the game was to increase military spending, thereby creating a budget crisis that would reduce social spending) 

·         The 1983 Morenci Mine Strike 

·         Steelworkers Face A Bleak Future After Layoffs (1984) –Chicago – Wisconsin Steel hardships

·        Democrats Response  from Right Turn

·         Late Reagan presidency--Excerpt from William Chafe

·         Ronald Reagan Calls for New Economic Policies, speech before business,1980

·         Excerpt from Barbara Ehrenreich, The Worst Years of Our Lives,

·         The Tax Revolt by Thomas Edsall http://members.tripod.com/~anthony_giacalone/tax_revolt.html

·         New Right by Alan Crawford http://members.tripod.com/~anthony_giacalone/new_right.html

 

Culture:

·        Lee Atwater and the Destruction of Black Music—very interesting interpretation of the decline of funk and disco http://www.soul-patrol.com/funk/lee_at.htm

·         Awesome 80s nostalgia for the 1980s

·        The 80s Movies

·         American Consumerism, 1970-present Excerpt from Juliet Schor, The Overspent American

·         The Way We Never Were: Americans and the Nostalgia Trap “Historically, Americans have tended to discover a crisis in family structure and standards whenever they are in the midst of major changes in socioeconomic structure and standards. Today's family crisis follows a major economic and political restructuring going on since the late 1960s” –blame the family (and women) instead of the social structures that put pressure on it

 

 

Military under Reagan

·         Understanding Military and Social Spending Under Reagan  --theme: military spending was geared not toward winning the Cold War, but toward giving a boost to the military industrial complex and reduce social spending

Star Trek-Klingons and Commies: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/st/original/commies.shtml

·         Excerpt from Gunfighter Nation (on Reagan/John Wayne and the cowboy myth)

·         Excerpt on Military and Social Spending from Right Turn

·         With Enough Shovels: Reagan and Nuclear War  Reagan appointee’s view on surviving a nuclear war: “If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it”

·          Dubious Secrets  -- the bizarre things that are classified as secret in our obsession with secrecy – a humorous but in the end, very serious look at how overclassification leads to less democracy and the ability to hide the reality of foreign policy

·         Snitch Snitch" investigates how a fundamental shift in the country's anti-drug laws -- including federal mandatory minimum sentencing and conspiracy provisions--has bred a culture of snitching that is in many cases rewarding the guiltiest and punishing the less guilty.

·           Low Intensity Conflict and the War on Drugs

·         Reagan and His Contra Buddies

 

 

Racial Politics

·         Lee Atwater and the Destruction of Black Music Very interesting Perspective

·         The Big Black Rapist and the 1988 Presidential Campaign—race and politics in the late 20th century

·         Reagan and the Chicago Welfare Queen

·         Opposing the Second Reconstruction- (history of affirmative action, legal status of African Americans)

·         Ten Myths about Affirmative Action—one of the most polarizing issues of the era was based on much mythology

·          Affirmative Action History

 

 

·          Deregulation and the Attack on labor –excerpt from Right Turn

·           Concession Bargaining and the Decline of Unions in the 1980s Explodes myth that concessionary bargaining by unions saved jobs; shows how it started under Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan, and is related to corporate agenda in both parties; shows how it was politically, not economically conditioned

·           Mexican coyotes – the life of illegal immigrants

·            Latinos as a scapegoat for Unemployment (1982)

·            Prison Industrial Complex

  

 

 

 

 

 

PATCO- pivotal moment in Reagan administration

Homelessness in NY during 1980s

Aids Use in Prison

       

·            Sunbelt Conservatism – the influence of military spending on the creation of the south as a political powerbase

·           The New Right by Alan Crawford (1981) written early in the influence – Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, others

Class War in the 1980s

·         ·         ·         How ideas were transformed by money— funding of popular books—“these people wrote  books directed at a mass audience and received funding and support from conservative sources that understood the fundamental importance of the battle of ideas.”

·          

·              A Time Bomb Inside of You: the AIDS crisis

 

 

·                Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly’s website

·            Conservative Foundations by Eric Alterman  a fantastic summary of the influence of money on the media- brief

·            The Money behind the Media this is among my favorite sites. Here you can find the way that money influences the media and ideas in society. It traces the funding for “think tanks” that are often quoted. This is the group that showed the Nazi-Eugenics link behind the funding of the book The Belle Curve, which proclaimed that African-American IQ numbers were lower because of racial factors (an idea discredited by most social scientists) But the website has lots of other examples.

 

·          The FBI, COINTELPRO and Far-Right Vigilante Networks  --provocative, documented;  main point he makes is that the violence against abortion clinics is in part the outcome of earlier decisions made by the FBI to support right-wing terrorist groups against left-wing in the U.S.;

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