Reagan and Conservatism

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Identify the three constituencies of the New Right coalition (economic conservatives, social conservatives organized through the Moral Majority, and neoconservative Cold War hawks) and account for what brought them together by 1980.
• Explain the policy program known as Reaganomics, including the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, the Tax Reform Act of 1986, federal deregulation, and the peacetime defense buildup, and weigh the record of growth, recession, and rising national debt the program produced.
• Account for the conservative legal movement, the founding of the Federalist Society in 1982, the appointment of Sandra Day O'Connor as the first female Supreme Court justice in 1981, and the broader reshaping of the federal judiciary the Reagan administration set in motion.
• Compare two contemporary primary sources from the period (a presidential speech and a federal statute or report) and account for differences in argument, audience, and historical situation, applying Skill 3.C.
• Weigh competing claims about the Reagan legacy (whether his presidency ended the Cold War, restored American confidence, hollowed out federal capacity, or accelerated economic inequality) using specific historical evidence drawn from the period.

The Reagan presidency is the political center of Period 9. The conservative movement that elected him in 1980 had been organizing since the 1964 Goldwater campaign, and the coalition that came together by the late 1970s combined three constituencies that had drifted apart during the New Deal era. The first was the economic conservatives, organized around think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation (founded 1973) and the American Enterprise Institute, who wanted lower marginal tax rates, less federal regulation, and a smaller welfare state. The second was the social conservatives, organized through the Moral Majority that the Reverend Jerry Falwell founded in 1979 and through allied organizations such as Phyllis Schlafly's Stop ERA campaign, who treated abortion, public school prayer, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the changing American family as a cultural emergency. The third was the neoconservatives, a group of former liberals and Cold War hawks (figures such as Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Jeane Kirkpatrick) who rejected the detente of the 1970s and pushed for confrontation with the Soviet Union and a larger defense budget. Reduced public faith in the federal government's ability to solve social and economic problems, the rapid growth of religious fundamentalism, and the spread of neoconservative thought all combined to give the conservative movement its post-1976 momentum (KC-9.1.I.A; Theme PCE).

The economic program that the Reagan administration pursued from 1981 onward, popularly known as Reaganomics, rested on the supply-side claim that lower marginal income tax rates would generate enough additional growth to broaden the tax base. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of August 1981 cut the top marginal income tax rate from seventy percent to fifty percent, indexed brackets to inflation, and accelerated business depreciation. The Tax Reform Act of October 1986 cut the top rate further, to twenty-eight percent, and consolidated brackets while closing dozens of loopholes. Alongside the tax program, the administration pursued deregulation across transportation, banking, broadcasting, and energy, and conducted the largest peacetime defense buildup in American history. The economic record of the eight years was uneven. A sharp 1981 to 1982 recession, driven by Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker's anti-inflation interest-rate increases, pushed unemployment to roughly ten and seven-tenths percent. The recovery that followed produced a long expansion (the 1983 to 1989 period saw real growth average about three and a half percent annually), but the combination of tax cuts and defense spending nearly tripled the national debt, from approximately nine hundred billion dollars in 1981 to about two and seven-tenths trillion dollars in 1989. Income inequality, measured by the share of pretax income going to the top one percent, began the long climb that would continue through the next four decades (Theme PCE; theme cross-reference WXT).

Reagan dramatized the new direction in August 1981, four months into his first term, when the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) walked off the job. PATCO had endorsed Reagan in 1980 and expected favorable treatment. Instead, the president cited federal law that prohibits federal employees from striking, ordered the controllers back to work within forty-eight hours, and dismissed more than eleven thousand who refused. He banned them from federal service for life (a ban President Clinton lifted in 1993). Labor historians point to PATCO as the symbolic start of the post-1980 anti-union turn in the United States. The percentage of American workers in unions, roughly twenty percent in 1981, had fallen to about ten percent by 2020, and private-sector employers, watching the federal example, grew far more aggressive in opposing union drives, hiring permanent replacement workers, and decertifying existing locals (KC-9.2.II.C). Conservative success on labor was substantial; conservative success elsewhere was uneven (KC-9.1.I.B). Signature New Deal and Great Society programs, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, survived intact. Roe v. Wade (1973) was not overturned during Reagan's terms (it would not be reversed until Dobbs in 2022). Many of the cultural changes the religious right opposed, including rising rates of women in the workforce and the decoupling of marriage from childbearing, continued through and beyond the Reagan years.

Outside the executive branch, the conservative movement set out to remake the federal judiciary. Three law students at Yale and the University of Chicago founded the Federalist Society in 1982 as a debate forum for conservative and libertarian law students; within a decade it had become the central pipeline for federal judicial nominees and a doctrinal home for originalism and textualism. The Reagan administration appointed three Supreme Court justices (Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981, the first woman to serve on the Court; Antonin Scalia in 1986; and Anthony Kennedy in 1988 after the Senate rejected the nomination of Robert Bork) and elevated William Rehnquist to chief justice in 1986. The administration also nominated more than three hundred federal district and circuit judges, the largest cohort by any president to that point, and the conservative legal pipeline the Federalist Society built has supplied federal judicial appointments through every Republican administration since (KC-9.1.I; KC-9.1.I.B). The judicial project is the part of the Reagan record whose effects have been most durable.

The contested record of the Reagan presidency runs alongside the achievements. The Iran-Contra Affair, made public in November 1986, exposed a covert operation by members of the National Security Council to sell weapons to Iran in violation of an arms embargo and to use the proceeds to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, in violation of the Boland Amendment that Congress had passed to prohibit such funding. The Tower Commission and the Walsh independent counsel investigation eventually indicted fourteen administration officials, and Reagan's approval rating fell roughly twenty points before partly recovering. Critics also pointed to environmental rollbacks under Interior Secretary James Watt and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Anne Gorsuch, the deregulation of the savings and loan industry that produced a one-hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar federal cleanup by the early 1990s, and the federal response to the early HIV/AIDS epidemic, which critics on the left and in the public-health community judged inadequate. Whether the Reagan presidency restored American confidence and helped end the Cold War, or whether it tripled the national debt, accelerated economic inequality, and hollowed out federal regulatory capacity, is the central legacy debate of the era and the question that any classroom comparison of the Reagan record needs to weigh (Theme PCE; KC-9.1.I.B; KC-9.1.I.C).

Topic 9.2's suggested historical-thinking skill is 3.C (sourcing and comparison). The three sources below are paired so that students can compare a presidential argument with a contemporary federal action and a contemporary federal record. All three are public-domain government documents and federally hosted texts; contemporary photographs, magazine covers, and television footage from the 1980s remain under copyright and are not appropriate for classroom reproduction.

1. (Continuity and Change) Compare the policy program Reagan advocated in the 1964 Goldwater speech with the program he pursued as president from 1981 to 1989. Identify two continuities and one significant shift, and account for what produced the shift.
2. (Causation) Account for the assembly of the New Right coalition between 1968 and 1980. Which of the three constituencies (economic conservatives, social conservatives, neoconservatives) was the most important driver of the coalition's success, and on what evidence?
3. (Comparison) Compare the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 with the firing of the air traffic controllers in August 1981. What does the comparison reveal about the relationship between conservative economic policy and conservative labor policy in the first year of the Reagan administration?
4. (Continuity and Change) Weigh the Reagan administration's record on conservative goals. Which goals did the administration achieve, which fell short, and which earlier policy commitments survived intact? Use at least three pieces of specific evidence.
5. (Causation) Account for the long-term significance of the conservative legal movement. How did the Federalist Society and the Reagan judicial appointments shape federal law and policy in the four decades after 1989?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.