Posted on Apr 10, 2022
Ronald Reagan’s New Economic Order, and What It Meant for America
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Ronald Reagan devoted his Labor Day in 1980 to two marvelous photo ops. The first captured him delivering a major speech on freedom and opportunity in Jersey City, N.J., the Statue of Liberty standing in the haze behind him. Then he flew to Allen Park, Mich., one of Detroit’s ubiquitous blue-collar suburbs, for an afternoon cookout at the modest home of a laid-off steelworker. There he got his second shot: the soon-to-be president of the United States standing over a grill packed with kielbasa, barbecue tongs in one hand, a beer in the other. The free market revolutionary as an average Joe, chatting up the workingman.
It was a marker of one of the two political transformations that drive Gary Gerstle’s enlightening new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.” For almost half a century families like those that lived in Allen Park had backed what Gerstle, the Paul Mellon professor emeritus of American history at Cambridge, calls “the New Deal order.” At its core lay Franklin Roosevelt’s commitment to using government power to counter capitalism’s instability and inequality. From that principle emerged an array of public policies, some meant to regulate troublesome sectors of the economy, others to assure the aged and the poor a minimal standard of living, still others to give working people the income they needed to buy the goods their factories produced and the homes they dreamed of owning. As the programs flowed out, the support flooded in: By 1936 Roosevelt had added a huge bloc of blue-collar voters in the urban North to the Democrats’ traditional base in the white South, a combination so powerful it gave the party almost unassailable control of national politics for two generations.
The coalition started to splinter in the mid-1960s, when Lyndon Johnson’s support of the surging civil rights movement drove the white South to the Republicans. Gerstle sees the fatal blow coming with the following decade’s economic crisis. The trouble started with the Vietnam War, which triggered an inflationary spiral that the oil shocks of the 1970s accelerated. Rising prices opened the economy to a rush of lower-cost imports that American industries didn’t see coming until it was too late. Suddenly auto plants were cutting shifts. Steel mills were shuttering. And Ronald Reagan was standing over a couple of dozen sizzling sausages, telling a yard full of struggling steelworkers that it was time to give up on the New Deal order.
It was a marker of one of the two political transformations that drive Gary Gerstle’s enlightening new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.” For almost half a century families like those that lived in Allen Park had backed what Gerstle, the Paul Mellon professor emeritus of American history at Cambridge, calls “the New Deal order.” At its core lay Franklin Roosevelt’s commitment to using government power to counter capitalism’s instability and inequality. From that principle emerged an array of public policies, some meant to regulate troublesome sectors of the economy, others to assure the aged and the poor a minimal standard of living, still others to give working people the income they needed to buy the goods their factories produced and the homes they dreamed of owning. As the programs flowed out, the support flooded in: By 1936 Roosevelt had added a huge bloc of blue-collar voters in the urban North to the Democrats’ traditional base in the white South, a combination so powerful it gave the party almost unassailable control of national politics for two generations.
The coalition started to splinter in the mid-1960s, when Lyndon Johnson’s support of the surging civil rights movement drove the white South to the Republicans. Gerstle sees the fatal blow coming with the following decade’s economic crisis. The trouble started with the Vietnam War, which triggered an inflationary spiral that the oil shocks of the 1970s accelerated. Rising prices opened the economy to a rush of lower-cost imports that American industries didn’t see coming until it was too late. Suddenly auto plants were cutting shifts. Steel mills were shuttering. And Ronald Reagan was standing over a couple of dozen sizzling sausages, telling a yard full of struggling steelworkers that it was time to give up on the New Deal order.
Ronald Reagan’s New Economic Order, and What It Meant for America
Posted from nytimes.com
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Ronald Reagan
Freedom
Economics
Capitalism
Posted >1 y ago
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Regan definitely appealed to the "working man" in America, I was in the military at the time and was so glad he kept Carter from a second Presidency. Carter treated the military like crap, pay raises were nearly non existing even though inflation was growing, and the the debacle in the desert. Within days of Reagan's election the mood of the country lightened, the Iranian hostages were freed, and it felt like our pride was being restored. We also got a real nice pay raise.
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That has got to be one of the shallowest book reviews I've ever read, attempting to distill what is almost certainly a complex narrative into a single-dimension discussion of racism.
For comparison, consider the abstract from the book author's 2018 paper sharing the same title:
"This 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."
For comparison, consider the abstract from the book author's 2018 paper sharing the same title:
"This 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."
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