Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1327918 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 848 pages

Customer Reviews

'The Age Of Reagan - The Fall of the Old Liberal Order'
‘The Age Of Reagan – The Fall Of The Old Liberal Order: 1964-1980’ brings to life the tumultuous decade and a half that saw Ronald Reagan rise from Hollywood star on a downward slope to the White House and political legend.

In the 1985 film ‘Back To The Future’, Michael J. Fox’s endearing teenager Marty McFly accidentally travels back thirty years in Dr. Emmet Brown’s Delorean time machine. The only way that McFly can return to 1985 is by finding Dr. Brown in 1955 before the only lightning storm for decades (which can power the time machine) hits Hill Valley a week later. The only trouble is Dr. Brown has yet to fall and bang his head in his bathroom, where he first gets a vision of the Flux Capacitor which is the crucial component of his time machine.

Curiously disbelieving of McFly’s time travel tales, Brown interrogates him about the future, and one of the questions he asks is: Who is President of the United States in 1985. McFly responds: “Ronald Reagan”. Brown is almost beside himself with laughter at such a seemingly ridiculous notion – “Ronald Reagan!? The actor!?”

When I first saw ‘Back To The Future’ aged 7, this obviously meant nothing to me, but when I started reading ‘The Age Of Reagan’ it occurred to me that his transformation from falling actor after the box office failure of his last ever film, 1964’s ‘The Killers’, to standard bearer of the conservative movement during the 1980s was truly meteoric.

Steven F. Hayward – also the author of ‘Churchill on Leadership’, and a frequent contributor to National Review, Reason and Policy Review – has penned a thoroughly compelling and provocative account of Reagan’s battle to be taken seriously, from ‘The Speech’ he made in support of Barry Goldwater’s disastrous Presidential bid in October 1964 to beating Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Presidential election.

It opens with an account of October 1964. Goldwater was heading for a crushing defeat by Democrat incumbent Lyndon Johnson, with the assassination of Kennedy only a year previous still fresh in the public’s minds, and no desire amongst the American public for a third president in such a short space of time.

Reagan was a life-long New Deal era Democrat – he voted for Franklin Roosevelt four times, shared campaign platforms with Harry Truman in 1948, campaigned against Nixon in the latter’s 1950 California Senate race, and fended numerous invitations during the 1950s to run as a Democrat for Congress. His volte-face in 1962, when he finally joined the Republican Party, was the culmination in his own political journey – from New Deal liberal to neo-conservative. Irving Kristol, an ex-Trotskyite who traversed the same political road, described this conversion as that of “a liberal mugged by reality”.

His fight to become the Republican standard bearer throughout the late Sixties and Seventies was a tough and at times lonely battle. The Republican establishment didn’t think he had leadership qualities, and in the early years he was seen as a gaffe-prone, intellectually limited runner-up who was out of his league. After his close defeat at the 1976 Republican Convention against incumbent Gerald Ford, many in the press and political sphere were prepared to call time on Reagan’s greater political aspirations. But he persevered, and with the defeat of Ford by Carter on short-lived wave of hope and optimism leading to listlessness and apathy, Reagan seized the moment and re-drew the political map for a generation.

Hayward chronicles the torrid and turbulent post-Watergate period which saw the Republican movement, bereft of ideas and distrusted after Nixon, disintegrate into acrimony and bitter in-fighting. As Hayward puts it, “the events shaping the political climate seemed to be larger than the personalities trying to master them”.

If anything, Hayward’s book teaches us that the beauty of conservatism is its pragmatism based on ideals not dogma. Conservatism is at its best when it embraces the world of today not yesterday, and adapts to the modern age. Goldwater’s fatal flaw in 1964 was that he came across as angry and pessimistic, and wanted to return America to a bygone era. America had already moved on. Yet Reagan was ahead of his time.

While Nixon would talk up America on the basis of material accomplishments – “it’s the millions of people that are buying news cars that have faith in America” – Reagan espoused a “forward-looking optimism, rooted in the latent greatness of America”. He borrowed heavily from Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln with visions of America being a “shining city on the hill”, all themes which would appeal twenty years later while Reagan occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

A truly provocative tome, which Hayward intends to accompany shortly with a second instalment focusing on Reagan’s period in office.

Morning in America
This vast and impressive work is an engaging read. More political history of the USA than biography, it chronicles the decline of liberalism from its apogee in 1964 to its defeat in 1980. The year 1964 was also the nadir of the conservative movement with LBJ's crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater.

Hayward focuses on the clash of ideas during the 1960s and 70s, demonstrating how brilliantly Reagan exposed the fault lines of liberalism in both its New Deal and Great Society manifestations. Reagan had a profound understanding of how modern liberalism veered away from its roots, and a great gift of communicating this to the America people, while offering sensible alternatives.

Early on he observed the arrogance of liberal elitism with its reliance on so-called experts and its contempt for common sense. He called it "the fetish of complexity" and insisted that there were indeed simple solutions, although they weren't necessarily easy.

Surrounded by airhead social engineers, LBJ was not stupid but his administration failed in everything that it attempted. It lost the war on poverty and the Vietnam War because there was no will to win. In addition, the student radicalism of the late 1960s alienated large numbers of the Democrat constituency.

And then under Nixon, spending on social programs actually increased! Nixon's foreign policy was likewise one of appeasement and retreat. The malaise of the Carter presidency thus had deep roots. At the same time, conservatism had experienced a tremendous resurgence.

By the end of the 1970s the political mood had turned because of the utter and repeated failure of liberal policies, leading to the humiliating Iran hostage crisis. The American electorate realised this and made the sensible choice in 1980. Thus the USA returned to greatness and prosperity under its most beloved leader of the 20th century.

For those more interested in Reagan the man than the ideological currents of the times, I recommend The Essential Ronald Reagan by Lee Edwards, When Character Was King by Peggy Noonan and Ronald Reagan: How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary Leader by Dinesh D'Souza.