The simplified electron and muon model, Oscillating Spacetime: The Foundation...RitikBhardwaj56
Discover the Simplified Electron and Muon Model: A New Wave-Based Approach to Understanding Particles delves into a groundbreaking theory that presents electrons and muons as rotating soliton waves within oscillating spacetime. Geared towards students, researchers, and science buffs, this book breaks down complex ideas into simple explanations. It covers topics such as electron waves, temporal dynamics, and the implications of this model on particle physics. With clear illustrations and easy-to-follow explanations, readers will gain a new outlook on the universe's fundamental nature.
Macroeconomics- Movie Location
This will be used as part of your Personal Professional Portfolio once graded.
Objective:
Prepare a presentation or a paper using research, basic comparative analysis, data organization and application of economic information. You will make an informed assessment of an economic climate outside of the United States to accomplish an entertainment industry objective.
Delivering Micro-Credentials in Technical and Vocational Education and TrainingAG2 Design
Explore how micro-credentials are transforming Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) with this comprehensive slide deck. Discover what micro-credentials are, their importance in TVET, the advantages they offer, and the insights from industry experts. Additionally, learn about the top software applications available for creating and managing micro-credentials. This presentation also includes valuable resources and a discussion on the future of these specialised certifications.
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Strategies for Effective Upskilling is a presentation by Chinwendu Peace in a Your Skill Boost Masterclass organisation by the Excellence Foundation for South Sudan on 08th and 09th June 2024 from 1 PM to 3 PM on each day.
it describes the bony anatomy including the femoral head , acetabulum, labrum . also discusses the capsule , ligaments . muscle that act on the hip joint and the range of motion are outlined. factors affecting hip joint stability and weight transmission through the joint are summarized.
Normal Labour/ Stages of Labour/ Mechanism of LabourWasim Ak
Normal labor is also termed spontaneous labor, defined as the natural physiological process through which the fetus, placenta, and membranes are expelled from the uterus through the birth canal at term (37 to 42 weeks
67. Review
• President Nixon
Focus Question: What were the major policies of the Nixon
administration on social and economic issues?
• Vietnam and Watergate
Focus Question: How did Vietnam and the Watergate scandal affect
popular trust in the government?
• The End of the Golden Age
Focus Question: In what ways did the opportunities of most
Americans diminish in the 1970s?
68. Review
• The Rising Tide of Conservatism
Focus Question: What were the roots of the rise of conservatism in the
1970s?
• The Reagan Revolution
Focus Question: How did the Reagan presidency affect Americans
both at home and abroad?
69. MEDIA LINKS
—— Chapter 26 ——
Order Title Filename Media link
1
Eric Foner on the
rebirth of
conservatism
rebirth_of_conservatism http://wwnorton.com/common/mplay/6.7/?
p=/college/history/foner4/&f=rebirth_of_cons
ervatism
2
Eric Foner on
Reagan's reshaping of
the national agenda
question128 http://wwnorton.com/common/mplay/6.7/?
p=/college/history/foner4/mp4/&f=question12
8
3
Eric Foner on civil
liberties intertwined
with civil rights
question129 http://wwnorton.com/common/mplay/6.7/?
p=/college/history/foner4/mp4/&f=question12
9
4 Eric Foner on the
religious right in
political life
religious_politics http://wwnorton.com/common/mplay/6.7/?
p=/college/history/foner4/&f=religious_politi
cs
70. Next Lecture PREVIEW:
—— Chapter 26 ——
Globalization and Its
Discontents, 1989–2000
• The Post–Cold War World
• A New Economy?
• Culture Wars
• Impeachment and the Election of 2000
• Freedom and the New Century
71. Norton Lecture Slides
Independent and Employee-Owned
http://wwnorton.com/college/history/give-me-liberty4/
by
Eric Foner
This concludes the Norton Lecture Slides
Slide Set for Chapter 26
Give Me Liberty!
AN AMERICAN HISTORY
FOURTH EDITION
Editor's Notes
Chapter 26: The Triumph of Conservatism, 1969–1988
The 1960s saw contesting ideals of freedom, most notably between civil rights and the burgeoning conservative movement. Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for the presidency helped spread ideas that later defined conservatism, such as opposition to the welfare state and a reduction in taxes and government regulations. Goldwater showed that whenever liberals controlled Washington, conservatives could portray themselves as anti-government populists, broadening their base and ending their image as upper-class elitists.
The late 1960s and the 1970s saw developments that transformed American politics—the disintegration of the New Deal coalition forged by Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR); an economic crisis that liberal policies could not end; a shift of population and economic resources to conservative bastions in the South and West; the growth of an activist, conservative Christianity more and more aligned with the Republican Party; and a series of US defeats overseas. Together, these events expanded the influence of conservatives’ ideas, including their definition of freedom.
The subtopics for this lecture are listed on the screen above.
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.
In the post–World War II era, conservatism seemed marginal in a very liberal environment. Conservatism was seen as outdated and associated with conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, and preferences for social hierarchy over equality. Liberals believed conservatives were simply alienated or psychologically disturbed. In the 1950s and 1960s, conservatism was reborn. In 1968, a backlash of formerly Democratic voters against black protest and the antiwar movement helped Richard Nixon win the White House. But conservatives were dissatisfied with Nixon. Nixon adopted conservative language but actually expanded the welfare state and improved relations with the Soviets and China.
Nixon, who won by a thin margin, moved to the center, trying to solidify Republican support and win disaffected Democrats. Nixon, mostly interested in foreign policy and wanting to avoid fights with the Democratic Congress over domestic policy, actually accepted and expanded much of the Great Society and welfare state. Nixon established new federal regulatory agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the National Transportation Safety Board, all of which limited entrepreneurial freedoms. Nixon spent liberally on social services and environmental initiatives. He abolished the Office of Economic Opportunity, which had coordinated the War on Poverty, but he also expanded food stamps and tied Social Security benefits to inflation. The Endangered Species and Clean Air acts regulated businesses in order to limit pollution and protect animals threatened with extinction.
Nixon’s great surprise was his proposal for a Family Assistance Plan to replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Under his plan, the federal government would guarantee a minimum income for all Americans. AFDC, known as “welfare,” gave aid, usually quite limited, to poor families who met local eligibility requirements. Originally a New Deal program that helped mostly the white poor, welfare came to be associated with blacks, who by 1970 were half of all welfare recipients. AFDC rolls expanded in the 1960s, partly because of relaxed federal eligibility standards. Conservative politicians now attacked welfare recipients as people who wanted to live off honest taxpayers rather than work. But Nixon’s plan for a guaranteed annual income, too radical for conservatives and not enough for liberals, did not pass Congress.
Nixon’s racial policy was ambiguous. He nominated conservative southern jurists who favored segregation to the Supreme Court to win over the white South, but the Senate rejected them. The courts lost patience with southern delays in enforcing civil rights laws and finally forced southern schools to desegregate. Briefly, Nixon also embraced “affirmative action” programs to raise minority employment. Nixon expanded Johnson’s efforts to require federal contractors to hire minorities. But Nixon wanted the affirmative action program as a way to fight inflation by weakening the power of building trade unions (he believed their control over the labor market hiked wages to unreasonable levels and increased construction costs). He hoped the plan would cause tensions between blacks and labor unions and that Republicans would benefit. Indeed, this is what happened. Trade unions of skilled construction workers, with few black members, strongly opposed Nixon’s plan. Nixon hoped to win blue-collar workers over for the 1972 elections, and he quickly replaced his affirmative action plan with a program that did not require federal contractors to hire minorities.
When Earl Warren retired as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1969, Nixon replaced him with Warren Burger, an opponent of the Warren Court’s “judicial activism.” Burger was expected to lead the court in a conservative direction. But he surprised Nixon and others by initially expanding much of the Warren Court’s jurisprudence. In 1971, the Court approved plans to integrate southern schools through busing, in which students were transported to other schools to make an integrated student body. Judges everywhere began to order busing, angering many white parents who wanted to keep their children in majority-white neighborhood schools. Particularly bitter and violent protests broke out in Boston. In only a few years, the Court reversed itself, and abandoned efforts to wrest control of local schools or bus students at great distances to achieve integration. Rulings absolved suburban districts of the responsibility of enrolling non-white, and often poor, students from non-suburban neighborhoods. By the 1990s, northern public schools were more segregated than southern schools.
Efforts to gain more job opportunities for minorities also sparked bitter legal battles and white resentments. Many whites came to see affirmative action programs as “reverse discrimination” that violated the Fourteenth Amendment by giving non-whites special advantages over whites. As affirmative action spread from blacks to include women, Latinos, Asian- and Native Americans, conservatives demanded that the Supreme Court ban such programs. The Supreme Court refused but offered no consistent position. But the Court proved more and more hostile to government affirmative action programs. In 1978, the Court shot down a University of California admissions program that set aside a quota of places for non-white medical students. The majority rejected the ideas of quotas while ruling that race could be one factor among many in college admissions. In the 1990s, affirmative action was ambiguously employed in higher education, although in 2003 the court reaffirmed that race could be a factor in college admissions.
Alarming conservatives, the sexual revolution became mainstream in the 1970s. Premarital sex was more widely accepted, the number of divorces and age of marriage rose, and by 1975, more divorces occurred than first-time marriages. American birthrates dropped dramatically, the result of women’s changing lives and the availability of birth control and legal abortion.
In the Nixon years, sexual equality advanced in law and policy. In 1972, Congress approved Title IX, banning gender discrimination in higher education, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, requiring that married women have access to their own credit. Huge sexual discrimination suits against large employers worth millions of dollars were won in courts. The number of working women continued to rise. By 1980, 40 percent of women with children worked; in 1990, 55 percent. Working women had various motivations, from being a professional in careers traditionally limited to men to bolstering family income as the economy faltered.
The gay and lesbian movement also expanded in the 1970s. By 1979, there were thousands of local gay rights groups through the country. They elected officials, pressed states to decriminalize homosexuality, and passed antidiscrimination laws in major cities. They urged gay men and lesbians to “come out of the closet” and forced the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. By the 1970s, the counterculture’s emphasis on personal freedom and individuality had become mainstream. Americans became obsessed with self-improvement in fitness, diets, and psychological therapies.
Conservatives also believed Nixon was “soft” in foreign policy. Certainly, Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, continued their predecessor’s policies of trying to undermine governments that seemed to endanger U.S. strategic or economic interests. Nixon sent arms to pro-American dictators in Iran, the Philippines, and South Africa. When Chileans elected the socialist Salvador Allende president, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped his domestic opponents launch a coup on September 11, 1973, that overthrew and killed Allende and installed a bloody regime ruled by General Augusto Pinochet. Thousands of Allende’s supporters, including some Americans, were tortured and murdered, while others fled the country.
In relations with major communist countries, however, Nixon decreased Cold War tensions. Nixon launched his political career as a militant anticommunist, but he and Kissinger were “realists.” They were more interested in power than ideology and preferred stability to endless conflict. Nixon hoped that better relations with the Soviets would pressure North Vietnam to end the Vietnam War on terms acceptable to America. Nixon also realized that China had its own interests, separate from those of the Soviets, and would soon be a major world power. In early 1972, Nixon made a highly publicized trip to Beijing, which led to China finally occupying its seat in the United Nations. Although full diplomatic relations with China were not established until 1979, Nixon’s visit sparked a vast trade increase between the United States and China. Three months after his China trip, Nixon became the first president to visit the Soviet Union, where he negotiated with Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev. The talks led to increased trade and two landmark arms control treaties: the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which capped each country’s arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, and the Anti–Ballistic Missile Treaty, which banned the development of systems for intercepting income missiles. Nixon and Brezhnev declared a new age of “peaceful coexistence” in which “détente” (cooperation) would replace Cold War hostility.
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.
In his 1968 campaign, Nixon pledged that he had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War. Once in office, he declared a new policy, Vietnamization, in which U.S. troops would gradually be withdrawn while South Vietnamese troops, backed by U.S. bombing, would take up combat. But Vietnamization did not limit the war or end the antiwar movement. In early 1970, Nixon ordered U.S. troops into neutral Cambodia, in order to disrupt supply lines to the South. But the invasion did not achieve its military goals, and it destabilized the Cambodian government, starting a chain of events that brought the Khmer Rouge to power (who forced most Cambodians to migrate into the countryside and massacred millions), and sparked the largest student protests in U.S. history. In protests at Kent State University, the Ohio National Guard killed four antiwar protests; at Jackson State University, two students were killed by police. More than 350 colleges and universities had student strikes and 21 campuses were occupied by troops.
Simultaneously, troop morale dropped. Although all young men were subject to the draft, most college students received deferments. The army was mostly composed of working-class whites and poor racial minorities. Blacks complained of having disproportionately higher casualty rates than white soldiers. And the military was not immune from domestic social and cultural changes. More and more soldiers wore peace and Black Power symbols, used drugs, refused orders, deserted, and assaulted and killed unpopular officers. The erosion in discipline convinced many high-ranking officers that the United States had to pull out from Vietnam.
At the same time, public support for the war declined. Revelations in 1969 that U.S. forces had committed a massacre of some 350 civilians at My Lai the year before shocked the nation. In 1971, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, a classified government report that traced U.S. involvement in Vietnam back to World War II and showed how multiple presidents had misled the American public about it. The Supreme Court rejected Nixon’s effort to suppress the papers’ publication. In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which limited presidential authority by requiring congressional approval for troop commitments overseas.
In 1973, Nixon sealed the Paris peace agreement and started to withdraw U.S. troops. The compromise left South Vietnam’s government intact, but it also left North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops in control of parts of the South. U.S. bombing stopped and the draft ceased. But the North Vietnamese launched a final offensive in 1975 that toppled South Vietnam’s government. The United States evacuated its embassy, and Vietnam was reunified under communist rule. The Vietnam War was a military, political, and social disaster, in which 58,000 Americans were killed, along with 3 to 4 million Vietnamese. The war cost the United States $100 billion, but the higher cost was to Americans’ confidence in their own institutions and their nation’s ideals and purposes. Policymakers behind the war, such as former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, have since said the war was a terrible mistake.
Nixon’s domestic and foreign policy successes secured his reelection in 1972. He won a landslide victory over liberal Democrat George McGovern and gained more support in Democratic strongholds in the South and among northern working-class whites. But triumph was succeeded by disaster. Nixon was obsessed with secrecy and did not tolerate differences of opinion. He viewed critics as national security threats and created an “enemies list” of unfriendly reporters, politicians, and celebrities. When the Pentagon Papers were published, Nixon established a special investigative unit in the White House known as the “plumbers” to get information about Daniel Ellsberg, the former government official who had leaked the papers to the press. The plumbers raided Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to discredit him. In June 1972, five former employees of Nixon’s reelection committee were caught breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C., and were arrested.
The arrests did not affect the 1972 presidential campaign. But in 1973, the judge presiding over the prosecution of the Watergate five tried to find out who was behind the break-in. Washington Post journalists revealed that persons close to Nixon had ordered the Watergate operation and tried to “cover up” Nixon’s involvement. Congressional hearings soon revealed a wider pattern of wiretapping, break-ins, and attempts to sabotage political opponents. A special prosecutor appointed reluctantly by Nixon demanded copies of tapes that the president had made of his conversations. The Supreme Court ordered Nixon to provide them, reaffirming that presidents are not above the law.
The scandal unfolded for weeks, and by mid-1974, it was obvious that Nixon had at least ordered the cover-up of the Watergate break-in (it was unclear whether he had ordered the break-in itself). In August 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend that Nixon be impeached for conspiracy to obstruct justice. Nixon soon became the only president to resign. His presidency is the classic example of the abuse of political power. In 1973, Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned after it was revealed he took bribes from construction firms. Nixon’s attorney general and two aides were convicted of obstructing justice in the Watergate affair and went to jail. Nixon insisted he did nothing wrong, and that previous presidents also lied and conducted illegal activities. While not excusing Nixon, subsequent Senate hearings held by Frank Church of Idaho revealed a history of abusive actions by every Cold War–era president, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) spying on millions of Americans and disruptions of civil rights groups, and CIA covert operations to overthrow foreign governments, assassinate foreign leaders, and organize a secret army in Laos, bordering Vietnam.
The Church Committee revelations, along with Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the Vietnam War, seriously eroded Americans’ confidence in their government. Congress soon placed restrictions on the FBI and CIA, which banned spying on American citizens and overseas covert operations without congressional knowledge. While liberals celebrated Nixon’s downfall, they did not realize that liberalism itself—the idea that government can be trusted to take positive action to solve social problems and promote the public good and individual freedom—was damaged by these events. These events contributed greatly to a growing public belief that a powerful central government could not be trusted, and it distracted Americans from the looming economic crisis that shook America in the 1970s.
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.
In the 1970s, postwar economic expansion and consumer prosperity ended, followed by slow growth and high inflation. The end of capitalism’s “golden age” was caused by many factors. With a booming economy driven in part by a military-industrial complex, administrations had not realized how the Cold War might have less positive economic consequences. To check the Soviets, the United States had promoted the economic reconstruction of Germany and Japan and supported new manufacturing in places like South Korea and Taiwan. It encouraged American companies to invest overseas and didn’t complain when allies protected their own industries while seeking unrestricted access to U.S. markets. Steel imports, for example, devastated the American steel industry. And the strong dollar, tied to gold by the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, made it harder to sell goods overseas. In 1971, for the first time in the twentieth century, the United States had a trade deficit (importing more goods than exporting). By 1980, almost all goods produced in the United States were competing with foreign-made products and the number of manufacturing workers had declined to 28 percent (it had been 38 percent in 1960). The Vietnam War produced higher federal deficits and rising inflation.
In 1971, Nixon announced a radical departure in economic policy. He took the United States off the gold standard, ending the Bretton Woods agreement that fixed the value of the dollar and currencies in gold. From now on, world currencies “floated” in relation to one another, their worth determined not by treaty but international currency markets. Nixon hoped this would promote U.S. exports, but the end of fixed currency rates destabilized the world economy. Nixon also froze wages and prices for ninety days to stabilize the economy. These policies briefly stopped inflation and reduced imports, but a war between Israel and its neighbors Egypt and Syria led Middle Eastern governments to hike the price of oil and suspend oil exports to the United States for several months. By this point, the United States imported one-third of its oil. Congress lowered the speed limit and urged conservation to save fuel. The energy crisis focused public attention on domestic energy sources like oil, coal, and natural gas. Oil exploration increased in the American West. And the high oil prices set by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) benefited western energy companies.
But rising oil prices affected the global economy and contributed to the combination of stagnant economic growth and high inflation known as “stagflation.” Between 1973 and 1981, the inflation rate in developed nations was 10 percent per year, while economic growth was down from the 1960s to 2.4 percent per year. The so-called misery index—the sum of unemployment and inflation rates—stood at 10.8 in 1970; by 1980, it was near 22. With higher oil prices, Americans bought more fuel-efficient foreign cars, hurting the domestic auto industry.
The economic crisis helped erode the postwar social compact. Facing lower profits and more global competition, corporations eliminated more high-paying manufacturing jobs through automation and moving jobs overseas. Older industrial cities and areas were devastated, while smaller industrial cities suffered even more, and as their tax bases disappeared, so did public services. The higher flows of population, jobs, and investment to the nonunion, low-wage Sunbelt states increased the political influence of this conservative region.
Always a junior partner in the Democratic coalition, labor found itself on the defensive in this era, and has been so ever since. The declining power of unions and the continuing economic shift from manufacturing to service jobs adversely impacted ordinary Americans. While median family income had doubled between 1953 and 1973, real wages between 1973 and 1993 did not rise at all. The 1970s was one of only two decades in the twentieth century when Americans were poorer than when it began.
The economic crisis troubled Nixon’s successors. Gerald Ford, appointed to replace vice president Agnew, assumed the presidency when Nixon resigned. Ford named Nelson Rockefeller of New York as his vice president. For the first time in U.S. history, both offices were occupied by persons for whom no one had voted. One of Ford’s first acts was to pardon Nixon, which prevented his prosecution for obstruction of justice. This was a deeply unpopular decision. Ford had no significant accomplishments in domestic policy. Ford and his economic adviser, Alan Greenspan, wanted Americans to spend less and save more to build money for investment, and they called for tax cuts and less government economic regulation. The Democratic majority in Congress did not approve. To fight inflation, Ford urged Americans to shop wisely, reduce spending, and wear “WIN” buttons (for “Whip Inflation Now”). Though inflation fell, unemployment rose in 1975 to the highest level since the Depression. But Ford continued Nixon’s policy of détente, and the United States signed an agreement with the Soviets at Helsinki, Finland, that recognized the permanence of the division of Europe. The Helsinki Accords inspired movements for more freedom in eastern Europe’s communist countries.
In 1976, Jimmy Carter, a former Georgia governor unknown outside that state, ran as a Democratic candidate untainted by a highly unpopular federal government. He won with a comfortable margin over Ford. A devout evangelical Baptist, Carter promised a disillusioned American electorate that he would be virtuous and honest. He wanted to make government more efficient, protect the environment, and morally improve politics. He also supported black aspirations, and he appointed unprecedented numbers of African-Americans to federal office. Even though the Democrats controlled Congress, however, Carter and the Congress rarely cooperated. Seeing inflation and not unemployment as the main economic problem, proposed cuts in domestic programs; viewing competition as a way to reduce prices, he deregulated the trucking and airline industries, and supporting the Federal Reserve Bank’s policy of raising interest rates to reduce economic activity and thus wages and prices, he hoped to stop inflation, but higher oil prices kept inflation alive. Carter also embraced nuclear power as a way to reduce dependence on foreign oil, but a near-fatal accident in 1979 at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania released radiation and sparked public fears about nuclear power and stopped the industry’s expansion. Carter even repudiated his party’s legacy as the party of affluence and economic growth when he gave a speech in 1979 about the nation’s “crisis of confidence,” seeming to blame it on Americans themselves and their bankrupt definition of freedom as “self-indulgence and consumption.”
Under Carter, a commitment to human rights defined U.S. foreign policy for the first time. Human rights groups in the 1970s that influenced Carter began to identify human rights violations not only by communist nations but by U.S. allies as well, especially Latin American dictatorships that used death squads to kill political opponents. In 1978, Carter cut off aid to the military dictatorship in Argentina which, in the name of anticommunism, had launched a “dirty war” against its own citizens, kidnapping and murdering 10,000 to 30,000 persons. As Argentina was an important U.S. ally, this shocked Latin American regimes dependent on American aid. By his presidency’s end, Carter had made human rights central to American policy. He believed that in the post–Vietnam era, U.S. policy should move away from Cold War assumptions and instead combat Third World poverty, prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and promote human rights. Carter also pardoned Vietnam-era draft resisters.
Carter’s emphasis on peaceful solutions to international problems brought some important results. In 1979, he brokered the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel. He improved Latin American affairs by promising to transfer control of the Panama Canal in 2000. He resisted calls to intervene against a left-wing revolution fighting Somoza, Nicaragua’s dictator. He also cut military aid to the right-wing government of El Salvador, which sponsored death squads. But despite criticisms from “realists” that his focus on human rights was damaging U.S. power in the world, Carter continued to pour billions into defense and the United States continued to support allies with records of human rights violations, such as Guatemala, the Philippines, South Korea, and Iran.
U.S. support for Iran undid Carter’s policies and administration. Iran, strategically located on the Soviet Union’s southern border, was a major supplier of oil and importer of U.S. military equipment. Carter’s 1977 visit in support of the Shah, Iran’s ruler, inspired a more militant opposition, and in 1979, a popular revolution led by the Muslim cleric Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah and declared Iran an Islamic republic. The Iranian revolution marked a shift in opposition movements in the Middle East from socialism and Arab nationalism to religious fundamentalism. This had long-term consequences for America. When Carter allowed the deposed Shah to come to America, Khomeini’s followers invaded the U.S. embassy and seized dozens of hostages. They regained their freedom only in January 1981, the day Carter’s term ended, and the hostage crisis deeply hurt Carter’s popularity.
The invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 by the Soviets, who sought to reinforce a friendly government fighting an Islamic rebellion, also confronted Carter with a crisis. Over time, the Soviet war in Afghanistan proved to be its own Vietnam, with high casualties, costs, and mounting domestic dissatisfaction. At first, however, it seemed to indicate a decline in U.S. power. In response, President Carter announced the Carter doctrine, declaring the United States would use military force, if necessary, to protect its interest in the Persian Gulf. He retaliated against the Soviets with boycotts and withdrawal from nuclear arms treaties. The United States also began to give arms and money to Islamic fundamentalist rebels in Afghanistan, giving rise to the Taliban.
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.
Domestic and international troubles in the 1970s made Americans anxious and emboldened conservatives. Economic crisis made lower taxes, less government regulation, and social spending cuts to spur business investment seem appealing. Fears about declining U.S. world power led to calls for renewing the Cold War. The civil rights and sexual revolutions produced fears and resentments that eroded the Democratic coalition, and rising urban crime created calls for law and order. In the 1970s, conservatives abandoned overt opposition to blacks’ struggle for racial justice, as the confrontations of George Wallace where replaced by demands for local control and resistance to the federal government. The language of individual freedom especially appealed to growing numbers of mostly white suburbanites leaving the cities and urban problems. The suburbs became the base of modern conservatism. But conservatives also organized at the grass roots level, and organized to win local elections and take local government, even school boards. One set of conservatives, the “Neoconservatives,” turned against the federal government and liberalism, citing a decline in moral standards and respect for authority. They wanted to end welfare, decrease taxes and regulations, and return to fighting the Cold War.
The rise of religious fundamentalism in the 1970s expanded conservatism’s base. More and more Americans embraced traditional religious values. While membership in mainstream Protestant denominations declined, evangelical churches flourished. Evangelical Christians seemed alienated from a culture that seemed to discount religion and promote immorality. They demanded the reversal of Supreme Court decisions that banned prayer in public schools, protected pornography as free speech, and legalized abortion. In 1979, Virginia minister Jerry Falwell created a group, the Moral Majority, to wage “war against sin” and elect “pro-life, pro-family, pro-America” candidates. Falwell labeled supporters of abortion rights, easy divorce, and reduced defense budgets as agents of Satan trying to undermine God’s plans for America. But Christian conservatives seemed most angered by the sexual revolution, which they saw as an immoral threat to traditional families. They thought the 1960s had turned freedom into moral anarchy.
In the 1970s, “family values” became central to conservative politics, most prominently in the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). First proposed in the 1920s, the ERA was revived by second-wave feminists. Its affirmation that “equality of rights under the law” could not be abridged “on account of sex” seemed uncontroversial, and Congress approved it in 1972 with little controversy and sent it to the states for ratification. But it sparked protest from those who believed it would discredit the role of wife and homemaker. The ERA revealed divisions among women as well. To its supporters, the ERA guaranteed women’s freedom in the public sphere. To its opponents, freedom for women was in their roles as wife and mother. Opponents claimed that the amendment would erode male breadwinners’ support for wives. Though polls showed that most male and female Americans supported the ERA, it did not achieve the required ratification of thirty-eight states in order to become law.
Far more bitter was the battle over abortion rights, which conservatives saw as liberals spreading sexual immorality at the cost of moral values. A movement to reverse Roe v. Wade started among Roman Catholics, but soon included evangelical Protestants and social conservatives. The movement insisted that life began at conception, and that abortion was murder. Feminists argued that a woman’s right to control her own body includes the right to safe, legal abortions. Both sides showed how the rights revolution had reshaped political language, as opponents of abortion appealed for the “right to life,” while supporters celebrated the “right to choose.” The anti-abortion movement successfully pressured Congress, over President Ford’s veto, to end federal funding for abortions for poor women in the Medicaid program, and by the 1990s, some extreme anti-abortion activists were bombing medical clinics and assassinating doctors who terminated pregnancies.
With liberals unable to check deindustrialization and declining real wages, economic anxiety also fostered conservatism in economics. Unlike during the Great Depression, economic crisis inspired a critique of government, rather than of business. New environmental regulations sparked calls for less government regulation of the economy, especially in the West, where the “Sagebrush Rebellion” sought to reduce federal bureaucracies’ control over and conservation of precious land, water, and minerals. But everywhere the end of affluence and the rise of stagflation created support for conservatives who claimed that government regulations raised business costs and eliminated jobs. Economic crisis in particular spread support for lower taxes. Conservatives welcomed tax cuts as a way to both enhance profits and reduce resources for government, thus preventing new social programs and reducing existing ones. Many Americans found taxes more burdensome, as wage increases were canceled by inflation and pushed families into higher federal tax brackets. In 1978, conservatives ran a successful campaign to ban further increases in property taxes, and demonstrated the power of anti-tax politics. The new law benefited business and home owners, but cut funds for schools, libraries, and other public services. Anti-tax sentiment flourished throughout the nation, and other states passed similar laws.
By 1980, Carter was deeply unpopular. Conservatism seemed on the rise everywhere. In England, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, promising to sell state-owned industries to private firms, shrink the welfare state, and reduce taxes and the power of unions. In the United States, Ronald Reagan’s campaign for the presidency united conservatives around promises to end stagflation and restore America’s confidence and its role in the world. Reagan also appealed to white backlash against civil rights, voicing support for states’ rights, vilifying welfare recipients, and condemning busing and affirmative action. Although not devout and a divorcee, Reagan won the support of “family values” religious conservatives. Reagan won the election, taking former Democratic bastions such as Illinois, Texas, and New York, while Carter received only 41 percent of the popular vote. While Carter went on to lead anti-poverty, human rights, and diplomatic efforts around the world, his presidency is considered by most to be a failure and his defeat launched the Reagan Revolution, which made freedom the domain of the right in American politics.
The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.
As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.
Reagan’s path to the presidency was unusual. Originally a New Deal Democrat and head of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan became the spokesman for General Electric in the 1950s, preaching the virtues of unregulated capitalism. His nominating speech for Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention brought him national renown. In 1966, he was elected California’s governor, and in 1976 challenged Ford for the Republican nomination, almost winning it. His victory in the 1980 election brought together old and new conservatives: Sunbelt suburbanites and urban working-class ethnics; antigovernment crusaders and aggressive Cold Warriors; and libertarians and the Christian Right.
Although Reagan, the oldest man ever to hold political office, was often underestimated by his opponents, he was politically experienced and a gifted public speaker whose optimism and good humor appealed to many Americans. Reagan made conservatism seem progressive, and he reiterated themes of America’s mission to be an example of freedom in the world that had their origins in the American Revolution. Freedom became the watchword of the Reagan Revolution, and Reagan used the word more than any other president before him.
Reagan reshaped the nation’s agenda and political language more effectively than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Reagan promised to free government from “special interests,” which he defined not as business groups but as unions, minorities, and others who wanted to use Washington’s powers to attack social inequalities. His Justice Department wanted to make the Constitution “color-blind” and gutted civil rights enforcement. Reagan seized the terms of debate and put Democrats on the defensive.
While Reagan, like his predecessors, invoked “economic freedom,” he defined it as reducing union power, dismantling regulations, and radically reducing taxes. In 1981 and 1986, Reagan won tax reforms from Congress that dramatically reduced taxes for the wealthy and moved America away from the ideal of progressive, graduated income taxes. Reagan also appointed conservatives to lead regulatory agencies, who reduced environmental and workplace safety opposed by business.
Liberals since the New Deal had tried to fuel economic growth by using government power to raise Americans’ purchasing power. Reagan, using “supply-side economics” (called “trickle-down economics” by opponents), relied on high interest rates to curb inflation and lower tax rates for business and the wealthy to stimulate private investment. This policy assumed that cutting taxes would make Americans at all income levels work harder, because they would keep more of what they earned, and that everyone would benefit from increased business profits and a growing economy, which would raise government revenues despite lower tax rates.
Reagan also began an era of hostility between government and labor unions. In 1981, when members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), the air traffic controllers’ union, went on strike in defiance of federal law, Reagan fired them all and used the military to supervise air traffic until new controllers were trained. Reagan inspired many employers to launch anti-union offensives, and more businesses now hired workers to permanently replace workers who had gone on strike. Manufacturing employment continued its long-term decline, further reducing union strength. When Reagan left office, both the service and retail sectors employed more Americans than manufacturing, and only 11 percent of nongovernment workers were union members.
“Reaganomics,” as critics called the administration’s policies, initially created the most severe recession since the 1930s. But a long period of economic expansion followed the recession of 1981–1982. As employers reduced their workforces, shifted production overseas, and used new technologies, they became more profitable. Simultaneously, inflation dropped dramatically, in part because of greater oil production. The stock market rose, and despite a sharp drop in 1987, the stock market continued to climb upward.
Reagan’s policies, deindustrialization, and rising stock prices contributed to increasing economic inequality. By the mid-1990s, the richest 1 percent of Americans owned 40 percent of America’s wealth, twice their share of twenty years earlier. Most spent their income, not on productive investments and charity, as supply-side economists predicted, but on luxury goods, real-estate speculation, and corporate buyouts that often led to plant closings. Middle-class income stagnated, especially for families with stay-at-home wives, while the income of the poorest declined. With less investment in public housing, the release of mental patients from state hospitals, and cuts to welfare, more and more Americans became homeless.
Deindustrialization and the decline of unions particularly devastated minority workers, who only recently had won skilled work in union jobs. While affirmative action expanded the black middle class by offering more educational opportunities, black workers suffered. Though Jim Crow ended in many work places in the 1970s, black workers lost their jobs as manufacturing declined. By 1981, the black unemployment rate was higher than 20 percent, more than double that of whites.
The 1980s are now seen as a decade ruled by misplaced values. Buying out companies generated more profits than running them, and making deals, not products, was the way to get rich. Corporate mergers produced billions in fees for lawyers, economic advisers, and stockbrokers. Wall Street financiers praised “greed” as “healthy.” Taxpayers paid for some of the consequences. The deregulation of savings and loans associations allowed these institutions to invest in risky real-estate ventures and mergers. When losses pushed the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, which insured depositors’ accounts, toward bankruptcy, the federal government bailed out the savings and loans institutions, at a cost of $20 billion. Though supply-side advocates argued that lower taxes would increase government revenues by stimulating economic activity, federal spending on the military in particular created enormous budget deficits. The national debt under Reagan tripled to $2.7 trillion. But Reagan remained very popular and easily defeated the Democratic candidate Walter Mondale in the 1984 election.
Reagan in some ways disappointed conservatives. While his administration sharply reduced programs such as food stamps and school lunches, it left intact core elements of the welfare state, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Reagan also did little for the Christian Right. Abortion stayed legal, women continued to enter the labor force, and Reagan appointed the first female member of the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor. Reagan voiced support for a constitutional amendment that would allow prayer in public schools, but the effort went nowhere. The administration launched a “Just Say No” campaign against illegal drug use, but failed to stop the spread of crack, a cheap form of cocaine, in urban areas. And Reagan did little to halt affirmative action.
Yet, Reagan revived the Cold War. He vigorously denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and started the largest military buildup in U.S. history, including long-range bombers and missiles. In 1983, he proposed a Strategic Defense Initiative to develop a space-based system to intercept and destroy enemy missiles. The ideas was not technologically feasible, and if deployed, would have violated the Anti–Ballistic Missile Treaty. But Reagan wanted to reassert America’s world power. He pressed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into deploying short-range nuclear weapons in Europe. The renewed arms race and Reagan’s talk of wining a nuclear war spread alarm and fear around the world. In the early 1980s, a mass movement in the United States and Europe called for a nuclear freeze—an end to nuclear arms development.
Reagan also wanted to end American’s reluctance to commit U.S. forces overseas, the result of Vietnam. He sent troops to invade Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island, to remove a pro-Castro government; he bombed Libya to retaliate against that government’s alleged involvement in a terrorist attack in West Berlin; and in 1982, he sent U.S. marines to Lebanon to keep the peace in a civil war, but quickly withdrew them after a bomb exploded at a U.S. barracks, killing 241 Americans. But Reagan preferred to achieve his objectives through military aid, not U.S. troops. He abandoned Carter’s emphasis on human rights and affirmed that the United States should support authoritarian anticommunist regimes. Under Reagan, the country became closer to anticommunist dictatorships in Chile and South Africa. His administration also sent money and arms to the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, whose armies and associated death squads committed atrocities against civilian opponents.
U.S. involvement in Central America created the great scandal of Reagan’s presidency, the Iran-Contra affair. In 1984, Congress banned military aid to the Contras, those in Nicaragua fighting the Sandinistas who in 1979 had ousted the U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza. In 1985, Reagan secretly authorized the sale of arms to Iran (then engaged in a war with Iraq) in order to get the release of American hostages held by Islamic groups in the Middle East. But the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council diverted funds from the arms sales to buy military supplies for the Contras, in defiance of Congress. In 1986, the scheme was exposed in the media, and Congress held televised hearings that showed lying and violations of the law that recalled the Nixon era. Eleven members of Reagan’s administration were convicted of perjury or destroying documents or plead guilty before they were tried. Reagan denied knowledge of the scheme, but the affair undermined the public’s confidence in him.
Surprisingly, Reagan in his second term softened his anticommunism rhetoric and established good relations with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev had come to power in 1985 and wanted to reform the Soviet Union’s political system (glasnost) and reinvigorate its economy (perestroika). The USSR had fallen far behind the United States in producing and distributing consumer goods and relied more and more on food imports to feed itself. Gorbachev realized the reforms he wanted required cuts in military costs. Reagan was ready to negotiate, and they held a series of talks on arms control that concluded with agreements to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles. In 1988, Gorbachev started to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Reagan, despite starting his presidency as a Cold Warrior, left office repudiating his earlier, militant anti-Soviet stance.
Reagan’s presidency showed the contradictions of modern conservatism. Though he wanted to appeal to the religious right, the Reagan Revolution undermined traditional and conservative values by inspiring speculation, business mergers, and investors to pursue profits at the cost of plant closings, job losses, and devastated communities. Deindustrialization, unemployment, and downward pressure on wages all threatened local traditions and family stability and undermined a common sense of national purpose by expanding income and wealth inequality.
Because of Iran-Contra and huge deficits, Reagan left office with a tarnished reputation. But few figures have so decisively reshaped American politics. Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, defeated Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts in the 1988 election in part because Dukakis could not deny that he was a “liberal,” now a term of political abuse. Conservative ideas about the virtues of free markets and the evils of “big government” dominated the media and debates. Those receiving public aid were now seen not as unfortunate, but as a burden on taxpayers. The Democratic president of the 1990s, Bill Clinton, embraced many of these ideas.
The 1988 election saw politics at new lows. The Democratic frontrunner dropped out of the race after a sexual affair was revealed. Both parties ran negative campaigns. The lowest point of the campaign were Republican television ads that said Dukakis as governor of Massachusetts had released from jail Willie Horton, a black murderer and rapist. Bush achieved a substantial victory, winning 54 percent of the popular vote, but the Democrats retained control of Congress.
