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American Political Life After the Reagan Era
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13614 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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4 / 1988 |
5,557 Words |
| Author
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Donald Atwell Zoll
Donald Atwell Zoll, author of The Twentieth Century Mind, is a
retired professor of political science at Arizona State
University who has since turned to ranching. |
The phrase "Reagan era' is popular with political journalists; it summons up a nebulous vision of some startling transformation of the sociopolitical landscape, comparable perhaps to the Jacksonian Revolution or even the New Deal. To speculate about the future course of American political life would seem to require some understanding of what the Reagan era evokes, what its impact has been.
The central proposition in such a retrospective view is that the Reagan years have not amounted in any overt sense to a dramatic change of political direction, despite the claims of erstwhile conservatives that some ascendancy, some overdue triumph, of the political Right has occurred.
Reagan and most of his chief associates were and have remained rather consistently nonphilosophical in their outlook. If one traces Ronald Reagan's ascent to power, one finds the resuscitation of well-used national mythologies based on nostalgia for nineteenth-century individualism. From a purely political standpoint, such a picturesque and slightly archaic evocation was not without widespread appeal, especially on the heels of an administration that reeked of indecision.
But it may be questioned whether there was a conservative agenda, in spite of a certain spasmodic support for isolated "social issues," such as praying in schools and abolishing state-supported abortion--matters, in fact, upon which genuine conservatives remain divided in opinion. The Reagan era was marred by the random interplay of social forces that were permitted to ebb and flow, contend and dominate, without containment or direction. This was not some deliberate recrudescence of laissez-faire; it
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