Doug Rossinow

The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s by Doug Rossinow is a fairly comprehensive look at the Regan Era. Rossinow is a professor of history at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota and is the author of numerous works, including Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oslo and is past president of the Peace History Society.

The 80s were a golden age for me. I became an adult, spend time in Southern California courtesy of the Marine Corps, traveled the world, and was employed the entire decade. I rocked to Van Halen and later to hair bands. I worked on computers, rode motorcycles, had a bumper sticker that read "I'd rather be killing communists in Central America" and had a great decade. Thanks to modern social media, I have caught up with several friends from back then and we all look back fondly on that time. The future was bright back then. America was back on the rise and we were riding the wave.

I think we all have favorite presidents that captured our imagination. My grandmother spoke highly of FDR. My parents praised JFK. My son loves Clinton. For me, it was Reagan. It's was morning again in America. Needless to say after college and especially after graduate school my youthful idealism faded with the facts. Rossinow seems to have those same initial feelings: a proud Reagan supporter, who later has second thoughts.

The Reagan Era is not an attack on the former president, but a very well-documented account of the Reagan years concentrating on Reagan and his staff. Investigations of Edwin Meese who seemed to invite scandal became Attorney General before resigning "vindicated" by a finding of "Insufficient evidence to indict." There were scandals outside the government too. Banks, Savings and Loans, and televangelists all found their way to the headlines. Many people gained power in this era such as William Casey, James Baker III, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and many more.

We had a Red Scare of our own as we saw communists "in our own backyard." We sponsored freedom fighters in Latin America and Africa. The later without much public attention. Jean Kirkpatrick tried to ease the idea of supporting right wing dictators over left wing dictators (communists) by suggesting the right wing is more open to democratic reforms than the left. We entered an arms race. We built a six hundred ship navy. We developed the MX missile and developed an intermediate range missile just to make the Soviets remove theirs from Europe. Reagan defied the logic of the anti-ballistic missile treaty with a far-fetched Strategic Defense Initiative. America did win the Cold War, but it was not exactly like we think we did. Rossinow provides a great deal of documented information on exactly how it happened.

We like to remember the 80s as a Golden Age and of rebirth of America. Rossinow show us cracks in the facade. In fact, many of the problems we see today have their roots in the 1980s. It was when the 1% grew in wealth and the middle class shrank. Although Reagan is known for his historic tax cut, the tax increases and revenue enhancements are pushed by the wayside. The man who wanted less government increased spending considerably. The Reagan Era covers many aspects of the decade. I just chose a few to mention here. Nearly a quarter of the book is documentation and cited sources. The information is accurate.

Otto von Bismark is credited with saying "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." The eighties no matter how much I enjoyed them are rather like Bismark and his sausage. They were great... until I learned how they were made.



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Morning (after) in America

The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s by Doug Rossinow (Columbia University Press, $35).

Those of us who were young adults during the Reagan years are now coping with the vicissitudes of middle age, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t reevaluate our history as well as our own lives. In The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s, historian Doug Rossinow leads us—both painstakingly and painfully—through the infatuated optimism of “morning in America” to the utter disgust of failed supply-side economics, Iran-Contra and the foreign policy arrogance that laid the groundwork for our current wars.

Rossinow appears more interested in foreign policy, highlighting the rather odd obsession that the Reagan Administration had with Central America (frustrated over Cuba, perhaps, or determined to turn the Cold War hot?), but he also demonstrates how the deception and lack of empathy (especially for the poorest and sickest) took us backward, all right, but not to a golden age. Instead, the rampant lack of compassion for our most vulnerable set the stage for the current return to Gilded Age-style inequality, while feeding the myth that poverty is the result of some personal moral failing rather than a rigged system.

Reading this book will throw the current implosion of the GOP into a harsh and revealing light; Rossinow makes clear that Reagan (or rather, his henchmen, who returned to power in the administration of George W. Bush) blew up the foundation of the party.

It’s not a cultural history of the period, but, if paired with Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge, The Reagan Era is a good start on understanding a bad time.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com… (más)

An excellent review of the 1980’s, Rossinow explores many of the events of that decade and how the Reagan presidency either affected or were affected by them. Subjects ranging from anticommunism to racism are covered. Contradictions such as the growth of the American prison system to the corruption of Reagan’s own staff (two of his top White House advisors left office due to corruption). Rossinow provides this information in an easily readable, easily understood manner. He provides an honest, non-partisan assessment of Reagan’s time in office. He doesn’t try to lead the reader into a positive or negative view of Reagan, instead providing a wealth of information to allow you to make your own decisions. I highly recommend this book.… (más)

Rossinow's project is too turn the bottom up approach of new left history onto the movement itself to rescue the movement from now stale arguments about the connections between the new and old left. He succeeds in bringing the movement back into the mainstream of conversations about American history and getting us out of the trap of the bankruptcy of the left in a post-cold war world. If these people were "from America," that is to say, if their protest was grounded in the larger discourse on democracy, then maybe we can use this as a project to stop repudiating the American past as a tragic denouement in which real change never really happens. Radical politics, in this account, is in the mainstream of American political culture.

In his "Introduction: From the Age of Anxiety to the Politics of Authenticity," Rossinow makes an intriguing claim:

To segregate political radicalism from the mainstream of political and cultural history is to obscure the close and tangled connections between the new left and larger strands of political and cultural development in the twentieth-century United States - strands such as social gospel liberalism and Christian evangelicalism, cold war liberalism and Western libertarianism, liberal feminism and the search for authenticity. My investigation of these connections provides an alternative genealogy for the new left. Looking at the new left from the ground up and bringing it into focus as it appeared in and from the provinces, this book provides, in a sense, the first new left history of the new left. (p. 11)

Instead of looking at Berkeley, Columbia or Madison, Rossinow focuses on the evolution of the new left at the University of Texas at Austin. In the first half of the book he covers the new left up to the point where the focus turned to anti-Vietnam protest. Part One Chapters include "This Once Fearless Land: Secular Liberals Under Right-Wing Rule"; "Breakthrough: The Relevance of Christian Existentialism"; "The Issues of Life: The University YMCA-YWCA and Christian Liberalism"; "To Be Radical Now: Civil Rights Protest and Leftward Movement". As the chapter titles suggest he focuses on the role of Christian social movements on the origins of new left during the early years of the Cold War. In a state where right wing "homemade fascists" were all too ready to persecute the left, Christian or not, the YMCA-YWCA movement provided the space in which those dedicated to the social application of liberal Christianity to try out their ideas. As Sara Evans has argued on the origins of women's liberation, women were a key force in the early awakenings of liberal Protestantism's postwar social activism.

Though we know more generally of the connection between the civil rights movement and student radicalism, Rossinow also shows the importance of women to the early student movement. Showing the centrality of Sandra "Casey" Hayden early in the protest movement in Texas helps us historicize the marginalization of women in the national SDS. The feminist critique of the new left hence appears as a re-assertion of earlier involvement rather than a new awakening to rights freshly discovered by women's activism in basically male movements.

The National SDS organization forms one of the foci of the second half of the book. By moving to a 90% focus on Vietnam later in the decade, the student left in the SDS (both locally in Austin and Nationally) tied itself to an issue whose import was transient.

The hard truth is that the new left's entanglement with the war and the anti-war movement helped derail its initial project of developing a movement for fundamental political change, rooted in a thorough critique of American life ... The sense of desperate urgency produced by the war led the left away from long-term strategic thinking, toward displays of anger that got it nowhere. (p. 246)

By focusing so heavily on Vietnam, the student left helped the right in its quest to marginalize the left as a whole as irrelevant to the concerns of modern life. As the new left moved to embrace Marxism and the civil rights movement moved to embrace black power, an increasingly fragmented world was appearing. The move toward this position is documented in Part Two Chapters include "These People Were From America: The New Left Revisited"; "Against Rome: The New Left and the Vietnam War"; "This Whole Screwy Alliance: The New Left and the Counterculture"; "The Revolution is Yet to Come: The Feminist Left" Ending with the consideration of the feminist left, he points the way for the left to reclaim its heritage by embracing the feminist critique of American society. In his "Epilogue: From the Politics of Authenticity to the Politics of Identity," he makes the point that the new left was essentially a reform movement, bound in time by the events of the 60s and 70s. As the new left retreated further and further into local community building it gave up its claims to reshaping America in a more democratic mold, and eventually the new left retreated entirely to allow its members to cultivate their own gardens.

Like all reform movements, the New Left cannot be brought back to life (except perhaps by the historian's craft). This movement is now history, but the quest to reform American life will go on. The problems they wrestled with are still with us.… (más)