1980s
A new era of conservatism

MICHAEL McQUARRIE

“Reagan represented the reorganisation of the Republican Party around a new coalition which starts capturing white workers for the Republican Party. And so you have this alliance of white workers alongside business elites and social conservatives.”

JONATHAN WEILER

“He's also playing to some themes that Richard Nixon and the “southern strategy” had popularised a few years earlier. Including the racial strategies of the Nixon era. And so his first stop after winning the nomination, the Republican nomination in 1980, is he goes to the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi and he gives … a long speech and in the midst of that speech he expresses his support for states’ right.”

MICHAEL KAZIN

“He made a point of going to a town where there had been a trial back in 1964 of some sheriffs - who were also clansmen who had killed some civil rights workers - to basically say he was for states’ rights. He didn't explicitly say I'm against civil rights, you couldn't do that anymore in 1980s America.”

Profile: Lee Atwater

• Harvey LeRoy "Lee" Atwater (February 27, 1951 - March 29, 1991) was an American political consultant and strategist to the Republican Party.
• He was an adviser to US presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and chairman of the Republican National Committee.

JONATHAN WEILER

“What you're talking about is the success of introducing racially coded appeals into American politics … that the government works for certain people and it doesn't work for you. That interview that Atwater gave is kind of a Rosetta Stone for modern American politics.”

CHRIS HEDGES

“It was in the case of Reagan very effective advertising and promises that the new neo-liberal order would benefit everybody and at that point people didn't realise they were being had. Everybody drank the Kool-aid, everybody and to some it became like all reigning ideologies inevitable.”

JONATHAN WEILER

“Reagan really initiated I would say a kind of ideological war and a series of policies that would subsequently be built upon to create [a] historic level of inequality in American society.”

JULIET SCHOR

“The voodoo economics of supply-side economics, the idea that you could cut these taxes and you'd end up with more revenues. It's just fraud.”

ARTHUR LAFFER

“Reagan’s comment in 1980 was government isn't the answer, government is the problem.”

"Reaganomics"

• “Reaganomics”, the economic policies promoted by President Ronald Reagan, are associated with the macroeconomic theory called supply-side or trickle-down economics, whose proponents include economists such as Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell.
• Supply-side economists argue that growth can be created most effectively by lifting barriers to the supply of goods and services, and that tax cuts can result in an increase in tax revenues, by incentivising productivity.
• Therefore, supply-side economists typically recommend less government regulation, and lower marginal tax rates. "Only by reducing the growth of government," said Ronald Reagan, "can we increase the growth of the economy."
• Reagan's 1981 Programme for Economic Recovery had four key objectives:

ARTHUR LAFFER

“He cut the taxes. He didn't cut them by 30 percent as everyone says he did, he moved the brackets out. The highest rates still stayed at 50 percent. Now he got rid of the 70 percent and the 50. We had growth rates in there, seven, eight, nine percent. For years we had this huge boom.”

NAOMI WOLF

“Policies were put in place in the Reagan era to strip the middle class of the structures that they needed in order to remain middle class. The elites figured out how to claw back that little bit of territory that these outsiders in the middle class had managed to get their hands on in the '70s.”

MICHAEL McQUARRIE

“And that means capitalists get the profit, workers don't. Rich communities get the benefits, not poor communities, that economic inclusion is no longer a desirable goal for American society.”

1981: President Reagan and the PATCO strike

• In 1981, nearly 13,000 air traffic controllers went on strike to demand better pay and working conditions. As federal employees, they had no legal right to walk out, and President Ronald Reagan gave them a 48-hour ultimatum to return to work or lose their jobs. Many were fired and the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organisation (PATCO) disbanded in a showdown which would change American labour relations forever.

ELIZABETH HINTON

“Millions of people are kicked off the welfare rolls during the Reagan administration. The investment in social welfare programmes is almost gone. There's really this sense that there's nothing that can be done to solve the problem of black urban crime except for incarceration.”

NAOMI WOLF

“The prison-industrial complex really took off post-Reagan. Building prison structures to incarcerate more and more Americans, especially again males of colour, became monetised by private industry. And what happened then is the cycle of lobbyists for the prison industry, would push for laws that would make it easier to lock up more and more and more poor people.”

ELIZABETH HINTON

“What happens is that these prisons are located in rural areas and most of the people who are in the prisons are from urban areas. So rural areas in the United States tend to be white and urban areas … tend to be Latino and African American where Americans of colour live. So this ends up benefitting these rural communities at the direct expense of urban communities.”

Prison-industrial complex

By the 1980s, crime control and incarceration dominated national responses to poverty and inequality. The initiatives of that decade were less a sharp departure than the full realisation of the punitive transformation of urban policy implemented by Republicans and Democrats alike since the 1960s.