Talking Points Memo
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP"Be afraid. Be very afraid."
Reagan revisionism is hard upon us, and nothing says "Reagan" more than a line of movie dialogue from the 1980s. Ronald Reagan was the aged leader who signaled his cultural relevance and spoke to a youthful public by dropping bits of film dialogue—"Go ahead, make my day"—and slogans that sounded as if they came straight from an advertising agency—"Let's go for the gold!"—into serious public events and debates.1
Fifteen years ago, when Bill Clinton ran for the presidency and lamented the 1980s as a "decade of greed," few would have predicted that historians of the future would be kind to Reagan and the society of the 1980s. Reckoning with Reagan: America and Its President in the 1980s, by Michael Schaller, published in 1992, echoed the "decade of greed" interpretation, but it was not followed by similar works from other historians.2 Now, after a hiatus of scholarly production on this topic lasting approximately a decade, an outpouring of books has reversed the direction of scholarly assessment. As of this writing, among academic historians, the Reagan revisionists—who view the 1980s as an era of mixed blessings at worst, and of great forward strides in some renditions—hold the field. After evaluating recent studies by Gil Troy, John Ehrman, and Robert Collins on the 1980s, I will suggest possible explanations for this interpretive turn. [End Page 1279]
Fundamentally, these books replicate what Troy, author of Morning in America, correctly calls "the Reagan storyline." Troy conveys an acute understanding of the ways in which the history of the 1980s has gotten locked into rigid, endlessly repeated narratives. While critics tell a tale of greed and social injustice, he recognizes that the celebratory "Reagan storyline" has become more powerful. "It is a simple story, told repeatedly, divided into three parts. The first part tells the sad tale of America in the 1960s and 1970s, a country demoralized. . . . Part two has Ronald Reagan riding in to save the day, with a mandate for change. . . . The result, part three, was Morning in America—the great party known as the 1980s, when the stock market soared, patriotism surged, the Soviet Union crumbled, and America thrived" (12). Troy continues, "This Reagan storyline of decay and renaissance was all the more remarkable given its tenuous relationship to the truth" (13).
Because Troy announces his critical distance from this triumphal narrative, his inability to extricate himself from it is particularly notable. Tellingly, Troy's iterations of fragments of the "Reagan storyline" tend to lack substantiation. At times it is hard to know whether he is offering his own judgments or merely seeking to summarize the Reaganite view. He writes that, in 1980, "a great pall, a spectre of failure, a fear of disaster haunted American society. Civil rights had degenerated from seemingly clear black and white issues to a morass of competing choices. . . . The Great Society was bogged down in bureaucracy, generating taxes and regulations rather than guaranteeing social justice" (28). In truth, the biggest surviving Great Society program was Medicare, which delivered a substantial dose of social equity with rather little bureaucracy. Reagan was a "charming optimist," he states, in contrast to both Barry Goldwater and Jimmy Carter. As evidence, Troy quotes Reagan's joke from the 1960s "that student radicals 'act like Tarzan, look like Jane, and smell like Cheetah'" (36), a standard laugh line for Reagan at that time. Even if you think this is funny, it is not an example of charming optimism...
