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Title: The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order
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Manufacturer: Prima Lifestyles
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| The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order by Prima Lifestyles Essential for those interested in recent American political history | | There are few books greater than 700 pages in length (almost 850 with footnotes, etc.) that are real page-turners. Steven Hayward's 2001 The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order 1964-1980 is one of them. Age of Reagan is not entirely about Ronald Reagan. It is, instead, a political history--at the federal level--f the United States from 1964-1980. It is, as the subtitle says, about the fall of the "old liberal order" and the subsequent rise of Reagan. The story from Lyndon Johnson's huge victory in 1964 to Reagan's huge victory in 1980 is a story of the exposure of the failure of governmental ordering of society and economics. Johnson's Great Society, the impact of Vietnam, the rise of the New Left, the return of Nixon, the fall of Nixon, Reagan's insurgent 1976 campaign, and Carter's failed presidency are all covered in fascinating detail in this book. The book really picks up steam in discussing the 1976 and 1980 elections. Hayward is a conservative, and this book is written from a conservative worldview. But Hayward does not ignore Reagan's gaffes and, in discussing contemporary opinions, seemingly quotes from the pages of The New Republic as much as he does from National Review. Age of Reagan is, in short, fair, comprehensive, fun, and essential for those interested in recent American political history. | | The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order by Prima Lifestyles Deceptively good | | "The Age of Reagan" is a well written and objective political history of the sixties and seventies. The title is mis-leading by intimating that Reagan is the center of the discussion (which he is not), but the title did hook me and cause me to purchase the book. Initial disappointment was quickly replaced by appreciation for an interesting, informative and enlightened record of two decades of political battles. I recommend the book. | | The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order by Prima Lifestyles Near Great Book | | This was a really great and lengthy book to read. I really loved what you were writing in this book. It clears up alot of things that I needed to know about what society was like before the 1980s and America's Post Industrialism. As a child of the 1980s growing up with He-Man, TransFormers, Star Wars, and Nintendo I was always curious about how society was like before Reagan. I am always brainwashed by marketing of the time like Michael Jackson. Basically there was no mass production of PCs, most Americans payed a 90% tax rate and industrialism was the norm. There is an eerie reminder of society with Bush and LBJ. But anyways, Vietnam was over and Post World War 2 Keynseian Management was considered dead. There needed to be fresher leadership and Reagan was it. Great writing yet again. | | The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order by Prima Lifestyles Polemic & Proud Of It | I assume that the title of this excellent history of Reagan's America is not a pun. The age of Reagan -- he was almost 70 when elected president in 1980 -- became one of many flippant liberal flip-offs of the man and his revolution, and it's the default insult that animates Richard Reeves' venomous account of Reagan's presidency. Reeves tries to demonstrate that the conservative revolution ignited by Barry Goldwater in 1964 was undone by a conservative actor who was too old and senile to be president.
Mr. Hayward's book stops before the "senile" presidency begins, so the Age of Reagan he discusses is the age of reborn conservatism. Smart people (Cronkite, Rather, Reeves of the Jayson Blair Times) told us that Goldwater's crushing defeat in 1964 was the final defeat of the paranoid style of right-wing politics. Goldwater the Bircher was the last gasp of McCarthyism (Joe, not Gene) and American Hitlerism. Goldwater, they told us, was against our nation's goodness (the New Deal, the Great Society), and they told us that, unlike kindly President Johnson, Goldwater would send American boys to do the job that Asian boys should have done for themselves in Vietnam. Johnson's kindly assistant Bill Moyers used network television to tell America that Goldwater would incinerate little girls counting daisy petals. (Network television was the only television we had in 1964. When Cronkite said "And that's the way it is," most Americans believed that's the way it was.)
Ronald Reagan bought a little time on network television before 1964's crushing electoral defeat of conservatism, and Reagan gave conservatism a reason to live: his speech was the only viable moment of Goldwater's campaign. Reagan didn't shift the Northeastern liberal consensus that dominated America back then, but he showed that it was possible to use a tool of consensus, Big Media, to blow past the imperial media and to possibly, some day, beat liberalism at its own game. Reagan was conservatism with an appealing, human face.
As the kindly Johnson-Moyers administration mired itself in quagmire, Reagan turned his tv appeal into votes, first in California (Lou Cannon's account of Governor Reagan is better than Mr. Hayward's), then in Jimmy Carter's dispirited liberal America. Carter's media cronies in 1980 rolled out their 1964 canards -- that old Reagan would kill Social Security and irradiate the planet -- but the liberal consensus had been mugged & broken by the reality of liberalism. At home and abroad it didn't work.
It's the story of liberal meltdown that Hayward tells best. It's the story of media meltdown that someone needs to tell. Reeves' recent attempt to assassinate a dead man (he even approvingly cites a reporter who metaphorically kicks Reagan's corpse) is built on the illusions and delusions of media mastery and hegemony that dominated America's thinking in 1964. Someone good, and I hope it's Hayward, who has promised a book about 1981 - 1989, will ruthlessly deconstruct the malignancy of Big Media in the Age of Reagan. Turn the same merciless attention on Cronkite, Rather, Reeves & his Times that Rather and Reeves turn unfairly on Reagan's conservative revolution.
I'm not being unfair by using the word "unfairly." Elsewhere on Amazon I show that Reeves loads his arguments and stacks his deck in the service of a Northeast liberal consensus that he still serves. Preposterously, Publishers Weekly on this page uses a flipside argument against Hayward. They accuse him of writing a right-wing polemic, and Reeves rails against right-wing pro-Reagan polemicists at the Heritage Foundation and Stanford's Hoover Institute. Hayward and Reeves represent the polarity of America in 2006: two observers of the same man, Reagan, and the same phenomenon, Reagan's conservatism, see nothing the same. America now is two cultures and clashing civilizations, a diversity viciously resented by smart elitists who used to tell us what to think in 1964, back when Reagan's revolution began.
| | The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order by Prima Lifestyles Morning in America! |
This vast and impressive work is an engaging read. More political history of the USA than biography, it chronicles the decline of liberalism from its apogee in 1964 to its defeat in 1980. The year 1964 was also the nadir of the conservative movement with LBJ's crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater.
Hayward focuses on the clash of ideas during the 1960s and 70s, demonstrating how brilliantly Reagan exposed the fault lines of liberalism in both its New Deal and Great Society manifestations. Reagan had a profound understanding of how modern liberalism veered away from its roots, and a great gift of communicating this to the America people, while offering sensible alternatives.
Early on he observed the arrogance of liberal elitism with its reliance on so-called experts and its contempt for common sense. He called it "the fetish of complexity" and insisted that there were indeed simple solutions, although they weren't necessarily easy.
Surrounded by airhead social engineers, LBJ was not stupid but his administration failed in everything that it attempted. It lost the war on poverty and the Vietnam War because there was no will to win. In addition, the student radicalism of the late 1960s alienated large numbers of the Democrat constituency.
And then under Nixon, spending on social programs actually increased! Nixon's foreign policy was likewise one of appeasement and retreat. The malaise of the Carter presidency thus had deep roots. At the same time, conservatism had experienced a tremendous resurgence.
By the end of the 1970s the political mood had turned because of the utter and repeated failure of liberal policies, leading to the humiliating Iran hostage crisis. The American electorate realised this and made the sensible choice in 1980. Thus the USA returned to greatness and prosperity under its most beloved leader of the 20th century.
For those more interested in Reagan the man than the ideological currents of the times, I recommend The Essential Ronald Reagan by Lee Edwards, When Character Was King by Peggy Noonan and Ronald Reagan: How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary Leader by Dinesh D'Souza.
| | The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order by Prima Lifestyles Product Description | The Age of Reagan brings to life the tumultuous decade and a half that preceded Ronald Reagan's ascent to the White House. Based on scores of interviews and years of research, Steven F. Hayward takes us on an engrossing journey through the most politically divisive years the United States has had to endure since the decade before the Civil War. Overseas, we were embroiled in a war we couldn't win; at home our streets had become battlefields; and in Washington, the old liberal order was collapsing under the weight of a long string of failed policies. "It seemed that an era of American optimism and progress had come to a close," Hayward writes. "The concatenation of Vietnam, Watergate, the recurrent energy crisis, the swooning economy, the increasingly disorderly world scene, and the failed presidencies associated with these events robbed Americans of their native optimism for the future."
Meanwhile, from out of the West arose a new conservative movement led by Ronald Reagan, a one-time Hollywood actor whose speech in 1964 in support of the doomed candidacy of Barry Goldwater not only electrified a national television audience but also created a political star who would change the course of history.
With meticulous detail, Hayward captures an America at war with itself—and an era whose reverberations we feel to this very day. He brings new insight into the profound failure of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the oddly liberal nature of Richard Nixon's administration, the significance of Reagan's years as California's governor, and the sudden-death drama of his near defeat of Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican primary, the listlessness of Jimmy Carter's leadership, and the political earthquake that was Reagan's victorious presidential campaign in 1980.
Provocative, authoritative, and majestic in scope, The Age of Reagan is an unforgettable account of the rebirth and triumph of the American spirit. |
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