saw the emergence of neoconservatism, a move-
ment of disaffected liberals who believed that the ex-
pansion of the welfare state promoted by liberalism
had gone too far. While not opposed in principle to a
powerful central government, they believed that ex-
cessive social engineering had begun to erode the tra-
ditional self-reliance of the American people.
The Reagan Revolution All these groups found
common ground in the so-called Reagan Revolution
of the early 1980’s, in part because Reagan’s own
political philosophy combined elements of social
conservatism, populism, and free market, classical
liberalism. Virtually all of these conservatives also
supported a more aggressive policy of opposition to
the global spread of communism, as embodied in
the Soviet Union. Two decades of grassroots organiz-
ing had produced a groundswell of popular support
among the American working and middle classes for
what became known as Reaganism. Indeed, the most
salient feature of conservatism in the 1980’s was
the shift of millions of traditionally Democratic vot-
ers to the ranks of the Republican Party, either by
reregistering or simply by allegiance at the polls.
The term “Reagan Democrat” was coined to de-
scribe Democratic Party members who voted for
Reagan in 1980 and 1984.
Many of these converts were blue-collar workers
and socially conservative Catholics who believed that
the Democratic Party no longer spoke to their needs
and aspirations. The conservative movement was es-
pecially effective in convincing these voters that the
Republican Party was the party of the American
Dream and of what it represented as traditional
moral values. The Republicans promised lower taxes
to promote free enterprise, fiscal responsibility, a re-
turn to so-called family values, opposition to abor-
tion on demand, and a foreign policy that would no
longer seek simply to contain the Soviet threat but to
roll it back.
Among the conservative groups that gathered
under the Reagan tent, the New Right and the
neoconservatives were perhaps the greatest benefi-
ciaries. During his first two years in office, Reagan
successfully promoted legislation designed radically
to reduce welfare spending, to cut tax rates, and to
reduce government regulation of business. Histo-
rians are still debating the long-term effects of much
of this legislation, but during the early 1980’s it ap-
peared to most Americans that Reaganism was in-
deed a revolution and that the expansion of the wel-
fare state had been stopped, if not reversed. In
foreign policy, the neoconservatives, many of whom
were appointed to key positions in the Departments
of Defense and State, exerted growing influence
over the Reagan agenda, especially in building sup-
port for covert anticommunist operations in coun-
tries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan.
Discontent in the Ranks As Reagan entered his sec-
ond term, it became apparent that serious fractures
were developing in the conservative coalition. Most
disaffected were the traditionalist, or Old Right,
conservatives for whom Reagan’s attempts to
check the progress of big government did not go far
enough and for whom the foreign policy crafted by
the neoconservatives was little more than a mis-
guided new imperialism. This wing of the move-
ment, sometimes characterized as “paleoconser-
vative,” favored radical decentralization of the
federal government and a return to states’ rights, re-
strictions on immigration, economic protections for
American workers, and a non-interventionist policy
abroad.
Philosophically speaking, the paleoconservatives
were opposed to the neoconservative vision of
America as a nation whose identity was fundamen-
tally defined by the ideals of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence. For the paleoconservatives, the identity
of the nation was more than an abstract set of ideas,
but was profoundly rooted in an Anglo-Saxon politi-
cal tradition that reached back to the Magna Carta.
They also insisted that the United States was rooted
in local custom and tradition, a common language
and literature, and a constitution that would have
been inconceivable without the British common law
tradition that preceded it. True conservatism could
flourish, in this view, only if power were returned to
the states and local communities. As for foreign pol-
icy, in the paleoconservative view, American-style
democracy was not a set of portable ideals that could
be transplanted around the world.
Impact Despite some dissension within its ranks,
the conservative coalition of the 1980’s remained
largely in place. It was still early enough in the shift
to conservatism in U.S. politics that the multifac-
eted conservative movement believed it had more in
common than not: The incompatibilities between
social conservatism, fiscal conservatism, and politi-
cal conservatism that would later become important248 Conservatism in U.S. politics The Eighties in America