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American Political Life After the Reagan Era
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13614 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1988 |
5,557 Words |
| Author
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Donald Atwell Zoll
Donald Atwell Zoll, author of The Twentieth Century Mind, is a
retired professor of political science at Arizona State
University who has since turned to ranching. |
The phrase "Reagan era' is popular with political journalists; it summons up a nebulous vision of some startling transformation of the sociopolitical landscape, comparable perhaps to the Jacksonian Revolution or even the New Deal. To speculate about the future course of American political life would seem to require some understanding of what the Reagan era evokes, what its impact has been.
The central proposition in such a retrospective view is that the Reagan years have not amounted in any overt sense to a dramatic change of political direction, despite the claims of erstwhile conservatives that some ascendancy, some overdue triumph, of the political Right has occurred.
Reagan and most of his chief associates were and have remained rather consistently nonphilosophical in their outlook. If one traces Ronald Reagan's ascent to power, one finds the resuscitation of well-used national mythologies based on nostalgia for nineteenth-century individualism. From a purely political standpoint, such a picturesque and slightly archaic evocation was not without widespread appeal, especially on the heels of an administration that reeked of indecision.
But it may be questioned whether there was a conservative agenda, in spite of a certain spasmodic support for isolated "social issues," such as praying in schools and abolishing state-supported abortion--matters, in fact, upon which genuine conservatives remain divided in opinion. The Reagan era was marred by the random interplay of social forces that were permitted to ebb and flow, contend and dominate, without containment or direction. This was not some deliberate recrudescence of laissez-faire; it was simply that events tended more to shape the Reagan leadership without leadership imposing its design upon phenomena. It is no doubt true that it was in the region of economic policy that Reagan's directives were most premeditated, coherent, and experimental. What emerged was a new variety of entrepreneurialism, even a legitimation of avarice, that at least appeared to widen the gaps between economic classes. A kind of social Darwinism, not by explicit design, but by virtue of the intellectual and moral climate of the society, these economic policies operated in the absence of recognizable political authority.
The Centrist Matrix
The thesis, much beloved by political scientists, that American politics gravitates inevitably to a centrist matrix would seem confirmed by the Reagan presidency, which
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