The Claremont Institute: The Year Liberalism Died

If you don't read Michale Barone on a regular basis, you should. Here an example:

American liberalism died in 1980. Of course, no one knew it at the time, and if the journalistic coverage of that year's presidential campaign was any indication, you might have thought liberalism was still a vital force in American life and conservatism a credo of cranks. That was, after all, the conventional wisdom from the 1930s clear up to the end of the 1970s. The liberalism of the New Deal and the Great Society, of Keynesian economics and Phillips Curve manipulation, was, we were told, the only rational way of governing a large industrial society. And after the apparent failure of the American effort in Vietnam, we were lectured that conciliation and negotiation were the only rational means of managing foreign policy in a world heading toward convergence of our system and that of our adversaries.

But 1980 changed all that, as Andrew Busch ably demonstrates in his incisive Reagan's Victory: The Presidential Election of 1980 and the Rise of the Right. As Busch makes clear, Ronald Reagan's smashing defeat of Jimmy Carter was the result not just of a political failure by the Democratic party or a particular president, but of the policy failure of American liberalism itself. Those of us who remember the 1980 campaign sometimes forget how dire things seemed as we entered that election year. Busch begins his narrative with an account of Jimmy Carter's July 15, 1979 "malaise" speech (which, as he notes, never included that infamous word), and quickly sketches how we'd come to that point. He reminds us that in the 1970s, Time magazine featured cover stories like "Can Capitalism Survive?" Keynesian economics, which had promised us endless low-inflation economic growth, had in fact produced high-inflation economic stagnation--"stagflation," as it came to be called.

Read more of Barone here: