The Official End of the Reagan Era

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His election that year as governor of California mirrored a broader repudiation of urban riots and campus turmoil; of perceived moral decay, the long reach of the tax collector and a liberal consensus stretched to the breaking point by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. In 1980 an electorate similarly radicalized by double-digit inflation, crippling interest rates and the humiliating spectacle of 52 Americans held hostage by Iranian kidnappers would award the old Hollywood player what Reagan biographer Lou Cannon calls the role of a lifetime.

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Thirty years before Barack Obama, Reagan offered hope and change to a nation sick of the status quo. As with F.D.R. in 1933, the new President's most pressing task was to dispel gathering fears that the U.S. might be entering a period of irreversible decline. Ironically, nothing so impressed voters as the grit and humor he displayed after being shot by a would-be assassin. Reagan practiced coalition government, though in his case it meant melding the cultural conservatism that had made him governor with the economic conservatism that had propelled him into the Oval Office. Populists and pinstripes--Reagan spoke to, and for, both. His governing majority included Wall Street titans and nascar fans, right-to-lifers and leave-me-alone libertarians, Jeane Kirkpatrick neocons and xenophobes channeling Father Coughlin through his lineal descendants on toxic talk radio.

Reagan preferred laughing at his adversaries to demonizing them. He disarmed critics of his relaxed administrative style by acknowledging that the right hand of his Administration didn't always know what its far-right hand was up to. As the laughter crested, so did the tax-cutting, the regulatory rollback and the military buildup that foreshadowed, paradoxically, the most sweeping arms reductions of the nuclear era. The ensuing political realignment was measured less in voter-registration rolls than in a pervasive skepticism about the state. Because there were many things government did badly, it came to be assumed, there was virtually nothing it did well. Long after his return to California in 1989, Reagan's anti-Washington consensus continued to exercise a powerful restraint on his successors. Even the notably activist Bill Clinton was driven to acknowledge an end to the era of Big Government.

Nothing so visibly riled the last Democratic President as Obama's description of Reagan earlier this year as a transformative leader. More recently the same phrase has been applied to Obama by General Colin Powell, himself a prominent alumnus of the Reagan White House. Inevitably the prospect of an Obama presidency has led observers to ask, Is the Age of Reagan over? In the wake of Wall Street's collapse, Reagan's vaunted "magic of the marketplace" has come in for heavy criticism. Did the deregulatory pendulum swing too far? Have Americans glorified individual success at the expense of shared purpose? And what of the visionary who could imagine a Strategic Defense Initiative to trump the existing arms race but who couldn't, or wouldn't, conceive of an alternative to cheap fossil fuels?

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