This is the first episode in an occasional series examining significant elections in American history. Future installments will appear every few weeks until Election Day.
“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”
The most memorable words spoken by Ronald Reagan in his 1981 Inaugural Address echo to this day. Delivered at a time of severe economic trouble as New Deal liberalism appeared a spent force, Reagan’s faith in free markets and ordinary citizens to overcome national problems continues to animate large parts of the Republican right.
The former Hollywood actor and California governor became the first candidate to defeat a presidential incumbent since Franklin Roosevelt unseated Herbert Hoover in 1932 in the throes of a far worse economic crisis, the Great Depression. Reagan trounced Democrat Jimmy Carter, whose term had been swamped by vexing domestic and foreign policy problems, 489-49 in the Electoral College.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historians Jeffrey Engel and Jeremi Suri discuss the enduring significance of the election of 1980.
“It ushered in what some have called the Age of Reagan,” said Mr. Suri, a scholar at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. “There’s a fundamental change in the way the United States thinks about domestic policy and the economy, and even to some extent foreign policy. 1980 is an approximation for that shift.”
“The end of the 1970s and Carter’s years were in the wake of Watergate and distrust in government. We’re in the wake of Vietnam…. There are oil shocks and difficulties in the Middle East. It’s not a great time to be president,” said Mr. Engel, the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Reagan’s strength, said Mr. Engel, was his optimism in the face of those challenges and his ability to inspire confidence in voters who saw Mr. Carter as incapable of solving the country’s problems.
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