President Ronald Reagan's Administration

More all over, beneath the surface was a quiet crisis which has become fully evident only over time. About 1973, the nation's long-term rate of economic growth shortly slowed. The standard of living of most Americans, which had roughly doubled in the postwar generation, ceased to rise, and indeed has remained largely stagnant from that time manger the present.

This prolonged experience of alarm and anxiety, in Dallek's view, provided the essential preconditions for the ontogeny of Reaganism. He finds it unsurprising that Reagan, though middle western by background, was politically a creation of California:

In California, where the modern consumer subtlety was strikingly evident, upwardly mobile middle-class suburbanites, who had migrated from the South and

Midwest objected to high taxes, wasteful government spending, unbalanced budgets, special champion to minorities

at the expense of the majority, and "indecent"

demonstrations on college campuses ... [attitudes which] could be summed up as antigovernment, antiminority, and conformist (p. 31).

The California suburbia of the 1950s by means of 1970s was, broadly speaking, an attempt to reproduce the imagined values of the small-t hold Midwest, from which so many of its people, including Reagan himself, had originated. The retrospective image of this heartland milieu was aptly captured by Reagan's own genial, aw-shucks public image.

approximately dependence and independence, loss of control, and self-possession. He finds great appeal in self-

Reagan's childhood implanted in him powerful feelings

communism of the Soviet Union represents the end point,

Reagan's Soviet Union was not the stagnant, essentially conservative and status-quo power of the Brezhnev era, but the symbolic essence of what he fe ard runaway liberalism and permissiveness would make of America if left unbridled:

authority and social change as from any possible understanding of Soviet aims and capabilities (p. 129).

Indeed, in the context of the central apparent motion raised by Dallek, the role of Reagan as symbol, the relevant doubt about Reaganism is perhaps not its material consequences but its psychological consequences.

Dallek's argument from the outset is that Reaganism was a state of mind, and one that in his view might long outlast the Reagan presidency.

licated aspect to Reagan's own background, and to the public sentiments upon which he played. Reagan had grown up in down(p) circumstances, near the edge of poverty. His father, if not precisely a ne'er-do-well, was a man who never achieved success, and who had a long-term struggle with dipsomania, an alcoholism expressed not violently, but in relative imbecility and dependency. In Dallek's view, Reagan's idealization of self-reliance, the success ethic, and entrepreneurial capitalism was a reaction to these elements in his background.

Reagan offered the public not so some(prenominal) a program as an expression of will. Reagan's America would no longer tolerate dependency and disorder within; it would "just say no" not only to drugs, but to public assistance dependency, crime, and the demands of minority groups for compensatory special treatment. Abroad, Reagan's America would no longer spare itself to be pushed around, but would stand up tall and strong. "Reagan's policies are less a response to actual problems at place and abroad than a means of restoring tr
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