MM#345--Pivotal Tuesdays series: The Election of 1980, part 1

Transcript

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Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life.

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Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

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Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute and to another episode in our series called Pivotal Tuesdays, where we are covering the pivotal elections of the 20th century.

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No-transcript, in case you have not been keeping up with this we covered the election of 1912 and the legacy of Woodrow Wilson.

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Woodrow Wilson Three weeks ago we covered the 1932 election, when the federal government expanded and that became permanent, and that was two weeks ago.

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And then just last week, we covered the volatile election of 1968, when Richard Nixon barely won and then proceeded to govern as a liberal and hurt the country even more.

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But today we are covering the last of the pivotal elections of the 20th century, the election of 1980.

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Now, if you are new here and this is your first time listening, welcome.

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We certainly appreciate you being here.

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Please write a review If you love this podcast.

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If you absolutely hate it, please do not write a review.

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Thank you very much.

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And what are these pivotal Tuesdays all about?

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You might be asking.

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Well, because most of us have been given that conventional reading or the liberal historian reading of why these elections were pivotal, of why these elections were pivotal.

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We are certainly reading that same liberal interpretation in these pivotal Tuesdays, but then we're going to give you a conservative version of the same election.

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Then we're also going to take that and ask the same question what's the legacy of that election from a conservative point of view?

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Because that is something that is not often shared.

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And that's why our series is different, because we absolutely want it to be worth your time, because you're again, you're not going to get the humdrum conventional liberal reading of history.

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I mean you will, but we just introduce you to that to give you the context of where the conservative understanding is coming from.

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We understand that you have suffered through the indoctrination of our American history story from enough different outlets.

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So we do want to make this worth your time.

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And if you have been listening to us, you know that Stephen Hayward has been our resident conservative historian with his book the Politically Incorrect Book of the Presidents, part Two.

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Highly recommend that.

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And Margaret O'Mara is our conventional and liberal historian with her book Pivotal Tuesdays.

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So with that brief reintroduction of our weekly Pivotal Tuesday series, let's begin the way we have always began in our Tuesday series with the question what happened last In the election of 1980,?

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Well, it was a significant and decisive victory for the Republican candidate, ronald Reagan, over the incumbent President, jimmy Carter.

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It was held on November 4th 1980.

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And it was the beginning of the conservative counter-revolution against liberalism, going all the way back to FDR's New Deal of the election of 1932.

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Now again, ronald Reagan was the former governor of California.

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At the time, he campaigned on a platform of conservative policies, including increased defense spending, supply-side economics and a reduction in the size of government.

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His slogan was let's make America great again, and that resonated with many voters who were dissatisfied with the status quo.

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Jimmy Carter was the incumbent president, former governor of Georgia.

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He faced significant challenges, including a struggling economy characterized by stagflation, which is the combination of high inflation and unemployment, the Iran hostage crisis and the perception of his weak leadership.

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Now John Anderson ran on the independent ticket.

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He was a former Republican congressman.

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He appealed to moderate voters who were dissatisfied with both major parties.

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Now some of the campaign issues that came up and were critical in the election in 1980.

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The US economy was suffering from stagflation, like we talked about.

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It was double-digit inflation, high unemployment rates.

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Voters were frustrated with Carter's handling of the economy over the last four years from 76 to 80.

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The Iran hostage crisis we had 52 American hostages that were taken in roughly over about a year.

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Hostages that were taken and roughly over about a year and that severely damaged Carter's presidency and contributed to the perception of his administration's ineffectiveness.

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We still had the Cold War going on.

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Soviets invaded Afghanistan and there was other Cold War issues which heightened concerns about national security and America's global standing.

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America had never regained its confidence from the late 1960s all the way through the 70s.

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Watergate contributed to that loss of confidence, followed by weak leadership everywhere on both sides of the aisle.

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Detente was not working and so the election results was Reagan won in a landslide 489 electoral votes to Carter's 49.

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Reagan received 50.7% of the popular vote, while Carter garnered 41%.

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Anderson received 6.6%.

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Now many people think that the Reagan landslide was a.

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It was destined.

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It was absolutely going to happen.

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That is not true.

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Late breakers, late deciders for which side they were going to vote for broke heavily towards Reagan, but that did not happen until the last week of the election.

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So this was not certainly in the bag by any means.

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The congressional impact is Republicans gained control of the Senate for the first time since 1954.

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They picked up an astonishing 12 seats and they also gained 34 seats in the House of Representatives, although the Democrats still retained the majority.

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That was a significant, significant picked up and would help Reagan in his first term.

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The 1980 election is often seen as a political realignment election.

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It marked the rise of conservatism in American politics.

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Reagan's victory symbolized, thank God, the shift away from liberal policies of the New Deal and the Great Society eras, and his administration pursued significant changes in economic and foreign policy.

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Now, overall, the 1980 election was the turning point that set the stage for the Reagan era, characterized by a conservative approach to governance and focus on reducing the federal government's role in economic and social affairs.

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So, with that brief overview of the 1980 election, why do people call it the conservative counter revolution?

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Well, I could spend another 20 podcasts to answer that question, but because there is so much liberal garbage out there, if I had to sum it up in just several sentences, it would be politically, reagan had one of the strongest coattail effects in modern American history.

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Adding to that, economically, reagan commits to supply side economics and proves that it actually works.

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There was major doubts whether it would work.

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He absolutely proves it.

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Margaret Thatcher proves it and BB Netanyahu follows on and proves it yet again and BB Netanyahu follows on and proves it yet again.

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So the 1980 election was just proof positive and Reagan demonstrated that over his eight year to four year terms.

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Culturally, reagan restores American confidence.

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He gets the economy moving again in his first term while also being a strong advocate for defense.

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Peace through strength is his foreign policy and he restores americans confidence on the world stage and that is the reason why you have the conservative counter-revolution.

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It's much more to that, but in those politically, economically and culturally.

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Judicially he also has strong candidates to the Supreme Court.

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Two out of three of his candidates were very strong or not very strong.

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Two of them were okay, one was problematic.

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Sandra Day O'Connor would become problematic the more she stayed on the court.

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Anthony Kennedy became problematic later in his career and Antonin Scalia essentially was the greatest of all time on the original intent side, the strict constructionist side of the judicial philosophy.

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So there was a lot going on with Reagan, essentially since Calvin Coolidge.

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On the economic side in the 1920s, americans had not seen a full-throated version of conservatism ever on the national stage.

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With Ronald Reagan, you got double barrels, you got everything A government running on conservative values, all eight cylinders.

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So, going back to the politics, reagan's coattail effect.

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Well, let me define that.

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The coattail effect is where the candidate at the top of the ticket, ronald Reagan in this case, substantially increases and helps the party gain seats in Congress.

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And this can be tricky to measure in Congress.

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And this can be tricky to measure, for example, if a candidate's running for the House of Representatives and he's running higher in the polls than the top of the ticket candidate.

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Did the candidate for the House really win because of the top of the ticket or because they were a good candidate and they ran stronger than the top of the ticket?

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So when you're looking for this type of stuff, you have to be careful and only read, only read the political junkies who define their terms and know what they're talking about, so you're not caught off guard.

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And just reading somebody from MSNBC who probably has never read a book, now, that's a side story.

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Book, now that's a side story.

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Um, but in modern American history since roughly Woodrow Wilson era, say 1912 election onward, several presidents have had strong coattails.

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Uh, they significantly influenced down ballot races and they helped their party gain seats, most notably Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

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He's often cited as having the strongest coattail effect.

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He followed his landslide victory in 1964, where he defeated Barry Goldwater, and Johnson's popularity helped Democrats gain 36 seats in the House and two seats in the Senate.

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That resulted in a supermajority in both chambers.

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Now the interesting point on this election is just four years later Johnson would not seek re-election.

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So the conventional wisdom says that LBJ was a great man of Congress and knew how to get things done practically.

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Thank you, doris Kearns Goodwin, who worked for LBJ.

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But this coattail effect seems a little dubious.

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My theory and many others' theory is that the 1964 election was not so much an LBJ coattail election but it was a sympathy vote for the first slain president, president Kennedy.

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That happened to be caught on television and was able to be replayed over and over and over again with the newly emerging technology of television, and they did that to nationwide audiences.

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So that's our theory why the LBJ landslide was the landslide.

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It was more of a sympathy vote, not necessarily great policies from the top of the ticket from LBJ.

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Our second coattail candidate from the liberal historians is Franklin Roosevelt.

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He had significant coattail effects His 1932 election.

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He helped gain 97 seats in the House, 12 in the Senate, and then in subsequent elections, 36, 40, and 44, he continued to bolster Democratic majorities in the House, solidifying the New Deal coalition.

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Now, all this is true, no doubt about it.

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Now, all this is true, no doubt about it.

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We can get in the weeds about how those coattails came about, which is quite revealing because we're just now learning the history, some 75 to 100 years later, of FDR's liberalism and how those coattail effects actually happened.

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Tail effects actually happened, um, but you know, liberal historians will, will grudgingly have to give them some respect in this area.

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And then we turn to Ronald Reagan.

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In this pivotal election, uh, ronald Reagan had a substantial coattail effect, like we said.

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Uh, republicans in the Senate gained the majority for the first time since 1954.

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They garnered 12 Senate seats, 34 House seats, which significantly changed the political landscape.

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The switch in the Senate happened after 25 years of solid Democratic control, and some of that time was supermajority status, meaning they could override any presidential veto.

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That's a very important nugget of wisdom.

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And just two more, two more of these coattail effects Dwight Eisenhower, 1952, he won as a World War II hero.

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He helped Republicans gain control of both the House and the Senate in the 1952 elections.

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It was the first time since 1946 that the Republicans had control of both chambers at the same time, and Barack Obama is the last.

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His victory in 2008 had a notable coattail effect.

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His victory gained 21 seats in the House, eight in the Senate.

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It secured a strong majority in both chambers, enabled the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

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And now another measure that has just come into the modern presidency is the question if you're such a popular president or candidate, how does the state legislatures and the governor's races all over the county or all over the country fare under your if you were at the top of the ticket?

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Scientists and historians can measure, but we will tackle that for another day and we will move on to the election of 1980 and to our liberal historian of the time, margaret O'Meara.

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And what does the conventional or liberal wisdom say of the 1980 election?

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Go into the book Pivotal Tuesdays.

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Ronald Reagan stood before the Republican National Convention in Detroit as his party's new nominee for president.

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Accepting the nomination, he promised a new beginning for a country that had been battered by a decade of foreign crises, economic malaise and social turbulence.

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He condemned the Democrats as irresponsible tax and spenders who had made America less safe by their compromises with the Soviet Union Union.

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He said it's time to put America back to work, to make our cities and towns resound with confident voices of men and women of all races, nationalities and faiths, bringing home to their families a decent paycheck that they can cash for honest money.

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He went on to say for those who have abandoned hope, we will restore hope and we'll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again.

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Yes, ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign theme was make America great again.

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So for all those Trumpers out there that insist in 2016 that Donald Trump originated this campaign theme, I'm sorry but you are wrong.

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Read your history books.

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Going back to the book, reagan's two terms in office had redefined American politics and reshaped national government.

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The arms office had redefined American politics and reshaped national government.

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The New Deal order that had held steady since the days of Franklin Roosevelt became replaced by a new politics of free markets and free enterprise, of government cuts and privatization of social issues and family values.

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The Democratic Party lost three presidential elections in a row.

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It had morphed from a party of liberal consensus to an expansive, chaotic combination of identity-focused interest groups, southern populists, tradition-bound labor union bosses and economically beleaguered working class.

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A new generation of leaders within the Democratic Party, hailing from southern and western states, had started to argue that the party must move to the political center to stay viable.

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Democratic liberals strongly disagreed.

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Meanwhile, the GOP had become more disciplined in its message, more charismatic in its leadership and more conservative in its politics.

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Always the party of business, the Republicans had also become the party of evangelical Christians, who were taking a more visible and instrumental role in political affairs than ever before.

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And while this is all true, from our conventional or liberal historian, there's almost no difference between the two.

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The more I read, margaret amer does what most of these historians do.

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She simply dismisses the reagan years from 81 to 89 as a detour along the road of liberal progressivism.

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And what the country wants is just more progressivism and liberalism.

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That is where I have to strongly disagree with her.

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Since the election of 1932, the country had indeed moved dramatically to the left, but the point of the 1980 election was that the country overwhelmingly said thanks but no thanks.

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We're going a different direction.

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Direction Now.

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She correctly points out that after the Ronald Reagan election came George HW Bush who wins in 1989 as the third term for Reaganism and for conservatism, which is essentially sealing the deal that a majority of the American people were with the conservatives.

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And when was the last time that that happened?

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When was the last time that the incumbent president wins two terms and then cannot run again and wins a third term?

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Well, it only happened with since the 22nd Amendment.

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It only happened with Ronald Reagan and George W Bush following on in 1989.

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Before the 22nd Amendment.

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The last time that it happened was the election of 1948, when Harry Truman defeats Thomas Dewey, securing his first full term.

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Do we see that same party being elected back into office again before FDR in 1940 renominates himself, because the 22nd Amendment had not been adopted yet, to limit him to only serving two terms Before that is the election, all the way back to 1908 when William Howard Taft followed Teddy Roosevelt's nearly two terms and Teddy Roosevelt took over after President McKinley had been assassinated early into his first term.

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So, getting back to the 1980 election, liberal historians just love to gloss over the Reagan years and the move to the right in 1992 of Bill Clinton as pivotal, like Margaret Amer tried to do in her book, because Clinton was the quote new Democrat and actually he was not.

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He was the same type of Democrat.

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He was a tax and spend liberal and only after the Reagan revolution continued on from 1980 and gained steam.

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We see that result in the 1994 election where Clinton was throttled by the GOP winning the majority for the first time in the House since 1952.

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Only then does Clinton get forced into a corner and has to come back to the middle to govern on most issues.

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So Margaret Amara's Pivotal Tuesdays book is short on the pivotal election of 1980.

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But let's turn to another book to understand just how pivotal was the election and how and why it should be studied and understood more.

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Because, again, it was the conservative counter-revolution to 50 years of liberalism.

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Not just one branch of government, but all three branches of government.

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Let's dig into the weeds to understand this, and I'm going to quote from the 1986 Almanac of American Politics, kind of the Bible of political junkies.

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And this is Michael Barone writing here.

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And Barone is a center to slightly right of center historian, but listen to what he is saying.

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In 1986, after the 1984 re-election of Reagan, after winning some 49 out of 50 states.

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Check this out.

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To understand American politics in the middle 1980s, you need to accept something about the United States that probably will be the first thing future historians will notice about our time but which almost everyone fails to see or even denies.

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Today we are a nation at peace, and not only, though this is the most important reason because we are not at war, but because we are not likely to be involved in a major war anytime soon.

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Again, he's writing this in 1986.

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With ourselves, beneath the turmoil and the clash of everyday American politics, beneath the sometimes apocalyptic rhetoric, we have been approaching something like a consensus about basic values and policies and something resembling a consensus on the differences we are willing to tolerate in each other.

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Amid all the fashionable talk of politics of alienation, angst and anonymity, the election results of 1984 helped to reveal Americans to themselves as reasonably pleased with the nation they have come to be Further down the road.

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We pick this up later, but the incumbent victories of 1984 followed a striking shift in the underlying currents of public opinion.

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Consider the responses to political pollsters' typical opening question are things in the nation today going in the right direction or are pretty much off on the wrong track?

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Through most of the 1970s and into the 80s, the responses were almost always negative, sometimes by more than two to one margin.

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Only with the ascensions of new presidents did optimism appear and then quickly vanish.

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That happened again in 1981, but this time optimism reappeared in 1982, well in advance of the economic recovery, at the time when the nation was in its fourth year of recession.

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In early 1984, pollsters found most Americans optimistic about the direction of the nation and over the summer and fall their optimism grew.

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Obviously this worked to a benefit of that most optimistic of incumbent presidents, ronald Reagan, but evidently it worked to the benefit of incumbents of both parties running for offices of all kinds.

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The result was a ratification of the status quo.

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The voters voted to continue the policies in the spirit of Ronald Reagan as modified and moderated by the sometimes different-minded Republicans in the Senate and very different-minded Democrats in the House.

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This is a quite extraordinary result.

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Only once before in American history have voters continued different parties in control of the two houses of Congress for three elections in a row.

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And that was all the way back in the 1880s, when the balance between the parties was much closer and more regionally based than it is now.

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The voters have shifted the political fulcrum back and forth several times in the last decade, giving wide power to the Democrats in 1976 and giving Republicans control of the legislative process in the 1980s.

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But increasingly the fulcrum points seem closer together.

00:28:51.201 --> 00:28:55.721
The voters seem to have reached a balance they want.

00:28:55.721 --> 00:28:59.794
And one last key nugget of wisdom for this episode.

00:29:02.720 --> 00:29:08.358
But the Democrats predicament is a result not of their failures but of their success.

00:29:08.358 --> 00:29:13.246
For the 40 years they won almost every important political battle.

00:29:13.246 --> 00:29:15.058
Their ideas prevailed.

00:29:15.058 --> 00:29:17.126
In 1930.

00:29:17.126 --> 00:29:31.884
Most Americans did not believe that the federal government had a responsibility to maintain a strong economy with low unemployment and provide sustenance for those who could not find it for themselves by 1964, most Americans did.

00:29:31.884 --> 00:29:40.757
In 1930, most Americans did not believe that the federal government should guarantee the civil rights of blacks by 1970, most Americans did.

00:29:41.657 --> 00:29:44.241
Democrats have, in effect, written the history books.

00:29:44.241 --> 00:29:53.305
Most Americans believe that Franklin Roosevelt was a good president and Richard Nixon a bad one, and they believe that John F Kennedy was a best of all.

00:29:53.305 --> 00:29:54.997
That was not.

00:29:54.997 --> 00:29:56.563
That's just simply not true.

00:29:56.563 --> 00:30:29.659
They believe that isolationism before World War II was wrong, and they believe that the Vietnam War was wrong too, and they believed that the Vietnam War was wrong too, purposes.

00:30:29.659 --> 00:30:33.490
But it turns out that what they have endorsed is more the balance, the fulcrum point, between reagan republicans and the diffuse democrats.

00:30:33.490 --> 00:30:42.175
Whether this balance will be maintained, whether the fulcrum will stay there where it is removed, are the great questions ahead for american politics.

00:30:42.778 --> 00:30:54.468
For the moment, it appears that the re, it appears that Ronald Reagan has the satisfaction, as Franklin Roosevelt had before him, of helping move the fulcrum in the direction he wanted.

00:30:55.494 --> 00:31:06.690
In a huge, diverse, prosperous and successful country where institutions are well entrenched and inertia tends to govern, that is no small thing.

00:31:06.690 --> 00:31:10.615
Indeed, that is no small thing.

00:31:10.615 --> 00:31:26.869
So you can see how the impact of the 1980 election, most especially as a pivotal election, but followed on by the 1984 election of Ronald Reagan, because that conservative counter-revolution just continued to march on.

00:31:26.869 --> 00:31:40.347
George HW Bush would be re-elected in 1989 to serve the essential third term, which is the validation, the vindication of that conservative counter-revolution.

00:31:40.347 --> 00:31:55.867
So the election of 1980 kicked it off and it is perhaps the most pivotal election in the 20th century, next to the elections of 32 and 36, in terms of the direction of the country.

00:31:55.867 --> 00:32:07.387
And that vaunted fulcrum that Michael Barone just told us about 1980 and 1984 was the conservative counterrevolution to 50 years of liberalism.

00:32:07.387 --> 00:32:22.969
Now come back tomorrow for part two of the conservative counter-revolution, where we will hear from Stephen Hayward on how conservatives should view the 1980 and the 1984 election.

00:32:22.969 --> 00:32:28.086
And for now let's just keep fighting the good fight and we'll see you tomorrow.

00:32:31.536 --> 00:32:32.778
Thank you for joining us.

00:32:32.778 --> 00:32:36.147
We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast.

00:32:36.147 --> 00:32:45.325
Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources.

00:32:53.020 --> 00:32:54.363
Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.

MM#345--Pivotal Tuesdays series: The Election of 1980, part 1

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