MM#346 --Pivotal Tuesdays Series: The Election of 1980, part 2--A Conservative Counter-Revolution

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 we're calling Pivotal Tuesdays.

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This is our part two of Pivotal Tuesdays series of the election of 1980.

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Series of the election of 1980.

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Now this series is a fascinating romp through the 20th century and the pivotal elections of that century.

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Namely, those elections are the election of 1912, 1932, 1968, and 1980.

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Now we are in part two today, but I would urge you to go back and check out and listen to all those other podcasts If you have not.

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They are certainly some of our best work.

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And now, in our last episode, we covered the election of 1980.

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And, principally, we covered how the conventional and liberal historians covered how the conventional and liberal historians covered that election.

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So today, to finalize this series, we're going to take apart the election of 1980 from a conservative historian's point of view.

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Now, before we do just that, let's set the stage.

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Because what happened in the election of 1980?

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Because what happened in the election of 1980?

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Well, it was a conservative counterrevolution against liberalism and especially against liberalism's march for the last 50 years, from 1932 to the 1980.

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Election with some minor bumps here and there.

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Election with some minor bumps here and there.

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Democrats, both radical and progressive, marched without any pushbacks.

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Without any pushback all the way to the 1980s.

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They did so politically, they did so culturally, they did so economically.

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Now some folks say wait a minute, wait a minute now.

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Wasn't there some Republican presidents during that time?

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Yes, there was Dwight D Eisenhower Ike, from 1952 to 1960.

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But Ike was a moderate, he did not push back.

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There was the election of 1968, which we have covered before.

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Richard Nixon from 1968 till 1974.

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And he was essentially a liberal for most of his time in office.

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Check out that Pivotal Election podcast for more details.

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Then there was Jerry Ford.

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Jerry Ford was much like Mitt Romney.

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He was like Mitt Romney or he was like Mitt Romney.

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Mitt Romney never got elected, though Neither did Gerald Ford, but he was more like Dwight D Eisenhower, just kind of a moderate, ho-hum Republican.

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Many say that's what was needed at the time.

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I would disagree, but I was two years old, so I'm always looking back at it through 2020 hindsight progressive policies, and we get cultural progressivism and radicalism, and we get economic progressivism and radicalism.

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There were some good tax cuts there in some minor bumps.

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Like I mentioned, jfk gives a tax cut in 62,.

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Spurs the economy, republicans, in a bipartisan fashion coming out of World War II, override Truman's veto and they pass tax cuts.

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So there was some good stuff, but boy, it was minor blips on the radar.

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The overwhelming majority of policies and the culture and economically was that aforementioned Democrat march of progressivism and radicalism.

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So the 1980 election marked the beginning of this counter conservative revolution and that revolution would last some 15 to 20 years, all the way to the elections of 1996, where 1998 hard to measure, uh, and some would say it's still going on.

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I would probably dispute that, especially with the Barack Obama election in 2008 and 2012.

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But there are some arguments, serious arguments, to be made on both sides of that.

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Now I would call myself a Reagan conservative for a whole host of reasons, but that is a different podcast.

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But with that brief introduction, let's hear from Stephen Hayward in his book the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents, part Two of why the 1980 election was so important.

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Go on to the book.

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Ronald Reagan's achievements are so massive that even political adversaries have grudgingly come to acknowledge them.

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One liberal historian, John Patrick Diggins, wrote in 2007 that Reagan deserves to be considered among the greatest American presidents, alongside Washington, lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

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I couldn't agree more.

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After more than 10 years of high inflation, slow economic growth and rising pessimism, reagan, the first two-term president since Eisenhower, successfully turned the nation around, broke the back of inflation, stimulated rapid economic growth and saw the creation of 20 million new jobs and restore the nation's self-confidence and optimism about the future.

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His greatest and most long-lasting achievement was winning the Cold War over the Soviet Union quote without firing a single shot.

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In the words of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

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Princeton University historian Sean Willits, a liberal, wrote of Reagan.

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Quote his success is helping to finally end the Cold War is one of the greatest achievements by any president of the United States and arguably the greatest single presidential achievement since 1945.

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In both domestic and foreign policy, reagan reached these achievements despite the fierce opposition and nonstop criticism of liberals and the news media.

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Criticism of liberals and the news media Just as today.

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Liberals in the 1980s opposed reducing taxes and deregulating the marketplace.

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And foreign policy, liberals opposed Reagan's strategy of quote peace through strength.

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As well as Reagan's tough talk and clear statements about the Soviet Union as an evil empire, most everyone, including some of his own senior staff, thought Reagan was foolish to say in Berlin in 1987, mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

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But two and a half years later, the Berlin Wall came down.

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The indelible proof of Reagan's success is that today, even liberals want to claim his legacy, though they can do so only by distorting his ideas.

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But there is one part of Reagan's legacy that liberals can't distort and that conservatives have tended to overlook in the recent years, have tended to overlook in the recent years Reagan's devotion to the Constitution and his desire to move the nation closer to the founders' views of limited government.

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Yes, without a doubt, reagan's election in 1980 kicked off a conservative counterrevolution, and that continued with his re-election in 1984, essentially reaffirming his policies.

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Not to mention that he won 49 out of 50 states, a complete thrashing of Walter Mondale and his liberal ideas.

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Now we talked about politically.

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Reagan's policies articulated over the eight years won the argument that conservative government at the federal level can get out of the way and allow its citizens to flourish without interference, and that argument was certainly proven right.

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But more importantly, it was proven as doable.

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In the area of economics, reagan was proven right with supply-side economic policies.

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He was proven so overwhelmingly right despite the attacks from the left, from his own GOP and even to listen to me even of his own administration to me even of his own administration.

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You can check out Stephen Hayward's second volume, the Age of Reagan, a book about how there was often so much backbiting from these economic advisors and from some of his own party, including some in the Senate.

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Bob Dole, what were you thinking?

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Holy smokes, those jerks?

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They should be apologizing in their memoirs and none of them did.

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Art Laffer in the Laffer Curve was proven right and he advised Iron Lady Thatcher in Britain in the late 70s and she was proven right.

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And BB Netanyahu he advised him in Israel during the early 2000s and you can check out the success of that story in BB, my Story, the Academy review.

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We just published about it.

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So Ronald Reagan, in economic terms, with economic policies, was absolutely proven right.

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The argument is one.

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There's no need to have the argument anymore.

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In the area of culture, reagan certainly drove the culture towards a more harmonious and peaceful decade.

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He helped to restore Americans' confidence in themselves and their country, and that was helped because people were doing well economically.

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They had money in their pockets.

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So the conservative revolution was proven right in all areas politics, economics and culturally.

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Now let's go back to the book for more information.

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And culturally Now let's go back to the book for more information.

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Reagan was the first president since FDR to speak frequently and substantively about the founders in the Constitution, and he was the first president since Calvin Coolidge to criticize the administrative state that modern liberal constitutionalism has created.

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This is a remarkable and telling fact.

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It is largely overlooked today that FDR spoke often about the founding and the Constitution, and, quite differently from Woodrow Wilson, while Wilson was openly critical of the founding and the Constitution, fdr's references to the founding were mischievous.

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He appeared to be defending or proposing a restoration of the principles of the founding, while in fact attempting a wholesale modification of the meaning of the constitutional order.

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After FDR, our presidents practically ceased making references to the founding or the Constitution until Reagan arrived.

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In a 1979 letter from Reagan to Ben Shaw, the publisher of the Dixon Illinois Evening Telegraph newspaper, reagan wrote this the permanent structure of our government, with its power to pass regulations, has eroded, if not in fact repealed, portions of our Constitution.

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I have been speaking, particularly in my talks around the country, about the 10th article of the Bill of Rights.

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He's speaking about the 10th Amendment.

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The federal government is performing functions that are not specified in the Constitution and those functions should be returned to the states and back to the people.

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Of course, the tax sources to fund them should also be turned back Even more so.

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Check out this quote from Reagan speaking to the Brits, speaking to the British Parliament in Westminster Hall in 1982, as president quote there is a threat posed to human freedom by the enormous power of the modern state.

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History teaches the dangers of government that overreaches Political control taking precedence over free economic growth, secret police, mindless bureaucracy all combining to stifle individual excellence and personal freedom.

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Boom, right on, right on President Reagan.

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Now he was helping out his favorite ally outside of His Holiness John Paul II, margaret Iron.

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Lady Thatcher was one of Reagan's favorite allies and with those comments he was helping her to fight her fight with ridding the Brit or unwinding the British system from socialism that was quite entrenched by that time, all the way from the 50s into the late 70s.

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But also he was in the midst of a knockdown, drag out battle with his own Congress here in the United States.

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Now you will remember that Margaret Thatcher was fully implementing that supply sideside economics in her country during that time and she was winning that argument too.

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But let's go back to the book.

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While this was not nearly revolutionary, he was talking about supply-side economics here.

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It was controversial as it challenged the basic premises of the modern centralized administrative state.

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Liberals had never expected to hear such heresy from a presidential podium.

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Although many liberals had been shaken by the disasters of the preceding 15 years, from Vietnam and the Great Society through President Carter's ineffectual rule, there had never been a point at which the fundamental premises of modern liberalism was attacked from the pinnacle of American power.

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It is significant that Reagan rejected the liberal reformist theme, very popular at the time of his election, that the presidency and our democracy in general was inadequate to the times.

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He said this.

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From time to time we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for and by and of the people.

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But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

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Amen, absolutely so.

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Right Now, if there was two areas where Reagan missed the mark, where he took his eye off the ball, two criticisms, perhaps it would be these, and they're combined First, the rolling back of big government and reigning in its power and reach Right.

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And the second, more practical step was not helping his party to win decisively in the 1984 elections.

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Contrary to the myth that Reagan's landslide in 1984 helped him to have long coattails that is a myth long held by most conservatives conservatives reagan's mistake was, in his 1984 re-election run, more of a light jog than a re-election run.

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He really didn't help out many down ballot members of his own party.

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To gain some insight, let's go to hayward's explanation of how this could have happened in his book the age Age of Reagan, volume 2.

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Mondale had managed to hang on to his home state by a slight margin of 8,000 votes, making Minnesota the only state that never voted for Reagan even once, while Reagan swept the other 49 states, collecting the largest electoral college margin ever.

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Reagan racked up 59% of the popular vote, the fourth largest popular vote landslide in presidential history, a figure that no candidate has come close to matching, since he carried nearly every demographic except blacks, hispanics and Jews.

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He carried 61% of independents, a quarter of registered Democrats, three quarters of young first-time voters.

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Despite the presence of a Catholic woman as a running mate on the Democratic ticket Geraldine Ferraro, by the way, reagan carried 56% of the Catholic vote and 54% of the women's vote.

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The gender gap facing the GOP was and still is an unshakable media theme, though one wonders whether the media have it backward.

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Reagan polled 62% of men, suggesting the gender gap is as much of a problem for Democrats failing to attract the votes of men as Republicans falling short with women.

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And here's our key nugget Despite the magnitude of Reagan's landslide, he had no coattails.

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Reagan received 17 million more votes than Republican House candidates.

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Before the election, reagan's campaign manager, ed Rollins, said if we don't gain Republican seats in Congress, the Reagan revolution is over.

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Most analysts predicted a 20 to 25 seat gain for Republicans in the house, but on election day the GOP picked up a paltry 14 seats, compared to 33 in 1980.

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Most of which gain had been lost in the 1982 midterm election.

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Nine of the Republican House pickups were in two states, texas and North Carolina, where the Republican Party ran integrated campaigns presenting a united front to voters.

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Nationally, the popular vote for the House was almost exactly equal.

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Republicans actually received a majority of total votes cast in contested seats, but because of gerrymandering, democrats would enjoy a comfortable 253 to 182 margin in the House.

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96% of House incumbents were re-elected.

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The incoming 99th Congress had one of its lowest numbers of new representatives in decades.

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Of the newcomers was Tom DeLay of Texas, elected in a Houston district once held by Vice President George H W Bush.

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Vice President George H W Bush.

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Now Republicans ended up losing two Senate seats, narrowing their advantage to 53 to 43.

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And here's our last point.

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The election result left the ideological divisions in Congress more raw than ever, especially in a House where a dispute over an Indiana congressional district is said to have been a turning point in the partisan fury of the people's chamber.

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A Republican had been certified as the winner after two recounts.

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Of a close thought, I think we ought to go to war.

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While Representative Henry Hyde said that this has put a breach in the House like nothing I have seen in my 10 years here, house Republicans would continue to be, in the words of the National Journal, the Rodney Dangerfields of American politics no respect.

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So Reagan needed a lot of help to help him roll back and curb government growth and hold the line on government spending, but his lack of helping those who could help him cost him dearly.

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Nevertheless, ronald Reagan's successful second term was absolutely incredible.

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Most second term presidents don't get nearly what they want accomplished.

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Reagan got a lot accomplished.

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The economy kept booming and would keep booming all the way until a slight downturn in 1991 hurt then-President Bush 41 and caused him re-election in November.

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That economy then was running on fumes all the way into 1993, but then would gain more traction from a welfare reform bill ushered in, in which Bill Clinton signed it, and it acted as a stimulus and kicked off another four to six years of economic growth.

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Americans' confidence was certainly back for sure on the economic front.

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Let's go back to Reagan.

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There were two important initiatives in Reagan's second term that have tended to be forgotten over the years but that deserved to be remembered today.

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First, starting in 1985 and working chiefly through his second attorney general, edwin Meese, the Reagan administration picked a major fight with liberalism.

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Meese and Reagan began making speeches and publishing articles against, arguing that the judiciary, mainly the Supreme Court, should interpret the Constitution according to quote the original intent of the framers, and that federalism and coordinate review that is, the idea that all three branches, not just the judges and lawyers, have a duty and a right to interpret the Constitution and should be revived.

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After all, the preamble says we the people, not we the judges, as Attorney General Edwin Meese put it.

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He went on to say.

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The Supreme Court, then, is not the only interpreter of the Constitution.

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Each of the three coordinate branches of government created and empowered by the Constitution the executive and the legislative have no less than the judicial has a duty to interpret the Constitution in the performance of its official functions.

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In fact, every official takes an oath precisely to that effect.

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Now, in launching a high-profile debate on interpreting the Constitution, reagan and Meese reopened a fundamental question that liberals thought was settled.

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No prominent Republican since Coolidge, had seriously advanced such an argument.

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The public fight Meese picked over original intent, legal scholar Jonathan O'Neill wrote constituted the most direct constitutional debate between the executive branch and the court since the New Deal.

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Reagan and Meese were attempting nothing less than to wrest the Constitution away from a self-appointed legal elite and return it to the people.

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Reaction, not just of the usual suspects, such as the New York Times editorial page, but also of sitting Supreme Court justices Two of them made speeches criticizing original intent and of many prominent voices in the legal academy assured that this issue would not go away.

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Indeed, it is still very much with us.

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Amen, amen.

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Think of the late Supreme Court Justice, antonin Scalia, who, almost single-handedly, has created a category of legal thought which is most popular today, titled strict constructionism, and the currently serving Clarence Thomas Supreme Court Justice, where he is almost in the same vein as Justice Scalia, was as a strict constructionist, especially with his original intent philosophy.

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So the breadth and depth of both Scalia and Thomas Thomas rather who we have studied here from this microphone on a podcast Check out Mojo, minute 302 for that episode but both of them are absolute, perfect examples of what President Reagan and Edwin Meese Attorney General Meese were looking for.

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Now here is something I forgot about with President Ronald Reagan's second term, but it's worth remembering.

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Let's go to the book.

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Second, starting in 1987, reagan argued for a package of five constitutional amendments he called his Economic Bill of Rights amendments he called his Economic Bill of Rights.

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This represented another way in which Reagan was trying to turn back the liberal legacy of FDR, whose own Economic Bill of Rights of 1944 consisted of more things the government would give you by redistributing wealth, such as the right to a job, the right to health care, a right to housing and food.

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Reagan wanted to restore the older understanding that individual rights are limits on the government's power over you rather than claims you can make against your fellow citizens through expanded government power.

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Reagan's first two amendments were very familiar a balanced budget amendment and the amendment granting the president a line item veto over spending bills which most state governors have and which enables the executive to reduce spending for individual programs that is often included in large budget bills that the president cannot veto, such as defense appropriations.

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Reagan had asked for both of these amendments in nearly every State of the Union speech during his presidency.

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But Reagan's other three proposed amendments were different and interesting.

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Proposed amendments were different and interesting.

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His third proposal was a requirement for a two-third supermajority vote of Congress for all tax increases.

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The fourth was a constitutional spending limit so that the federal government couldn't just slowly or quickly, as under President Obama increase its share of the nation's income step-by-step and year-by-year.

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Finally, reagan's fifth proposed amendment was a constitutional prohibition on wage and price controls.

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This last one is the most curious and an indication of Reagan's farsightedness.

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By the late 1980s inflation had come down and there was no one arguing that the US would ever want to consider wage and price controls again.

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You'll remember that happened under President Nixon.

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Nearly everybody across the political spectrum at the time agreed that wage and price controls of the 1970s hadn't been very successful at all, that, in fact, such price controls could not work.

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But Reagan knew that times change.

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Perhaps he anticipated the kind of fiscal situation we have today, with enormous budget deficits and a Federal Reserve Bank running the government printing presses overtime.

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If inflation returned, a big government liberal like President Obama might want to bring back wage and price controls as a remedy.

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Now, this book was written in 2012, so that's why Hayward is teeing off about President Barack Obama, and thank God he did not bring back wage and price controls during his administration, but in fact, inflation did come back in 2022.

00:30:01.471 --> 00:30:24.665
So mum is the word, and let's hope no idiot in and out of government will ever bring back up the policy of wage and price controls, because they were indeed utter failures in any objective sense of the of the policy.

00:30:24.665 --> 00:30:29.635
Now nothing has been done with any of the five economic amendments.

00:30:29.635 --> 00:30:32.688
That but talk about Reagan's farsightedness.

00:30:32.688 --> 00:30:38.251
Are they, each of these in their own right, more important today than they were then?

00:30:38.251 --> 00:30:55.412
We have a $34 trillion deficit, that's $34 trillion with a T Crazy debt which will bankrupt our country, and either party is not talking about it nor addressing it.

00:30:55.412 --> 00:30:57.045
It's just stupid.

00:31:00.181 --> 00:31:14.436
Now let's pivot to the most bracing, horrendous and contentious political and cultural issue of our time Abortion.

00:31:14.436 --> 00:31:19.268
What did President Ronald Reagan believe?

00:31:19.268 --> 00:31:20.290
Go into the book?

00:31:20.290 --> 00:31:39.403
To mark the 10th anniversary of the Roe versus Wade decision in the spring of 1983, reagan published a long article in the Human Life Review, republished the following year as a small book entitled Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation.

00:31:39.403 --> 00:31:47.945
Reagan's political advisors were nervous about publishing such an article so close to his re-election campaign.

00:31:47.945 --> 00:31:53.223
Reagan simply replied I might not get re-elected but we're going to go with it now.

00:31:54.326 --> 00:32:05.324
Reagan was the first sitting president to publish a book and seldom has any president since Lincoln spoken so openly and forcefully about such a contentious moral issue.

00:32:05.324 --> 00:32:18.413
He was just as direct and unequivocal as Lincoln was about slavery Quote make no mistake, abortion on demand is not a right granted by the Constitution.

00:32:18.413 --> 00:32:28.152
Roe was an act of raw judicial power, quoting Justin Byron White's scorching dissent, comparable to Dred Scott.

00:32:28.152 --> 00:32:36.193
This is not the first time our country has been divided by a Supreme Court decision that denied the value of certain human lives.

00:32:36.193 --> 00:32:39.950
Some of Reagan's language was bracing.

00:32:39.950 --> 00:32:58.078
Quote the abortionist who reassembles the arms and the legs of a tiny baby to make sure all of its parts have been torn from its mother's body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being, can hardly doubt whether it is a human being.

00:32:58.078 --> 00:33:08.880
The media said such a controversial article by a sitting president was rare and unusual.

00:33:08.880 --> 00:33:17.880
Reagan was the Lincoln of our day and he took head-on the most contentious issue of our day.

00:33:17.880 --> 00:33:23.119
And Reagan, like Lincoln, rightly called abortion for what it was.

00:33:23.119 --> 00:33:30.359
It was like slavery was, to our country, a very shameful sin.

00:33:31.880 --> 00:33:48.784
Us conservatives, no matter that the overturning of Roe v Wade with the Dobbs decision in June of 2022, which correctly places this legal issue back into the states, for each state to decide for itself we conservatives have to keep fighting the fight Now.

00:33:48.784 --> 00:33:54.292
The fight must be made and the argument must be made on a moral basis of the law.

00:33:54.292 --> 00:34:07.163
As of this writing, 17 states have enacted abortion bans, with 14 prohibiting abortion at all stages of pregnancy and three banning it after approximately six weeks.

00:34:07.163 --> 00:34:18.675
The left, the progressive and radical left, with their evil and wicked thoughts, have ways that have not stopped and will not stop.

00:34:18.675 --> 00:34:21.969
As they say, evil never rest.

00:34:21.969 --> 00:34:35.465
As of this most recent podcast, 24 states and the District of Columbia allow abortion with varying degrees of restriction so the fight continues.

00:34:35.465 --> 00:34:40.242
Allow abortion with varying degrees of restriction so the fight continues.

00:34:40.242 --> 00:34:42.146
Abortion is the 20th and 21st century equivalent to slavery.

00:34:42.146 --> 00:34:46.934
We must keep fighting and winning the moral argument.

00:34:47.760 --> 00:34:51.711
Thank you, president Reagan, for your moral clarity on this issue.

00:34:51.711 --> 00:35:08.681
On this issue, so as we have learned, reagan's two victories, his two major victories in 1980 and 1984, kicked off and kept going the conservative counter-revolution to liberalism's follies.

00:35:08.681 --> 00:35:24.266
The re-election, or rather the election of 1988, the essential quote third term for all of a very popular president's policies, especially when he could not run again.

00:35:24.266 --> 00:35:36.273
That essential third term would be the ultimate arbiter and vindication of whether Reagan had been right or wrong about the direction of the country and where it needed to go.

00:35:36.273 --> 00:35:47.554
And because I know you're very curious, what did, what happened on Reagan's third term?

00:35:47.554 --> 00:35:52.731
Let's go back to Stephen Hayward in the second volume of the Age of Reagan.

00:35:52.731 --> 00:36:02.489
Second volume of the Age of Reagan.

00:36:02.510 --> 00:36:11.523
On election day a week later, george H W Bush swamped Michael Dukakis by a popular vote margin of 54 to 46.

00:36:11.523 --> 00:36:21.753
But the Electoral College result was more lopsided, with Bush winning 40 states and 426 electoral votes, to just 10 states plus the District of Columbia and 111 electoral votes for Dukakis.

00:36:21.753 --> 00:36:26.009
A few Democrats looked at the bright side.

00:36:26.009 --> 00:36:30.331
Dukakis did better than Mondale and Carter, but most were more realistic.

00:36:30.331 --> 00:36:38.630
Democratic pollster Harrison Hickman was despondent If we couldn't beat Bush, I don't know who we can beat.

00:36:38.630 --> 00:36:49.331
Hendrick Hertzberg wrote in the New Republic If Dukakis is too liberal, then any Democrat is probably too liberal.

00:36:49.331 --> 00:37:05.615
And we later on read and yet Bush became the first vice president to succeed a sitting president in 150 years and his victory had been interpreted justly as a third term for Ronald Reagan.

00:37:19.500 --> 00:37:21.282
Logical conservatism diminished the clarity of Bush's politics.

00:37:21.282 --> 00:37:42.952
Beyond pledging to continue Reaganomics, a pledge he did not keep In the main outlines of the Reagan's foreign policy, bush had gone to some trouble to distinguish himself from Reagan stylistically, most pointedly with his conventional speech language of seeking to bring about a kinder and gentler nation, kinder and gentler than whom Nancy Reagan is reported to have asked.

00:37:42.952 --> 00:37:53.751
George W Bush tried to reassure conservative movement leaders about his father, telling them you'll be astounded at how conservatively he will govern.

00:37:53.751 --> 00:37:58.411
George Bush, to the conservatives, will be like Richard Nixon in China.

00:37:58.411 --> 00:38:16.512
And sadly George HW Bush did not keep his pledge on those taxes and that was largely the reason he lost the election, or one of the major reasons he lost the election in 1992 to Bill Clinton.

00:38:16.512 --> 00:38:28.128
A third party certainly didn't help, but Bush's flip-flop on the taxes issue caused a lot of consternation among conservatives.

00:38:28.128 --> 00:38:37.208
That and with a sinking economy, the best thing he should have done is cut taxes, and the economy would have revived back.

00:38:38.121 --> 00:38:46.606
Now let's share one more last dig about how conventional historians analyze conservative presidents and reshape how we view them.

00:38:46.606 --> 00:39:08.077
Going back to Hayward for one last but perhaps the most important quote of them all, the conventional wisdom among journalists, political scientists and historians is that the second presidential terms are disappointments and often are a disaster, especially if the second term arrives through a landslide.

00:39:08.077 --> 00:39:22.237
Foundered quickly on the shoals of an ill-conceived court packing scheme which derailed the momentum of the New Deal and led to a rout at the next midterm election.

00:39:22.237 --> 00:39:25.525
Eisenhower had a recession, minor scandals and a foreign policy embarrassment.

00:39:25.525 --> 00:39:36.615
In his second term, johnson, in winning a landslide for what would have been JFK's second term, was engulfed in the Vietnam War and domestic calamities.

00:39:36.615 --> 00:39:40.244
In the 1960s, nixon had Watergate.

00:39:40.244 --> 00:39:41.929
Bill Clinton was impeached.

00:39:41.929 --> 00:39:50.875
George W Bush had Hurricane Katrina and the unpopularity of the Iraq War and the implosion of the financial markets.

00:39:50.875 --> 00:39:55.547
Now that sounds all well and good, doesn't it?

00:39:55.547 --> 00:39:56.711
It sounds reasonable.

00:39:56.711 --> 00:40:20.010
Reagan became the first president to serve two full terms since Eisenhower, but despite the favorable revisionism of the past few years, his second term is still defined by the unmitigated disaster of the Iran-Contra scandal and only partially redeemed through his summits and arms control breakthroughs with the Soviet Union.

00:40:20.010 --> 00:40:30.231
And it is assumed, without examination, that little of note was accomplished in domestic policy, especially the budget deficit.

00:40:30.231 --> 00:40:33.809
This summary judgment is wrong.

00:40:33.809 --> 00:40:36.224
This summary judgment is wrong.

00:40:36.224 --> 00:40:47.661
Oh, and here is your key nugget of conservative wisdom let's continue, even allowing for the stain of Iran-Contra.

00:40:47.681 --> 00:40:54.851
Reagan's second term was one of the most substantial accomplishments, and not just in superpower relations.

00:40:54.851 --> 00:41:10.193
In domestic policy, he enjoyed a number of triumphs, and even where a hostile Congress, including leading members of his own party, stymied his initiatives, he and his administration pressed the conservative case.

00:41:10.193 --> 00:41:17.193
The flood tide of pent-up problems ran full, but never engulfed Reagan as it did Johnson and Nixon.

00:41:17.193 --> 00:41:31.851
His resolution in defending the principles of his economic policy established a template against which his successors would be measured, is remembered.

00:41:31.851 --> 00:41:42.032
But less well recalled is his steadfast opposition to trade protectionism, which Congress was eager to enact throughout his second term.

00:41:42.032 --> 00:41:59.594
Though Reagan lost many battles, he did not lose the initiative, and herein lies a fundamental lesson of politics Even when losing a political ideology that remains on the offensive creates a favorable political environment.

00:41:59.594 --> 00:42:10.704
Reagan helped create the political environment that made it possible for his party to achieve the rarity of winning the White House for a third straight election in 1988.

00:42:13.326 --> 00:42:26.251
So in today's Mojo Minute and in this final analysis of the most pivotal elections of the 20th century we saw the country beginning in 1980 was now arcing in a different direction.

00:42:26.251 --> 00:42:32.614
Liberalism was on the descent and conservatism was on the ascent.

00:42:32.614 --> 00:42:38.697
Bush 41 was elected, giving the Reagan conservative counter-revolution validation.

00:42:38.697 --> 00:42:49.463
The American people liked this type of government and Ronald Reagan should be considered great.

00:42:49.463 --> 00:42:59.056
He should be in the list with Washington and Lincoln and FDR as our most pivotal and consequential and great presidents.

00:42:59.056 --> 00:43:08.507
Now, how far would this conservative counter-revolution that Ronald Reagan started in 1980, how far would it go?

00:43:10.021 --> 00:43:15.250
We'll come back tomorrow and we'll pick up that story After Ronald Reagan and Bush 41 exit the stage.

00:43:15.250 --> 00:43:17.079
We'll pick up that story After Ronald Reagan and Bush 41 exit the stage.

00:43:17.079 --> 00:43:24.291
We'll pick up that story in 1994 with a fiery band of conservatives.

00:43:24.291 --> 00:43:34.251
Now, until then, thank you for listening to these Pivotal Tuesday episodes and this Pivotal Tuesday series.

00:43:34.251 --> 00:43:47.128
It's been my pleasure going along with you on this journey and this series has been one of the most received and the one that I have received the most feedback, so thank you very much for that.

00:43:47.128 --> 00:43:52.192
Now, until tomorrow, as always, let's keep fighting the good fight.

00:43:54.340 --> 00:43:55.567
Thank you for joining us.

00:43:55.567 --> 00:43:58.949
We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast.

00:43:58.949 --> 00:44:08.128
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.

00:44:08.128 --> 00:44:11.961
Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.

MM#346 --Pivotal Tuesdays Series: The Election of 1980, part 2--A Conservative Counter-Revolution

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