Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974-1980 - Hardcover

Kalman, Laura

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393076385 ISBN 13: 9780393076387

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Synopsis

An authoritative history of the right turn in American national politics during the Ford-Carter years.

On the face of it, the Ford-Carter years seem completely forgettable. They were years of weak presidential leadership and national drift. Yet, as Laura Kalman shows in this absorbing narrative history, the contours of our contemporary politics took shape during these years. This was the incubation period for a powerful movement on the right that was to triumph with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. These years also marked the coming of age of the social movements of the 1960s, as their causes moved from the streets to the courts for mediation. Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action and the scope of privacy rights had immense social and political impact. The nation experienced an energy crisis, a sharp economic downturn, and a collision with fundamentalism in Iran that set the terms for coming crises. Kalman’s navigation of this eventful political and social terrain is expert and riveting. 8 pages of black-and-white photographs

About this title

About the Author

Laura Kalman is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of acclaimed books in American political and legal history.

Reviews

The 1970s emerge as a time of drift and chaos that nonetheless fundamentally realigned America, in this cogent, though not quite groundbreaking, study of the Ford and Carter presidencies. UC-Santa Barbara historian Kalman (The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism) thoroughly surveys the cultural, economic, and geostrategic shocks Americans endured in the'70s: the rise of feminism and the gay rights movement; racial controversies over affirmative action and forced busing; defeat in Vietnam and anxieties about declining American power; deindustrialization, unemployment, soaring inflation, and oil shortages. As Democrats and moderate Republicans floundered, Kalman contends, a New Right comprising neoconservative hawks, evangelicals, supply-siders, tax rebels, and conservative populists capitalized on these crises to mount a compelling attack on the liberal consensus. To Kalman, these developments are epitomized by the perpetually vacillating Gerald Ford and, especially, Jimmy Carter (who she paints as a devious, yet unprincipled and ineffectual figure) whose weak leadership paved the way for the triumph of Ronald Reagan's forceful conservatism. 8 pages of photos.
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Liberal historians, among whom Kalman counts herself, continue to puzzle over the election of Ronald Reagan. Sean Wilentz in The Age of Reagan (2008) argues Reagan's election was the American electorate's repudiation of liberal overreach, but Kalman holds that voters rejected Jimmy Carter, not liberalism. Still, she has to explain how conservatives rose to power, and in this superdetailed account of the late 1970s, Kalman interprets their success as capitalizing on opportunities such as opposition to compulsory school integration, affirmative action, the ERA, and détente with the USSR. Right-wing personalities such as Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell occupy swathes of Kalman's chronicle, as does the Right's capture of the Republican Party. But it is within Carter's presidency that Kalman searches most deeply for clues to the advent of Reagan. In recounting Carter's alienation of Democratic Party constituencies, his perceived weakness in foreign affairs, and his inability to stifle stagflation, Kalman finds her evidence that a personality rather than an exhausted liberalism better explains 1980. On top of the facts and making her case, Kalman earns the political-history audience. --Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393076385
• ISBN 13: 9780393076387
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 496