America's Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton

by William C. Berman and Professor William C. Berman

Book Overview

In America's Right Turn historian William Berman examines the political, cultural, and economic contexts in which Republican conservatives operated and explores the crisis of the liberal welfare state against the background of presidential politics. Berman demonstrates the key roles played by conservative populism and the conservative backlash to the rights revolution in the collapse of Democratic hegemony. But most importantly, he shows...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801858720
• ISBN13: 9780801858727
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Well written with an obvious liberal bias, but who cares...

America's Right Turn does an outstanding job of explaining how the New Deal Coalition of Franklin Roosevelt--a powerful and pervasive force in politics for over forty years--gradually slipped away. All good students of history already know that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is what ultimately led to the unraveling of Democratic Party unity. The solid south, which for years had blindly voted for the Democratic Party, no longer shared the values of a party that tried to include African-Americans, feminists, environomentalists and Union workers. In the mid-term elections of 1966 the Republican party picked up 47 seats in the House of Representatives, which made the Republican leadership smell blood. They learned the value of promoting wedge issues: race, religion, sexual orientation, etc...to get voters to forget about their pocket books and economic circumstances when they entered the voting booth. The author of the book is clearly liberal and doesn't try to hide that fact. If you are a strong conservative you will have a hard time accepting reading some of the book. He accuses the Republican party of racism, class warfare and being economically recklessness. He blames Jimmy Carter for the Reagan revolution not because Carter was a liberal, but rather because Carter was too conservative! Furthermore he castigates Clinton as an idealistic Democrat that morphed into an economic conservative once he inherited a Republican Congress following the 1994 election. Clinton passed symbolic legislation to please the Democratic Party (for example the V chip) while he simaltaneoulsy passed welfare reform and NAFTA, two historically conservative issues. The book is most effective when it illustrates the effect that the Conservative Revolution has had on the standard of living in this country. NAFTA enabled high paying blue collar jobs to leave the country and were replaced by low paying service sector jobs. Deregulation allowed the Savings and Loan scandal to take place, which led to massive government bail outs, etc...Massive government deficeits under Reagan, Bush and Bush have bankrupted our country for future generations. I recommend the book because it effectively illustrates many of the pitfalls of the conservative revolution in this country. It also points out some of the tricks that Republicans use to control the electorate (wedge issues) and politicians (a massive defeceit that limits government programs). At times the book may seem to overestimate the value of "big government" but in era in which the term liberal is a bad word and conservatives control the government it is refreshing to read a book by an author that errs on the side of the left, rather than the right. I will now end with one of my trademark haiku's: 'Merica's Right Turn Huge Budget Deficeits--Ouch! Limbaugh laughs...pops pill

Loved it

This book presents a good argument for why america turned right during the 60s and 70s ... I found it both interesting and informative. I would def. reccomend this book to anything interested in us history. i had to read this for a college history class and i honestly loved it

A moderately good read

Granted, this book was written by some professors so it will not be the best read in the world. However, the author's do a good job of getting the main point of the book across -- that America has become increasingly conservative since the early 1970's. (Nixon would have fit in well with the Democrats today and Clinton certainly would have fit very comfortably with the Republicans in the 1970's). I thought the authors were pretty clear that the Clinton years (and all the scandals) could not yet be completed or analyzed (the book was written in 1998) and hindsight is usually needed when writing about history. In any event, the authors were not kind at all to the democrats of the 1960's and pretty much imply that the democratic party and its candidates in the 1970's was a wasteland -- look for comment on the Clinton scandals in the next edition. As far as the Reagan scandals (he told his lies and had his scandals too), I would try not to confuse objective analysis with a witch-hunt (conservatives think any criticism of Reagan is unwarranted, despite *his* scandals, and liberals do the same with Clinton and Kennedy). Rather, I suggest you read this moderately interesting, rather short book with an open mind. (We all know about Clinton's scandals, but a pretty good objective analysis of a few of Reagan's blunders and scandals is Ambrose's Rise to Globalism).