America's Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton (The American Moment) [Paperback]

William C. Berman (Author), Stanley I. Kutler (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0801858720 | ISBN-13: 978-0801858727 | Edition: 2nd

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 how conservative politics became allied with conservative economics—an alliance forged with singular success during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In this new edition, Berman discusses the initial failure of the Clinton administration to establish a viable political alternative to the GOP. Berman also shows how Clinton won reelection in l996 by moving steadily to the center, even to the extent of co-opting the Republican agenda, while defending a number of key Democratic programs.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

America's fundamental shift in political persuasion--the gradual erosion of the coalition formed during the New Deal and simultaneous rise in popular conservatism ultimately embodied in Ronald Reagan, is lucidly--and, one must note, concisely--described by William C. Berman, professor emeritus of history at the University of Toronto. He begins with the presidential election of 1964, in which racial politics and economic pressures on the middle class began to emerge as central issues in American politics, and provides the factual history with commendable objectivity and a minimum of academic abstruseness. Progressing in a straightforward chronological manner, Berman hits the major political stories of the last three decades of the 20th century; although the book contains little that is startling or revelatory, Berman's portrayal of characters and events, both major and minor, add up to a substantive one-volume history. --Robert McNamara

Review

"Berman writes in clear, unbiased prose and places large trends in context. He does especially well explaining the significance of the decline in the power of organized labor, as both cause and effect of the conservative trend... An excellent case study." -- Journal of Southern History, reviewing a previous edition or volume

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press; 2nd edition (April 14, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801858720
• ISBN-13: 978-0801858727
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #375,482 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well written with an obvious liberal bias, but who cares..., May 9, 2006

By 

Adam J. Mahlum (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: America's Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton (The American Moment) (Paperback)

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

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Introduction to Modern Conservative Movement in the United States, May 31, 2010

By 

Roger D. Launius "Historian" (Washington, D.C., United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: America's Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton (The American Moment) (Paperback)

Why has the political environment in the United States veered away from the New Deal liberalism of the middle third of the twentieth century toward an increasingly conservative position? This fine overview offers a well-grounded historical analysis of the process of rising conservatism and related questions. It serves as an excellent introduction to an important and complex topic. William C. Berman takes on an interesting and controversial issues in recent political history, and handles it in a relatively nonbiased manner although partisans on one side or the other will probably not acknowledge this.

Berman's account, which is designed for use in an undergraduate course on twentieth century history, takes a chronological approach to the topic. Beginning with the resistance to the policies of FDR to combat the Great Depression of the 1930s, he offers chapters that deal with "The Politics of Culture and Class, 1964-1974, "The Conservative Upsurge, 1974-1976," "Jimmy Carter and the Crisis of Liberalism," "The Triumph of Conservatism, 1980," "The Reagan Revolution," "Conservatism in Decline, 1985-1992," and "The Clinton Center." This second edition was published in 2001 so there is virtually no discussion of the election of 200o and the presidency of George W. Bush.

Berman emphasizes several benchmarks in the rise of conservatism to its current dominant place in the political life of the United States. The first is the now nearly mythical stomping in the 1964 presidential election by the Democrat Lyndon Johnson of Republican Barry Goldwater, a principled conservative who would rather adhere to his ideals than compromise for the sake of political office. Second, the development of conservative-leaning intellectual institutions that gave haven to thinkers and incubated the ideas that emerged in the 1970s to dominate the political discourse. Those ideas fueled the conservative movement, far more effectively than most people probably possible, during the political fights of the rest of the twentieth century.

Third, Berman emphasizes the rise of Ronald Reagan as a standard bearer not just of opposition to New Deal/Great Society liberalism but also of a coordinated and consistent ideology of what government should be and how it should behave. Efforts to put into place that alternative philosophy of governance and polity in a way that could not be dismantled by a Democratic successor to the Oval Office may have been Reagan's most lasting accomplishment, certainly Berman's account of the Clinton presidency suggests that may well be the case. Failing to forge a useful counter to the conservative forces in society and politics, Clinton moved increasingly to the center, some would say center right, to ensure his reelection in 1996.

Finally, and this was my most significant take away from this book, Berman makes explicit how the convergence of conservative economic ideas, conservative political philosophy, and social conservatism created a powerful coalition of strikingly divergent people who did not agree with each other on many issues but could work together toward a common general, if ill-defined, vision of the United States. I have read many other books that talk about this merger of ideas into a political juggernaut, however uneasily the disparate elements may have cooperated, but Berman's account is both more crisply written and clearly argued than many of these other works. Moreover, his refusal to take sides in the debate is both unusual and refreshing.

While some might see political bias in this book, the reality is that this is one of the most even-handed treatments of this important political movement I have read. Nothing, of course, is totally unbiased, and "America's Right Turn" is not either, but William Berman tries hard to offer a balanced perspective and overall he succeeds.

1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Loved it, December 16, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: America's Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton (The American Moment) (Hardcover)

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