Reagan Era

The Reagan Era or Age of Reagan is a periodization of recent American history used by historians and political observers to emphasize that the conservative "Reagan Revolution" led by President Ronald Reagan in domestic and foreign policy had a lasting impact. It overlaps with what political scientists call the Sixth Party System. In the view of historian and journalist Sean Wilentz, in his 2008 book, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008, Reagan dominated this stretch of American history in the same way that President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal legacy dominated the four decades that preceded it, whereas Rossinow (2015) calls the 1980s in particular "the Reagan era."

The Reagan Era included ideas and personalities beyond Reagan himself; he is usually characterized as the leader of a broadly based conservative movement whose ideas dominated national policy making in areas such as taxes, welfare, defense, the federal judiciary and the Cold War. Liberals generally lament the Reagan Era, while conservatives generally praise it and call for its continuation in the 21st century.

Campaigning for the Democratic nomination in 2008, Barack Obama interpreted how Reagan changed the nation's trajectory:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think that people... he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

Most historians begin the era in 1980, when Reagan was elected president, and usually probe back into the 1970s for the origins of the Reagan Era. For example, Kalman (2010) explores multiple crises of the 1970s that eroded confidence in liberal solutions: the rise of the religious right and the reaction against feminism and the ERA; grass roots reactions against busing ordered by federal judges; the defeat in Vietnam, the collapse of détente and fears of Soviet power; the challenge of imported cars and textiles, the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt, soaring inflation, stagflation, and the energy crisis, as well as the humiliation the nation suffered during the Iran hostage crisis and the sense of malaise as the nation wondered if its glory days had passed. She shows step by step the process by which one political alternative after another collapsed, leaving Reagan standing.

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