After six years in office Ronald Reagan has changed everything about American politics except ideology. Democrats and Republicans agree that Reagan has transformed the agenda, but in a peculiar way. We want to do the same things as before--stabilize the economy, protect the poor and the elderly, fight drug abuse--only with less government. Public opinion, however, hasn't shifted to the right. If anything, the voters have moved slightly to the left since Reagan took office--there is less support for military spending, more support for domestic social programs, increased concern about arms control, hunger, and poverty. Why hasn't there been a discernible conservative shift in public opinion? Because the impact of the Reagan revolution is more likely to be felt in the long run than in the short run. The President has not, after all, dismantled the New Deal welfare state. As Hugh Heclo, of Harvard University writes in *Perspectives on the Reagan Years,* "Much as F. D. R. and the New Deal had the effect of conserving capitalism, so Reaganism will eventually be seen to have helped conserve a predominately status quo, middle-class welfare state." [...]
Another element in this new institutional order is the new coalition structure that the Reagan revolution has given to American politics. Reagan brought together a variety of interests united by a distaste for big government. That coalition is not only larger than the traditional Republican Party but also more diverse. It includes business interests and middle-class voters who dislike taxes and regulation. It includes racial and religious conservatives who dislike the reformist social agenda embraced by the federal government in the 1960s, as well as neo-conservatives who want a tougher foreign policy. [...]
What keeps the Reagan coalition together is not affection or agreement but the perception of a common threat. The threat is that liberals will regain control of the federal government and use it, as they have in the past, to carry out their "redistributionist" or "reformist" or "anti-military" program. The threat will not disappear when Reagan leaves office, and neither will the Reagan coalition--not even if it loses the 1988 election. A coalition may be defeated, as Reagan's was in the 1986 Senate elections, but that does not mean it has been destroyed. In the short run the Republicans are likely to lose many elections, just as the Democrats did over the fifty-year history of their New Deal coalition. The short-term fate of the Republican Party is highly dependent on the condition of the economy. That is what brought the party to power in 1980 and kept it in power in 1984. A major recession would spell the end of Republican rule. But the Reagan coalition would dissolve only if the various groups that compose it no longer felt they had a common interest in limited government. The Republicans are now the party of a weak government and a strong state, attracting people who are committed to one or both objectives. The Reagan revolution, not just Reagan himself, has acquired a popular constituency.[...]
It worked because Ronald Reagan has two different political personalities. His rhetoric is that of the hard-core conservative ideologue, a bold and uncompromising man of principle who portrays every issue as a confrontation between "us" and "them." But his actions are those of a shrewd, practical politician, maneuvering for political advantage and accepting the best deal he can get. When it is useful, Reagan abandons his harsh rhetoric and speaks soothingly in terms of unifying values and symbols. Sometimes he even seems to abandon his principles, as when he accepted a tax increase in 1982 or when he reversed himself in early 1986 and facilitated the departure of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, or, most troublesomely, when he violated his own Administration's anti-terrorist policy by secretly selling arms to Iran. [...]
The anti-government revolt had been brewing for many years. Polls taken by the University of Michigan showed steadily rising anti-government feeling beginning in 1964. The percentage of Americans who believed that they could trust the government in Washington "to do what is right" most or all of the time went from 76 percent in 1964 to 54 percent in 1970, to 33 percent in 1976, and to 25 percent in 1980. The proportion who felt that the government was run "by a few big interests looking out for themselves" was 29 percent in 1964, 50 percent in 1970, and 69 percent in 1980. Less than half of the public in 1964 thought that the government wasted a lot of tax money; the figure was two thirds in 1970 and more than three quarters by 1980. Reagan's conservative regime is a natural consequence of this trend.
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