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Furie, setting out to make a Saturday matinee serial style of adventure film, surfaces with the script for Iron Eagle (1986). Funded by the fledgling Tri-Star Pictures, Furie shoots the film in Israel with recent Academy Award winner Louis Gossett Jr. Although critically ripped to shreds, the film succeeds at the box office and also makes money through video sales and rentals. Furie then agrees to direct Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) for Cannon Films. As a result of dire budget constraints and a script he was not allowed to alter without the permission of a difficult Christopher Reeve, the film becomes a disaster of the first order, going down in the books as one of the most notoriously bad sequels in movie history.

Toward the end of the seventies, the culture of feedback came under attack by conservative critics who challenged the mainstays of ecological thinking. Molecular biologists reasserted a reductionist genetic determinism in descriptions of natural selection, dismissing the theory of coevolution as unscientific. These neo-Darwinists relied on game theory to argue that even altruistic behaviors could be fully explained as the result of competition among “selfish genes.” Similarly, conservative economists applied game theory to the problem of “stagflation” and arrived at a neoliberal solution. Their supply-side economics recommended an end to government regulations in order to “free” the market. These economists positioned the competitive marketplace, rather than the ecosystem, as the final arbiter of human destiny. Supported by supply-side economic theory, the cultural politics of Reaganism mobilized a popular blend of individualism and optimism to flout ecology’s accepted truth that there were natural limits to economic growth. Consonant with a regressive notion of individualism, Reaganism emphasized closing borders and strengthening barriers in order to protect a traditional American identity. This ran counter to ecological thinking’s core belief that identity was emergent from the complex dynamics of interdependency characteristic of nested open systems.

This chapter presents Irving Howe's 1986 essay “Reaganism: The Spirit of the Times,” in which he examines how Ronald Reagan sought to undo the New Deal introduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt. In particular, Howe discusses the way the Reaganites demolished the welfare state. He argues that the Reagan administration's main achievement has not been institutional or programmatic, but rather consisted of a dramatic transformation of popular attitudes, values, and styles. Howe goes on to outline the main elements of the Reaganite vision and the collapse of American liberalism. He ends his essay by emphasizing the importance of criticism in addressing the imbalances in wealth and power in America's corporate-dominated society.

This chapter discusses the struggle over the meaning of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, arguing that the racist representation of the rebellion informed the depiction of New York City as synonymous with crime and urban decay during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. Focusing on the relationships between the crushing of the Attica uprising and the neoliberalization of New York, the chapter argues that the suppression of the Attica revolt was symptomatic of a counterinsurgency against radical social movements in the United States, and a key moment in the development of more punitive carceral policies. Ultimately, the state's response to a crisis of hegemony produced a solution—the super-maximum-security prison—that became a standard feature of neoliberal regimes of mass incarceration during the rise of Reaganism.

This chapter details the political rise of Ronald Reagan. One-time movie actor and former California governor Reagan established himself as a political figure in the 1960s, making his debut via a televised speech supporting Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in 1964. In 1966, he made a splendid first run for public office, turning out the incumbent Democratic governor of California, Edmund “Pat” Brown. In 1976 he aligned himself with the rising passion of movement conservatives, embracing the pro-life cause and speaking against ratification of the pending Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. By 1980, incumbent U.S. president, Democrat Jimmy Carter, was in trouble, damaged politically by price inflation and high unemployment levels. Reagan was poised to take advantage of this moment and became the Republican nominee for president in 1980.

This chapter considers Reagan’s first year in office. As he had triumphed with the voters in 1980; he did so with lawmakers in 1981. His success was fundamentally the result of the November 1980 election returns, which made his program’s passage certain in the Senate and likely in the House. The demoralization, division, programmatic exhaustion, and mediocre leadership of the Democratic Party also played a role. But it must be noted that Reagan, in his triumphal first year as president, did not ask Congress to take a hard path. No powerful interests opposed his program. He asked Congress to take politically attractive actions—voting huge new military expenditures and cutting taxes for everyone, most of all for the wealthy and powerful. The most controversial and least popular of his efforts had been the spending cuts, aimed mainly at the needy.

This chapter focuses on the climate of fear that plagued society in the 1980s. These fears, including fear of national decline, of enemies abroad, of dangerous classes at home, lay behind Reaganism’s positive and optimistic messages of an American revival. The foreign threats, in the Reaganite view, were Communists and terrorists. Anxieties over violence, violation, and disorder were often strongly racialized. White Americans generally associated this threat closely with cities and with black Americans. Many African Americans, and sometimes members of other racial minority groups, also lived in dread of violence from government authorities and vigilantes. While America’s political elites, from Reagan downward, did not create the climate of racial fear and tension in the 1980s, they did little to stem the toxic tides of fear and anger, and may have contributed to them responding crudely and opportunistically—sometimes on a strongly bipartisan basis—to public concerns about crime and disorder.

This chapter focuses on the run-up to the 1984 elections. From 1983 to early 1984, the White House focused on methodically removing obstacles from the path to Reagan’s reelection. Their efforts included strengthening the long-term finances of the Social Security system; changing the perception of the president’s indifference toward the disadvantaged; and addressing the stream of corruption scandals and allegations surrounding his appointees. For his second term, Reagan ran less as a guardian of conservative policies than as a suitable champion of national pride and rebirth, almost as a figure above politics. His campaign showcased a speech Reagan delivered in June on the cliffs of Normandy commemorating the D-Day invasion of Europe in 1944, and tied him closely to the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. On Election Day, Reagan secured 58.8 percent of the vote against 40.6 percent for Mondale.

This chapter focuses on the events surrounding the 1988 presidential elections. Despite the palpable sense of exhaustion with Reagan and conservatism he had championed, his vice president, George H. W. Bush won the 1988 elections with a campaign that smothered a brewing backlash against Reaganite economics. Bush effectively took Reagan off the ballot, and began to alter American conservatism by amplifying concerns which, while they had been components of Reaganite governance up to 1988, had received less attention than questions of economics and foreign policy. Bush focused on local controversies that were freighted with symbolic significance and that served to discredit the Democratic nominee, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Bush’s campaign set the stage for what would become known, in the 1990s, as the “culture wars,” a political era dominated by polarizing controversies relating to race, sex, crime, and patriotism. In this way, Bush lifted the most divisive and emotionally volatile elements of Reaganism out of the realm of undercurrents and secondary themes, and fashioned them into the central thrust of a retooled conservatism.

This chapter examines economic policies in the 1980s. Reaganite tax policies, for instance, eased the public burden on the wealthy, but brought little or no relief to less affluent Americans. These changes in taxation meant that the tax system did less to ameliorate growing inequality in the 1980s than it would have if the government had left federal rates alone. The government refused to raise the federal minimum wage after 1981—from $3.35 per hour—for an unprecedented nine years. The tight-money and high-dollar policies pursued by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department devastated America’s manufacturing sector, eliminating tens of thousands of unionized jobs and killing off firms where pay had been relatively egalitarian. Reagan’s fiscal policies—large tax cuts not offset by reduced spending—roughly tripled America’s public debt in dollar terms. The federal government’s debt jumped from 26.2 percent of GDP at the end of 1980 to 42.8 percent by the end of 1990.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Ronald Reagan and Reaganism in the 1980s. Reagan belongs to a select group of political leaders, which includes Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, whose names became watchwords for political creeds and stances toward society, even toward the world. Reaganism was a particular variety of American conservatism that had its heyday in the 1980s. While none of its basic features were new in the 1980s, these elements came together in a specially cohesive and potent way in response to the era’s political and social circumstances, forming a political identity that was also fueled and shaped by Reagan’s success. Reaganism’s core components include an insistence that unfettered capitalism is both socially beneficial and morally good; a fierce patriotism that waves the flag, global military supremacy, and no criticism of the United States; and a vision of society as an arena where individuals win or lose because of their own talents and efforts.

American filmmakers have used the rich musical legacy of the 1960s to help frame, historicize, and market the “Celluloid Sixties,” the Sixties as imagined, interpreted, and invoked by filmmakers. This chapter considers how films from a politically pregnant subset, the “Sixties Postscript,” examine the meaning of the Sixties in the present. The most famous entry is The Big Chill (1983), which many scholars argue embodies Hollywood’s contempt for the Sixties and its embrace of Reaganism; it is an anomaly, not an archetype. Whereas The Big Chill cast the Sixties as a past that could be remembered, but not revived, Rude Awakening (1989), Flashback (1990), and Pump Up the Volume (1990) posited the Sixties as an endlessly renewable source of inspiration. These films do not use music simply to imbue nostalgia. They use nostalgia about the Sixties—its music, politics, and promise—to express discontent with the present and to promote the revival of the hopes and dreams associated with the Sixties.