Bradford Martins “The Other Eighties”

Bradford Martins “The Other Eighties”

Introduction

Those who do not look back on Ronald Reagan's presidency as a golden age, morning in America or the moment when someone finally stood up to all those welfare queens may find a little solace in Bradford Martin's "The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan". The paper presents the review and in-depth analysis of the book.

Description and Analysis

Whatever humiliations the left suffered during those years, argues the author, a history professor at Bryant University in Rhode Island, it was less moribund and more effective than we tend to remember. If it could not stop the administration from funding the right-wing contras in Nicaragua, it still prevented that support from turning into a full-scale war -- an Iraq or a Vietnam.

If it could not keep conservative students from taking sledgehammers to the shanties that had gone up on the Dartmouth College campus in solidarity with South African victims of apartheid, the divestment movement nevertheless fed into the mounting international and internal pressure that in the next decade would bring down white rule. The death knell of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982 inspired a retrenchment that led to the nomination of Geraldine Ferraro for vice president in 1984 and, beyond that, substantial gains for women in office. The highly theatrical antics of the AIDS activist group ACT UP (my favorite, not cited by Martin, was the unfurling of a giant condom over Senator Jesse Helms' home) pressured the Food and Drug Administration to grant people with AIDS greater access to new and experimental treatments (Martin 2011, 101).

Perhaps more important, it wrested the national dialogue about the disease away from homophobes such as Helms and Jerry Falwell. (It seems as incredible now as it did then that the president did not publicly utter the word "AIDS" for the first six years of the epidemic.) In general, Martin does not overstate his case. He acknowledges, with disgust, the "abandonment of full-throated progressive idealism" that defined the "dunderheaded Democrats" and "undermined the party throughout the decade."

The left lived on outside Congress. But even there, as Martin sees it, it was crippled by the hangover the '60s had left. A case in point was the nuclear freeze movement:

"Though, the national media was quick to congratulate freeze activists for their lack of 1960s-style rancor, this very politeness left a ...