Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course
U.S. history, and today we're going to talk about the guy who arguably did the most to
shape the world that I live in. NO, Stan not Carrottop. No, not Cumberbatch although he
did do the most to shape the Tumblr that I live in. I'm talking about The Great Communicator:
Ronald Reagan. Reagan is a fascinating president because
he was, in lots of ways, straightforward. His presidency was called the Reagan Revolution
but it's a bit odd that he gets so much credit for changing America because he was
one of the least hands-on of all presidents and as you know here at Crash Course we don't
really indulge in great man history. So we're going to talk about Reagan but we're also
going to talk about the forces that predated his presidency that led to the so-called Reagan
Revolution. Mr. Green? Mr Green? I remember some of this
stuff. It's like almost interesting. I'm glad to be almost interesting me from
the past. Someday maybe you'll be almost interesting.
Intro The Reagan era began, unsurprisingly, with
his election to the Presidency in 1980. Now, anyone could have beaten Jimmy Carter, but
Reagan succeeded largely by pulling together many strands of conservatism.
Reagan emphasized his belief in "states rights" and he condemned "welfare cheats."
He also condemned busing and affirmative action. And he won the support of religious conservatives,
including the newly formed Moral Majority, by standing for family values, even though
in fact he was the first U.S. president to have been divorced.
Also, he once acted with a monkey. And there's nothing "family values" about that.
Stan just informed me that Ronald Reagan did not in fact act with a monkey. He acted with
a chimp. I apologize to all the primate rights people out there. Good lord!
Now Reagan also appealed to the so-called white backlash, working class white people
who resented the advances that African Americans had made during the 1960s and the 1970s.
And economic conservatives liked his anti-union, low taxes, free market positions, and anti-government
crusaders and libertarians liked his assertion that government was not the solution to problems,
but was itself the problem. Then there were the Cold War hawks who liked
his militant anti-Soviet rhetoric and his desire to spend more on the military.
Now that's a big coalition but it turned out to be just barely a majority coalition.
Still Reagan won in 1980. He even carried the traditionally Democratic
states of Illinois and New York proving that Jimmy Carter truly was profoundly unelectable.
A lot of Reagan's policy ideas weren't all that popular at the time, but he truly
was a great communicator. I mean Reagan's was a former actor and he
knew how to talk to people without them feeling condescended to.
Reagan's most famous campaign advertisement proclaimed that it was "morning in America"
again, and that relentless optimism (I mean at least if you're a morning person) was
a welcome contrast to Jimmy Carter being like "you should wear sweaters inside to save
fuel." Sorry Jimmy this is America! Ronald Reagan used the word "freedom"
more than any other president in American history, but it's interesting to think about
what he meant by the word "freedom." Because as we've seen in American history
freedom has meant lots of things to lots of people. Is freedom, freedom from government
tyranny? Or is freedom government protection from hunger
and homelessness and military attacks? Do governments ultimately restrict freedom
or provide it? Now there's no question that the federal
government that Ronald Reagan inherited would have been absolutely foreign to the people
who founded this country. I mean Social Security, Federal Income Taxes,
the National Endowment for the Arts. But some people would argue that the America
of 1980 was much more free for more Americans than say the America of 1790 when after all
slavery was legal. And in fact in the early 19th century many
slave owners said that the government was taking away their freedom to own slaves.
Ultimately, the question for how we should imagine freedom and how we should allow for
it, is at the center of American history. And a big part of Ronald Reagan's vision
of freedom was economic freedom, which he laid out in his Economic Bill of Rights.
It would curtain union power, reduce federal regulation of industry and the environment,
and most of all lower taxes. All these ideas were a big part of the Reagan
Revolution. But as we know much of what he proposed had been brewing for years during
the rise of conservatism. So what aspects this Economic Bill of Rights
actually ended up happening? Well, his main accomplishment was lowering taxes: in 1981
Reagan persuaded Congress to lower the top tax rate from 70% to 50%.
In 1986, Congress went even further with the Tax Reform Act that lowered the top income
tax rate to 28%. Oh, it's time for the mystery document!
The rules here are simple... I read the mystery document, I either get
the author of it correct or I get shocked. Alright here we go. Can I just take a preliminary
guess and say that it's going to be Reagan? "I will not accept the excuse that the Federal
Government has grown so big and powerful that it is beyond the control of any President,
any administration or Congress. We are going to put an end to the notion that the American
taxpayer exists to fund the Federal Government. The Federal Government exists to serve the
American people and to be accountable to the American people. On January 20, we are going
to re-establish that truth. Also on that date we are going to initiate
action to get substantial relief for our taxpaying citizens and to put people back to work. [...] We
will simply apply to our government the common sense that we use in our daily lives." It is Reagan! Stan is telling me that I'm not going to
get the check mark unless I guess the correct speech? Well he talked about January 20th, so obviously
it's not his inaugural address. It's either the acceptance speech he gave
at the convention or like the speech that he gave after he was elected. But I don't
think.... convention? Yes! So the idea that to lower taxes is the best
way to spur economic growth is called supply side-economics, trickle down economics or,
if you're George HW Bush running against Reagan in the 1980 primaries, voodoo economics. Sadly, this does not involve zombies or putting
pins in dolls. Instead, it's about high interest rates to combat inflation coupled
with cutting taxes, especially for wealthy Those rich people then spend more and invest
more in private enterprise which creates new jobs. Also, the thinking goes that lower taxes will
encourage people to work harder since they will be able to keep more of their money. Did this work? Eh. Now we're getting into
the part of history where it depends on your political perspective. Initially, the high interest rates definitely
provoked a recession in 1981 and 1982. Which was not ideal. But, inflation did drop from 13.5% in 1981
to 3.5% in 1988 and after 1982 the economy began expanding. And the rest of the Reagan era saw consistent
increases in gross domestic product; however, not everyone benefited from that expansion.
While the stock market boomed, wages didn't rise very much. And in fact, haven't risen
since. Now one of the central ideas of supply-side
economics is that you have lower tax rates and you also cut government spending. Because,
you know, the government has less money. Which, yeah, it did not happen. The government
is always good at cutting taxes but never good at cutting spending. The Reagan era did see cuts to some programs,
but the really expensive items: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, they remained largely
intact. And instead of cutting the overall amount
of spending it actually went up considerably because of the defense spending binge that
saw the national debt balloon to 2.7 trillion dollars. But Reagan totally did deliver on his anti-union
rhetoric. In August 1981, when the unionized air traffic controllers went out on strike,
violating federal law in the process, Reagan fired more than 11 thousand controllers who
refused to return to work.. So as I mentioned before, the 80's were
a pretty great decade for Wall Street generally, which is why Oliver Stone made a movie about
it that immortalized the line "Greed is Good." In the 1980s it became easier to make money
buying and merging companies than actually like running them profitably. But fortunately
we later dealt with that problem..... ugh. We never fix the problems, we only fix the
things that are fine. One of the reasons that American history is
so important to me is that I want us as a country to like summon the courage to deal
seriously with our problems. Sometimes I think that we're just so cowardly like we're
the cowardliest country on Earth... alright the French. Right, but like the merger of RJ Reynolds
Tobacco, maker of Winston cigarettes, and Nabisco, which gave us Oreos, not only created
a cancer and heart disease dream team, it also generated nearly $1 billion for the lawyers
and bankers who put the deal together. But if you were like most of us in the 80's
watching Dallas and Dynasty, working at your regular job, inexplicably having a carpeted
bathroom, than you probably didn't share in that abundance. The 80's saw a rising economic inequality,
although not nearly as dramatic as we see today. By the mid 1990s the richest 1% controlled
40% of the nation's wealth, double the share from 20 years before. Meanwhile the income of middle class families
stagnated and that of the poorest 20% began to decline. And one often overlooked aspect of de-regulation
was the closing of hospitals for the mentally ill. Now, some of these institutions were
hellish, but rapid closure of all of these facilities without replacement services meant
that many patients were left to live on the street. Homelessness increased dramatically. Now of course Reagan is considered the darling
of conservatives today, but by current standards he was something of a moderate. I mean yes, he cut taxes, and he cut funding
for programs that helped the poor like food stamps and school lunches. But during his second term he worked effectively
with the democratic congress. There's no bipartisanship today. Also, he left the big New Deal and Great Society
programs largely intact. I mean he was too old to believe in cutting
Medicare. He was like "all of my friends are on this." And the 80s also didn't see the fulfillment
of the desires of the Christian Right. I mean divorce rates went up, abortion continued
to be legal, women didn't leave the workforce. In fact, Reagan appointed the first woman
to the Supreme Court. Are you kidding? We didn't have a woman in the Supreme Court
until the 1980s? This is the craziest country ever. Even affirmative action persisted, and Nancy
Reagan's urging of Americans to "Just Say No" to drugs didn't convince anybody. And then we have Ronald Reagan's reputation
as the man who ended the Cold War. The thinking here goes that Reagan spent so much money
on defense that the Soviet Union bankrupted itself trying to compete. And there may be a case to be made there but
we don't want to remove agency from the people who protested the oppression of life
behind the Iron Curtain. So while you can argue that the Reagan administration
helped create good conditions for the change that happened, the people who made the change,
made it. Alright. Let's go to the ThoughtBubble. In his first term Ronald Reagan took a really
hard line against the Soviet Union. He called it an Evil Empire and even once joked that
the U.S. would "begin bombing in 5 minutes." That was ill advised. Reagan also sponsored
the largest military buildup in U.S history including the MX missile. The highlight was his proposed Strategic Defense
Initiative aka Star Wars: space-based missiles and lasers for shooting Soviet missiles out
of the sky. This was a fantastic idea, although it would have violated the 1972 Anti-ballistic
Missile Treaty, but anyway it was technologically impossible to build. The force was not strong
with this idea. Reagan also pressured NATO to put missiles
in Western Europe and the war games that NATO staged in 1983 were so realistic that the
Soviets almost scrambled their planes and launched ICBMs. Now if that had resulted in nuclear war, we
would have a very different story on our hands, but it didn't. And Regan's aggressive
nuclear posturing had a couple of positive results. First, it boosted the world wide anti-nuclear
weapons movement, called the FREEZE movement. Second, it turned Reagan into the most successful
nuclear abolitionist in the atomic age. There's nothing like a reasonably close
brush with nuclear apocalypse to tone down your rhetoric a little. In his second term
Reagan was much more conciliatory towards the Soviets and worked to reduce the number
of warheads. In his first term, according to the historian
Victor Sebastian, "[Reagan] spent nearly as much on defense as Presidents Nixon, Ford,
and Carter combined and much more than both the cost of the Korean and Vietnam wars,"[1]
but in his second, Reagan toned down both the spending and his rhetoric, declaring,
"Our constant and urgent purpose must be a lasting reduction of tensions between us."[2] Thanks, Thought Bubble. So, Reagan was able
to negotiate the first reduction in nuclear weapons with the new Soviet Premier Mikhail
Gorbachev in 1986. In fact, the two leaders might have tried
to get rid of nuclear weapons altogether, but Reagan's unwillingness to give up his
Star Wars initiative made that impossible. That was a big deal, but the rest of Reagan's
foreign policy was somewhat less triumphant. For instance, he sent Marines to Lebanon as
part of a peacekeeping mission, but then withdrew forces after 241 of them were killed by a
car bomb. And Middle Eastern policy played a key role
in the biggest controversy of Reagan's presidency: the Iran-Contra Scandal. This was truly one of the craziest schemes
ever hatched up by an American presidential administration. Which is really saying something. The Contras were rebels seeking to overthrow
the socialist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Because they were anti-communists and the
Cold War was in full swing, the Reagan administration wanted to support them. But Congress passed
a law saying that they couldn't. So two administration officials, John Poindexter
and Oliver North, got creative. They hatched a plan to sell arms to the Iranian government,
still technically our enemies, and then funnelled some of the profits from these illegal arms
sales to the Contras. And Congress would never have to know about
it. Except that they found out. Congressional hearings followed, and we learned
a lot about Ronald Reagan's penchant for delegating the details of his policy to underlings. In this case, that served him well as he could
plausibly claim that he knew nothing about the clandestine activities of these two rogue
employees. And this gets to the big point of the Reagan
era. I'm not sure that it was really about Reagan. In fact, I'm not sure that any great-man
history is really about the great men that supposedly spearheaded it. Whether or not you think America is better
off from the rise of conservatism we've seen since LBJ's great society. It wasn't
really, and it still really isn't about individuals. It's about us collectively deciding what
we mean when we talk about freedom and equality. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week. Crash Course is made with all the help from
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say in my hometown "It's morning in America." What should I say - "Don't Forget To Be Awesome"?
