I finished last night Steven J. Hayward’s The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order 1964-1980 (Prima, 2001).
It’s not a biography of the 40th president; Hayward’s book instead serves as a political history of the United States from the time of Johnson’s landslide election win to the time of Reagan’s first presidential election.
Hayward sprinkles plenty of useful observations within the book’s 717 pages, but I figured I would highlight one: the discussion of supply-side economics:
Liberals who worship at the shrine of progressive income tax rates hated the implication that lower marginal tax rates would generate higher revenues from the rich. Liberals were apoplectic when supply-side advocates began pointing to the impressive results of President John F. Kennedy’s tax cuts in the early 1960s. But the most profound impact of supply-side economics was also its most subtle: Supply-side economics represented a fundamental rejection of the “limits to growth” viewpoint that had come to be the dominant theme of liberalism. Suddenly it was conservative Republicans who were able to say, “Let’s get this country moving again,” and it was liberal Democrats who took on the crabbed countenance of Herbert Hoover.
