If your Christmas shopping list includes a fan of political history, you?ll do that fan a favor by giving him a copy of Steven Hayward?s The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980-1989.

A sequel to Hayward?s earlier narrative of the American political landscape from 1964 to 1980, the new Age of Reagan reminds us about the accomplishments and failures of the Reagan years. It also reminds us about the flak Reagan took from the Left and Right during his two terms in office.

Among the more interesting passages is Hayward?s description of a 1986 tax reform that George Gilder dubbed the ?greatest victory of the Reagan Revolution?:

The political effects of the 1986 tax reform act were profound. Cutting the top individual rate to 28 percent cemented in place Reagan?s fundamental victory in reorienting tax policy, and as such can be understood as the last act in the tax revolt that had begun in earnest with the passage of California?s Proposition 13 in 1978. Despite subsequent increases in the top marginal rate (to 33 percent under President George H.W. Bush in 1990 and to 39 percent under Bill Clinton in 1993), the 1986 tax reform foreclosed the possibility of using the income tax code for purposes of punishing the rich or redistributing wealth in any significant way. The liberal principle of progressivity was not completely banished, but no longer would the tax code be seen as a plaything for changing society wholesale. Although liberals still reflexively talked of raising taxes on the rich (which usually seemed to include middle class when tax increases got passed), no one ? not even Ted Kennedy ? proposed going back to a top rate of 50 percent, let alone the higher pre-1980 tax rates. It also introduced a slight bias toward considering the growth implications of tax changes, an element almost totally absent from tax reform efforts in the decades before 1980.