Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

Senator S. I. Hayakawa, who had said on the campaign trail that America should keep the Panama Canal because we “stole it fair and square,” now said he had only been joking.

In his State of the Union address, he praised Hubert Humphrey as a tribune for “the weak and the hungry and the victims of discrimination and poverty”—then intoned: “Government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy.”

a liberal is someone, as Robert Frost said, too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

“They go computer,” a senator complained. “We go computer. We’ve reached the crazy point of 1984 already.”

Irving Kristol, for his part, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, like a right-wing Joseph Stalin, that the political advantage tax cuts would provide Republicans was so historically imperative that they should be blasted through whatever the effect on the budget. “The neoconservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums. He wants to shape the future and will leave it to his opponents to tidy up afterwards”: now was no time to go wobbly.