From either a historical or a philosophical perspective, the emergence in the 1980s of a New Right movement based on a demonic view of government seems strange. For it required a massive dose of amnesia to blot out the considerable benefits that had accrued to two generations of the American population over the preceding half century, and it required a radically revisionist view of American history to depict the Federal Reserve Board, Social Security, and Medicare as illegitimate aberrations that must somehow, like most of the twentieth century, be revoked.
