The Backlash Revisited

Ronald Reagan dominated his era as no president had since Roosevelt and as no president has again. Today, he’s endlessly lionized as the man who pulled the country out of its economic death spiral and won the cold war for the free world. Is it possible to produce a useful political history of the 1980s while writing the decade’s central political figure out of it? Two new books more or less do just that, by consigning Reagan to the margins of the main story—one by design and the other coincidentally. For casual students of the political history of the late twentieth century, it seems a bit like

culture Apr/May 2009

Business Casual

The financial and economic crisis now unfolding worldwide continues to generate much distressing sound and fury, but surely its most bizarre feature is a comparatively silent one: the lackluster reaction it has met at its epicenter in the United States. Neoliberalism—the essentially American ideological export that has governed global economic integration for three decades—has taken a serious, and perhaps fatal, blow. Alongside that failure have been calamities in America’s own business civilization and public life that are too numerous to count. But the broader implications of the passing of