Reagan, the Business Agenda and the Collapse of Labour

Abstract

The first six years of the Reagan administration have been unique in postwar American political history both for the ideological consistency of its leadership and for the degree to which it succeeded in altering the direction of social policy. Unlike past Republican administrations the Reagan Team has made no ideological moves toward or concessions to the political centre. Political defeats in Congress have at times modified the vigour of the Reagan Revolution, as its supporters like to call it, but they have not changed the minds of its leader and cadres or deflected the drive toward that combination of militarism and market based economic policy that are the heart of Reaganism and conservative thinking throughout the capitalist West. The ability of the Reagan administration to 'stay the course' in the face of foreign policy set-backs, contradictory economic performance, and the cloud that hangs over the whole economic programme-the mushrooming cloud of deficits-lies above all in the forces behind Reagan's agenda and in important shifts in the political and social balance of forces that occurred prior to his election.