3 Review(s)

In this engaging new book, Bradford Martin illuminates a different 1980s than we may remember - one whose history has been buried under the celebratory narrative of conservative ascendancy. Ronald Reagan looms large in most accounts of the period, encouraging Americans to effectively shrug off the activist politics of the 1960s and 1970s and wholeheartedly embrace his particular brand of social conservatism. But a closer look reveals that a sizable swath of Americans strongly disapproved of Reagan's policies throughout his presidency. With the Democratic Party in tatters, many expressed their dissatisfaction in unorthodox ways. Unlike the civil rights movement or flower power protesters, activists of the 1980s generally found themselves on the defensive, struggling to preserve hard-won victories from previous decades. Their successes, then, were not in ushering in a new era of progressive reforms but in prodding the government toward more moderate policy.On-the-ground interventionism helped to temper the administration's aggressive Latin American policy and stave off a possible Nicaraguan war, while mock shanties constructed on college campuses shed light on tacit American funding of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Martin examines these and other small but influential movements in this concise history.