The Cultural Left and the Reagan Era

Nick Witham makes an important contribution to our understanding of American political culture in the 1980s. He examines a group of intellectuals, journalists, and filmmakers who, deeply critical of Ronald Reagan's policies in Central America, sought to inform and mobilize a complacent public. Witham's main argument is that these cultural producers not only reflected a politics of opposition but also helped shape “the political processes” of that opposition (p. 4). Witham joins a growing number of scholars in challenging prevailing interpretations of the 1980s as defined disproportionately by Reagan. Americans experienced the so-called age of Reagan primarily as an age of crisis at home (homelessness, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, farm foreclosures, Superfund legislation, and factory shutdowns) and on the foreign policy front, regarding not only the Soviet Union and the Middle East but also, as Witham shows so effectively, Central America. Witham makes a solid if uneven case for the importance of this 1980s cultural front. He is not always successful in fulfilling his promise to demonstrate “the vital importance of a ‘cultural left’ to any movement for political and social change” because he too infrequently shows the impact of these cultural producers on the movements (p. 6). Even so, Witham does well in reminding us of a vibrant and important culture of opposition

Legislation · New Left · Opposition (politics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Tea party · United front · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Law