Favorite Son

Garry Wills. Reagan's America: Innocents at Home. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987. 472 pp. Dan E. Moldea. Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and The Mob. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986. xvi + 382 pp. IIlus. From the day he was elected Governor of California, Ronald Reagan has done well for himself. American voting majorities have repeatedly endorsed his leadership. Middle-class conservatives in other western industrial countries have admired his fortitude. Among the minority groups opposed to his policies, academic intellectuals have been especially conspicuous in showing their disdain and contempt for Reagan and his admirers in the big public. If the voters have, until recently, gone for Reagan by margins approaching 60-40, the professors, particularly in the liberal arts, have turned their thumbs everlastingly down, perhaps by as much as a 90-10 margin. The enormous gap between popular and academic opinion serves to remind students of politics of a strikingly similar gap during and after the Eisenhower administrations of the 1950s, when the American people adored a president whom the professors ridiculed

Civil rights · Contempt · Governor · Martin luther king · Political science · Politics · Progressivism · Public opinion · Sociology · Victory · Voting · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law