32 - Austin Community College District



32

CH 32 STUDY GUIDE The Conservative challenge

PEOPLE, PLACES & EVENTS

1. San Diego’s Horton Plaza & the 1980s’ quest for personal fulfillment

2. The conservative Protestant Christian evangelicals of the 1970s

3. Conservatives in the late 1970s and 1980s & television

4. The conservative revival & Catholics

5. Evangelical Protestants versus conservative Catholics on the role of clergy in politics

6. The fundamentalists’ private schools versus secular humanism

7. Organized labor & the Reagan administration: air traffic controllers

8. Criticism of television programming

9. The 1980 election & the self-proclaimed “born again” candidate

10. Evangelicals & conservative Catholics: consensus on dangerous social trends

11. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 landslide victory

12. Reagan’s increase in the power and prestige of the presidential office

13. Reagan’s 1981 threefold agenda

14. “supply-side economics”—the Reagan economic policy in the early 1980s

15. The results of Reagan’s policies

16. The first woman to seek the office of the vice-presidency

17. The Democratic ticket in 1984

18. The costly Strategic Defense Initiative

19. By the late 1980s, nation with the world’s largest foreign debt

20. Reagan’s “second term blues”

21. The Reagan administration priorities in foreign policy

22. The Reagan and Bush administrations sent American invasion forces abroad

23. The 1980s health-care costs skyrocket increase

24. The INF treaties with Moscow, 1987

25. Dorothy Sanders, “Life in the Underclass” & the Los Angeles riot of 1992

26. The 1988 presidential election & George Bush’s victory

27. Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992

COMPLETION

1. The general term for conservative Protestants, several groups of whom became prominent in the late 1970s and 1980s, is [ ].

2. In 1979, Jerry Falwell established a political awareness organization called [ ] designed to examine candidates on issues of concern to conservative Christians.

3. Ronald Reagan identified himself with the theory of [ ] economics, based on ideas of economist Arthur Laffer that seemed reminiscent of the days of Coolidge and Hoover.

4. A new world leader unleashed momentous changes when he proclaimed policies of openness and restructuring for the nation of [ ].

5. Clarence Thomas and Sandra Day O’Connor were two notable conservatives who joined [ ].

6. The Gramm-Rudman Act was an unsuccessful effort to solve one of the most persistent problems of the 1980s, the federal [ ]; it threatened mandatory spending cuts if budgetary targets were not met.

7. In 1983 terrorists blew up a Marine barracks in [ ], killing 239 Americans.

8. In retaliation for Muammar Qadhafi’s supposed sponsorship of international terrorism, President Reagan ordered Air Force raids on his country, [ ].

9. The Contadora group of Latin American nations proposed a negotiated settlement to the situation in the nation of [ ].

10. The Iran-Contra operation began largely within [ ], an advisory agency to the President on foreign and defense policy.

11. The great symbol of the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe was when [ ] was torn down in 1989.

12. The United States in 1990 reacted to an Iraqi invasion of [Kuwait].

13. In February 1991, in a sudden and dramatic 100-hour assault, nicknamed Operation [ ], a coalition of forces led by the United States routed the Iraqi army.

14. The stresses in inner-city neighborhoods exploded in violence in the city of [ ] in 1992, when a white jury acquitted police officers of charges of using excess force in subduing a black man.

IDENTIFICATION QUESTIONS

Students should be able to describe the following key terms, concepts, individuals, and places, and explain their significance.

Terms and Concepts

|Pentecostal |Moral Majority |

|Sitcoms |tight money |

|supply-side economics |nuclear winter |

|Gramm-Rudman Act |Strategic Defense Initiative |

|Contadora Group |Iran-Contra connection |

|INF Treaty | |

Individuals and Places

|The Rev. Jerry Falwell |Father Robert Drinan |

|Archie Bunker |James Watt |

|Caspar Weinberger |Geraldine Ferraro |

|Sandra Day O’Connor |William Rehnquist |

|Beirut, Lebanon |Edward Boland |

|Robert McFarlane |Oliver North |

|John Poindexter |Reykjavik |

|Edwin Meese |Michael Dukakis |

MAP IDENTIFICATIONS

Students have been given the following map exercise: On the map on the following page, label or shade in the following places. In a sentence, note their significance to the chapter.

1. Nicaragua

2. El Salvador

3. Colombia

4. Venezuela

5. Grenada

[pic]

Critical Thinking

EVALUATING EVIDENCE (MAPS)

1. Which nations of Central and South America (map, page 1087) are the principal producers of cocaine? Which nations have the most serious debt crises? Which nations are the primary sources of immigrants to the United States?

2. Why would Honduras be a pivotal nation in the Reagan administration’s campaign against the Sandinistas? (Map, page 1087.) Where were rebel groups fighting established governments during the 1980s?

3. What three major areas of concern does the map of Central America (page 1087) point out for American foreign policy? Which area gave the Reagan administration the most concern? Which area seems most threatening, in your opinion?

EVALUATING EVIDENCE (ILLUSTRATIONS AND CHARTS)

1. What does the photograph showing Right to Life protesters (page 1077) suggest to you about civil rights politics in the 1980s?

2. What does the graph “Poverty in America, 1970-1990” (page 1084) suggest about the distribution of poverty, especially during the Reagan years? How does it reflect Michael Harrington’s view that the elderly are no longer the major victims of poverty?

3. What does the graph on the federal deficit (page 1084) suggest about Reagan’s commitment to a balanced budget? Has the deficit increased only in absolute numbers or as a percentage of the Federal budget as well?

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Students have been asked to read carefully the following excerpt from the text and then answer the questions that follow.

Reagan’s skill as an actor obscured contradictions between his rhetoric and reality. With his jaunty wave and jutting jaw, he projected the physical vitality and charismatic good looks of John Kennedy. Yet at 69, he was the oldest President to take office, and none since Calvin Coolidge slept as soundly or as much. Reagan had begun his political life as a New Deal Democrat, but over the next two decades he moved increasingly to the right. By the 1950s he had become an ardent anticommunist, earning a reputation among conservatives as an engaging after-dinner speaker and corporate spokesperson for General Electric. In 1966 he began two terms as governor of California with a promise to pare down government programs and balance budgets. In fact, spending jumped sharply during his term in office. Similarly he continued to champion family values, although he was divorced and estranged from some of his children.

Similar inconsistencies marked Reagan’s leadership as president. Outsiders applauded Reagan’s “hands-off” management: less management, not more was what the nation needed after a succession of activist presidents from Kennedy to Carter. Reagan set the tone and direction, letting his advisers take care of the details. On the other hand, many within the administration, like Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan, were shocked to find the new president remarkably ignorant and uninterested about important matters of policy. “The Presidential mind was not cluttered with facts,” Regan lamented.

Then, too, Reagan disliked personal confrontation. Outsiders viewed that quality as loyalty; some insiders saw it as an inability to control his advisers and staff. Nancy Reagan (aided by an astrologer) often dictated his schedule, helped select his advisers, and even sometimes determined the major issues the president addressed. Yet the public believed he was firmly in charge and, until the Iran arms scandal in 1986, consistently approved his conduct. His capacity for deflecting responsibility for mistakes earned him the reputation as the “Teflon president” since no criticism seemed to stick.

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Spiritual State of Americans in the 1980s*

From 1979 to 1984 Robert Bellah, a historian of religion, set out with a team of researchers to explore the state of the American character. Their primary focus was on the concept of individualism and the ways in which Americans found meaning in their private and public lives. What they seem to have discovered is that after Vietnam, “The Me Generation, “ and the era of limits, Americans were no longer so buoyantly optimistic about the future.

There was a time when, under the battle cry of “freedom,” separation and individuation were embraced as the key to a marvelous future of unlimited possibility. It is true that there were always those ...who viewed the past with nostalgia and the present with apprehension and who warned that we were entering unknown and dangerous waters. It is also true that there are still those who maintain their enthusiasm for modernity, who speak of the third wave or the Aquarian Age or the new paradigm in which a dissociated individuation will reach a final fulfillment. Perhaps most common today, however, is a note of uncertainty, not a desire to turn back to the past but an anxiety about where we seem to be headed. In this view, modernity seems to be a period of enormously rapid change, a transition from something relatively fixed toward something not clear. Many might find still applicable Matthew Arnold’s assertion that we are Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.

There is a widespread feeling that the promise of the modern era is slipping away from us. A movement of enlightenment and liberation that was to have freed us from superstition and tyranny has led in the twentieth century to a world in which ideological fanaticism and political oppression have reached extremes unknown in previous history. Science. Which was to have unlocked the bounties of nature, has given us the power to destroy all life on earth. Progress, modernity’s master idea, seems less compelling when it appears it may be progress into the abyss. And the globe today is divided between a liberal world so incoherent that it seems to be losing the significance of its own ideals, an oppressive and archaic communist statism, and a poor, often tyrannical Third World reaching for the very first rungs of modernity. In the liberal world, the state which was supposed to be a neutral watchman that would maintain order while individuals pursued their various interests has become so overgrown and militarized that it threatens to become a universal policeman.

Yet in spite of those daunting considerations, many of those we talked to are still hopeful. They realize that though the process of separation and individuation were necessary to free us from the tyrannical structures of the past, they must be balanced by a renewal of commitment and community if they are not to end in self-destruction or turn into their opposites. Such a renewal is indeed a world waiting to be born if we only had the courage to see it.

*From Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, Copyright 1985 by The Regents of the University of California.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download