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For reasons that are not entirely clear, indices of inequality in the United States have increased since the 1970s. Evidence indicates that the policies of the Reagan administration were not the original cause of this inequality, but it does suggest that they contributed to that trend. This essay concludes that the political skills of the Reagan presidency, combined with the residual effects of the Democratic party's failure in the late 1970s, meant that Reagan was relatively immune to liberal attacks about growing inequality.
A discussion about equality in the United States literally invites partisan polemics. The concept of equality is so difficult to define and is so susceptible to a variety of measurements that one can "prove" diametrically opposing arguments. Throughout the 1980s the Democrats attacked President Ronald Reagan's economic policies for being unfair in promoting the interests of the rich at the expense of the poor. Given how important the value of equality is within U. S. political culture, one might have expected the Democratic charges, accompanied by supporting statistics, to have wounded the Republican president more than they did; but, although there was evidence of widening income and wealth disparities throughout the decade, Reagan was able to win two landslide elections, maintain fairly high public approval ratings, and hand over the presidency to his vice president, George Bush.
The purpose of this essay is to explain why the growing inequalities of the 1980s did not threaten the political success of the Reagan administration. To accomplish that task I will: (a) discuss briefly the concept of equality in the United States; (b) describe the growing inequalities in the nation; and (c) analyze how the Reagan administration successfully coped with this issue. Equality in the United States Along with liberty and individualism, equality long has been understood to be a fundamental component of the American political culture. The French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville (1988, p. 9) begins Democracy in America by writing:
No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions. It was easy to see the immense influence of this basic fact on the whole course of society.... The more I studied American society, the more clearly I saw equality of conditions...