Chapter 38 Flashcards
A successful California state ballot initiative that capped the state’s real estate tax at 1 percent of assessed value. The proposition radically reduced average property tax levels, decreasing revenue for the state government and signaling the political power of the “tax revolt,” increasingly aligned with conservative politics.
Proposition 13
Term for conservative southern Democrats who voted increasingly for Republican issues during the Carter and Reagan administrations.
boll weevils
Signed into law by President Reagan on October 22, 1986, this streamlined federal tax codes and reduced the tax burden for top-income earners. Its successful passage reflected the Republican Party’s embrace of free market doctrine, or “supply-side economics,” as a cardinal principle of governance.
Tax Reform Act
Economic theory that underlay Ronald Reagan’s tax and spending cuts. Contrary to Keynesianism, supply-side theory declared that government policy should aim to increase the supply of goods and services, rather than the demand for them. It held that lower taxes and decreased regulation would increase productivity by providing increased incentives to work, thus increasing productivity and the tax base.
supply-side economics
Reagan administration plan announced in 1983 to create a missile-defense system over American territory to block a nuclear attack. Derided as “Star Wars” by critics, the plan typified Reagan’s commitment to vigorous defense spending even as he sought to limit the size of government in domestic matters.
Strategic Defense Initiative
Leftwing anti-American revolutionaries in Nicaragua who launched a civil war in 1979.
Sandinistas
Anti-Sandinista fighters in the Nicaraguan civil war. The contras were secretly supplied with American military aid, paid for with money the United States clandestinely made selling arms to Iran.
contras
Meaning “openness,” a cornerstone along with perestroika of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform movement in the USSR in the 1980s. These policies resulted in greater market liberalization, access to the West, and ultimately the end of communist rule.
Glasnost
Meaning “restructuring,” a cornerstone along with glasnost of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform movement in the USSR in the 1980s. These policies resulted in greater market liberalization, access to the West, and ultimately the end of communist rule.
Perestroika
Arms limitation agreement settled by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev after several attempts. The treaty banned all intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe and marked a significant thaw in the Cold War.
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty
Major political scandal of Ronald Reagan’s second term that was revealed in 1986. An illicit arrangement of selling “arms for hostages” with Iran and using money to support the contras in Nicaragua, the scandal deeply damaged Reagan’s credibility.
Iran-Contra affair
Political action committee founded by evangelical Reverend Jerry Falwell in 1979 to promote traditional Christian values and oppose feminism, abortion, and gay rights. The group was a major linchpin in the resurgent religious right of the 1980s.
Moral Majority
Refers to the practice of using race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or religion—or any marker of personal identity—to mobilize political support. Practiced by both the left and right, identity politics came into prominence in the 1960s. Sometimes criticized as a divisive regression to tribalism, it reflected an erosion of trust in public institutions and a weakening of shared national values.
identity politics
October 19, 1987. Date of the largest single-day decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average until September 2001. The downturn indicated instability in the booming business culture of the 1980s but did not lead to a serious economic recession.
Black Monday
U.S.-led multicountry military engagement in January and February of 1991 that drove Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army out of neighboring Kuwait. In addition to presaging the longer and more protracted Iraq War of the 2000s, the 1991 war helped undo what some called the “Vietnam Syndrome,” a feeling of military uncertainty that plagued many Americans.
Operation Desert Storm
Landmark law signed by President George H. W. Bush that prohibited discrimination against people with physical or mental handicaps. It represented a legislative triumph for champions of equal protections to all.
Americans with Disabilities Act
Fortieth president of the United States, 1981-1989. A former actor and California governor, he was elected in 1980 with a pronounced conservative mandate to fix the American economy by scaling back taxes and the role of government in business.
Ronald Reagan
Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. As an ideological partner to President Ronald Reagan, enacted economic liberalization reforms and attempted to check the powers of labor unions in Britain. She led a successful British military operation in the Falkland Islands War in 1982.
Margaret Thatcher
Last leader of the Soviet Union. He assumed control in 1985 and ushered in a period of reforms known as glasnost and perestroika. On four occasions, he met U.S. president Ronald Reagan to negotiate arms reduction treaties and other measures to thaw the Cold War. In 1991, after surviving a failed military coup against him, he dissolved the Soviet Union and disbanded the Communist party.
Mikhail Gorbachev
Iraqi dictator who led the Ba’ath party in a coup in 1968 and ruled Iraq until the U.S. invasion. He inaugurated hostilities with neighboring Iran in 1980, leading to the protracted and bloody Iran-Iraq War. He invaded Kuwait in 1990, prompting a broad-based military operation led by the United States to liberate the country. After that war, Hussein retained power under strict sanctions and no-fly demilitarized zones throughout the 1990s, but he stymied international atomic weapons inspectors.
Saddam Hussein
Christian evangelical reverend and radical right-wing traditionalist. In 1979, he founded the Moral Majority, a political action committee dedicated to moral values and in opposition to feminism and gay rights.
Jerry Falwell
The first female justice on the Supreme Court. A graduate of Stanford Law School, she served as an attorney, jurist, and politician in Arizona before being appointed to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. On the bench, she was known as a moderate, frequently casting crucial swing votes in important cases. She retired in 2005.
Sandra Day O’Connor
Forty-first president of the United States, 1989-1993. A former congressman, diplomat, businessman, Republican party chairman, and director the CIA, he served for eight years as Reagan’s vice president before being elected president in 1988. As president, he oversaw the end of the Cold War and the revitalization of the American military in the Persian Gulf War.
George H. W. Bush
First president of Russia, who took over as the former Soviet republic became independent in 1991. He led the country through the breakdown of the communist economy and introduced important market reforms.
Boris Yeltsin
Anti-apartheid activist and leader of the African National Congress. After spending twenty-seven years in prison in South Africa, he became the first black president of South Africa in 1994, dramatically signaling the end of racial apartheid in the country.
Nelson Mandela
Panamanian general and dictator from 1983 to 1989. He was ousted from power after the U.S. invasion in late 1989, convicted in the United States of drug trafficking, and imprisoned in Miami, Florida.
Manuel Noriega
The second black American to serve on the Supreme Court, he is a conservative justice who adheres to constitutional interpretation based on the doctrine of originalism. Appointed by George H. W. Bush in 1991 to replace Thurgood Marshall, he was the subject of controversial nomination proceedings when he was accused of sexual harassment by a former colleague.
Clarence Thomas
