![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() And The Other Eighties does capably revisit some of the surprising accomplishments and consolations the left won during this decade of reaction. In The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan, historian Bradford Martin tries to lift the Gipper out of the decade’s main political narrative. For casual students of the political history of the late twentieth century, it seems a bit like chronicling the Cuban Revolution without mentioning Fidel Castro. Is it possible to produce a useful political history of the 1980s while writing the decade’s central political figure out of it? Two new books more or less do just that, by consigning Reagan to the margins of the main story-one by design and the other coincidentally. Today, he’s endlessly lionized as the man who pulled the country out of its economic death spiral and won the cold war for the free world. Ronald Reagan dominated his era as no president had since Roosevelt and as no president has again. ![]()
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