In America's Right Turn historian William Berman examines the political, cultural, and economic contexts in which Republican conservatives operated and explores the crisis of the liberal welfare state against the background of presidential politics. Berman demonstrates the key roles played by conservative populism and the conservative backlash to the rights revolution in the collapse of Democratic hegemony. But most importantly, he shows how conservative politics became allied with conservative economics—an alliance forged with singular success during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In this new edition, Berman discusses the initial failure of the Clinton administration to establish a viable political alternative to the GOP. Berman also shows how Clinton won reelection in l996 by moving steadily to the center, even to the extent of co-opting the Republican agenda, while defending a number of key Democratic programs.

William C. Berman is professor of history at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration and William Fulbright and the Vietnam War: The Dissent of a Political Realist.

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Stanley I. Kutler is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions in the Department of History and the School of Law at the University of Wisconsin. He is editor of the Johns Hopkins Series The American Moment. HIs newest book is The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon.

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