Reconsidering Reagan
Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump
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Narrated by:
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Jeff Zinn
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By:
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Daniel S. Lucks
About this listen
2021 Prose Award Finalist
A long-overdue and sober examination of President Ronald Reagan’s racist politics that continue to harm communities today and helped shape the modern conservative movement.
Ronald Reagan is hailed as a transformative president and an American icon, but within his 20th-century politics lies a racial legacy that is rarely discussed. Both political parties point to Reagan as the “right” kind of conservative, but fail to acknowledge his political attacks on people of color prior to and during his presidency. Reconsidering Reagan corrects that narrative and reveals how his views, policies, and actions were devastating for Black Americans and racial minorities, and that the effects continue to resonate today.
Using research from previously untapped resources including the Black press which critically covered Reagan’s entire political career, Daniel S. Lucks traces Reagan’s gradual embrace of conservatism, his opposition to landmark civil rights legislation, his coziness with segregationists, and his skill in tapping into White anxiety about race, riding a wave of “White backlash” all the way to the Presidency. He argues that Reagan has the worst civil rights record of any President since the 1920s - including supporting South African apartheid, packing courts with conservatives, targeting laws prohibiting discrimination in education and housing, and launching the “War on Drugs” - which had cataclysmic consequences on the lives of Black and Brown people.
Linking the past to the present, Lucks expertly examines how Reagan set the blueprint for President Trump and proves that he is not an anomaly, but in fact the logical successor to bring back the racially tumultuous America that Reagan conceptualized.
©2020 Daniel S. Lucks (P)2020 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Throughout his political career, Ronald Reagan was on the wrong side of almost every civil rights question. Too many accounts of his life have downplayed or ignored his shameful record on civil and human rights. In this powerful and persuasive book, Daniel Lucks shines an honest, uncompromising light on Reagan’s disgraceful legacy and draws a straight line from Reagan to Donald Trump.” (Robert Mann, author of Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon)
“Deeply researched and forcefully written, Reconsidering Reagan provides a bracing reexamination of Reagan’s attitudes, rhetoric, and policies toward the question of civil rights and racial injustice. Lucks gives a searing indictment of Reagan’s leadership of the conservative movement that’s sure to revise our understanding of who Reagan was and what he stood for.” (Matthew Dallek, author of The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics)
“An elegantly written, powerfully argued, and unsparing indictment of Reagan’s racial record across his entire political career.... This history ought to trouble the consciences of principled conservatives and should be required reading for all Americans who seek to understand the trajectory of the Republican Party since Reagan.” (Geoffrey Kabaservice, director of political studies at the Niskanen Center and author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party)
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Story
The chaotic events leading up to Mitt Romney's defeat in the 2012 election indicated how far the Republican Party had rocketed rightward away from the center of public opinion. Republicans in Congress threatened to shut down the government and force a U.S. debt default. Tea Party activists mounted primary challenges against Republican officeholders who appeared to exhibit too much pragmatism or independence. Moderation and compromise were dirty words in the Republican presidential debates. The GOP, it seemed, had suddenly become a party of ideological purity. Except this development is not new at all.
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Kabaservice doesn't make the case
- By MJE on 01-22-16
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Donald J. Trump
- A President like No Other
- By: Conrad Black, Victor Davis Hanson - foreword
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Conrad Black, bestselling author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, turns his attention to his "friend" President Donald J. Trump and provides the most intriguing and significant analysis yet of Trump's political rise. Ambitious in intellectual scope, contrarian in many of its opinions, and admirably concise, this is surely set to be one of the most provocative political books you are likely to listen to this year.
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45th President of the United States of America
- By JEYCEE on 05-16-18
By: Conrad Black, and others
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Resistance
- How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump
- By: Jennifer Rubin
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In the tradition of Shattered and Game Change, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin provides an insider’s look at how women across the political spectrum carried a revolution to the ballot box and defeated Donald Trump, based on interviews with key figures such as Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Stacey Abrams, Nancy Pelosi, and many more.
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An excellent book
- By Gary on 02-02-22
By: Jennifer Rubin
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One Mighty and Irresistible Tide
- The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924-1965
- By: Jia Lynn Yang
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia. In a riveting narrative filled with a fascinating cast of characters, Jia Lynn Yang recounts how lawmakers, activists, and presidents from Truman through LBJ worked relentlessly to abolish the 1924 law.
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Good overview
- By steve thomas on 10-21-20
By: Jia Lynn Yang
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Four Threats
- The Recurring Crises of American Democracy
- By: Suzanne Mettler, Robert C. Lieberman
- Narrated by: Andrea Gallo
- Length: 13 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Four Threats, Lieberman and Mettler explore five historical episodes when democracy in the United States was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound, even fatal, damage to the American democratic experiment, and on occasion antidemocratic forces have prevailed. From this history, four distinct characteristics of democratic disruption emerge. Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power...have threatened the survival of the republic.
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Very informative
- By Angela Fobbs on 12-31-20
By: Suzanne Mettler, and others
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American Carnage
- On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump
- By: Tim Alberta
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 26 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The 2016 election was a watershed for the United States. But, as Tim Alberta explains in American Carnage, to understand Trump’s victory is to view him not as the creator of this era of polarization and bruising partisanship, but rather as its most manifest consequence. American Carnage is the story of a president’s rise based on a country’s evolution and a party’s collapse. As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning.
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masterpiece
- By ZZ on 07-26-19
By: Tim Alberta
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Reaganland
- America's Right Turn 1976-1980
- By: Rick Perlstein
- Narrated by: Samantha Desz, Jonathan Todd Ross, Jacques Roy, and others
- Length: 45 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Over two decades, Rick Perlstein has published three definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in modern American politics. With the saga's final installment, he has delivered yet another stunning literary and historical achievement. In late 1976, Ronald Reagan was dismissed as a man without a political future: defeated in his nomination bid against a sitting president of his own party, blamed for President Gerald Ford's defeat, too old to make another run.
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This Book is Censored by Audible
- By Nathan D. Backlund on 09-07-20
By: Rick Perlstein
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Supreme Disorder
- Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court
- By: Ilya Shapiro
- Narrated by: Fred Stella
- Length: 11 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The brutal confirmation battles we saw over Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are symptoms of a larger problem with our third branch of government, a problem that began long before Kavanaugh, Merrick Garland, Clarence Thomas, or even Robert Bork: the courts’ own self-corruption, aiding and abetting the expansion of federal power.
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Tremendous detail
- By Charles on 07-15-22
By: Ilya Shapiro
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For God and Country
- The Christian Case for Trump
- By: Ralph Reed
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2016, many Christian leaders opposed candidate Donald Trump. He was a social liberal, and his vulgarity, divorces, affairs, and scandals made it impossible for him to defend Christian values in public life. Or so they thought. Trump nevertheless won an overwhelming majority of the Evangelical vote in 2016, as well as the Catholic vote. And in 2020, the idea that he can’t represent Christians is demonstrably false.
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OUTSTANDING!
- By A. Brown on 12-13-20
By: Ralph Reed
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It Was All a Lie
- How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
- By: Stuart Stevens
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass. This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else.
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A party gone astray
- By Devin on 08-07-20
By: Stuart Stevens
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The Fierce Urgency of Now
- Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society
- By: Julian E. Zelizer
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The Fierce Urgency of Now animates the full spectrum of forces at play during these turbulent years, including religious groups, the media, conservative and liberal political action groups, unions, and civil rights activists. Above all, the great character in the audiobook whose role rivals Johnson's is Congress - indeed, Zelizer argues that our understanding of the Great Society program is too Johnson-centric.
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What It Took to Win
- A History of the Democratic Party
- By: Michael Kazin
- Narrated by: Lee Goettl
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In What It Took to Win, the eminent historian Michael Kazin identifies and assesses the Democratic Party's long-running commitment to creating "moral capitalism" - a system that mixed entrepreneurial freedom with the welfare of workers and consumers. And yet the same party that championed the rights of the white working man also vigorously protected or advanced the causes of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal.
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Timely and informative History Book
- By Asha Sceanca on 03-24-22
By: Michael Kazin
What listeners say about Reconsidering Reagan
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jean
- 09-24-20
Enlightening
I already knew most of the information in this book. What I have found helpful is that this puts most of the information into one book with references and documentation. I have been concerned about the whitewashing of Reagan’s legacy. I hope this book helps people stop and think.
The book is well written and meticulously researched and documented. I realize this is not a biography and was written to point out Reagan’s racism, as well as his flaws and mistakes he made. Normally, I prefer books that are unbiased and point out the good things done by a president as well as their mistakes. I believe the author is attempting to counter the attempts to whitewash the Reagan presidency, if so, he achieved his goal. This is an example why one should read a variety of books on both sides of an issue. I remember when Reagan was Governor of California, he tried to overturn the Fair Housing Act. The author reports that when Martin Luther King had his March for Poverty to Washington, D.C. Reagan said, “it was a fraud and a hoax”.
I noted some reviews written against the book that primarily made sarcastic remarks. I would have preferred to have read some examples of specific issues that have documentation where the author is incorrect either in source or analysis. I want to learn but need facts not rhetoric or sarcasm to evaluate their position. Overall, the book was easy to read and understand considering it is more of an academic book. It is well worth the read.
The book is thirteen hours and seventeen minutes. Jeff Zinn does a good job narrating the book. Zinn is an actor as well as a voice-over artist and audiobook narrator.
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- Robert B. Craig
- 04-26-21
Spot On and Essential Reading
This is an well-written and absorbing book that is essential for understanding the GOPs embrace of Trump and white supremacy. Reagan was much different than Trump but author makes a compelling case for how he planted the seeds for our current crisis.
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- Kindle Customer
- 12-15-20
Outstanding "hidden" history
Really enjoyed this one. Lost in all the morning in America rhetoric is the damage these 8 years did to our values and sense of unity.
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- Carol
- 02-12-24
Good story but narrator took away from it!
I usually am not picky on narrators and can deal with most but this one was terrible! Sounded either robotic or slurring. The story was good but the terrible narration took away from it.
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