Describe Ronald Reagan's domestic and foreign policy. explain what Reaganomics and the Reagan Doctrine are. What happened? 

What role did business and religion play in the conservative movement? How did Reagan's domestic programs reflect conservative values? Were these approaches effective? Why? 

OF THE PEOPLE CHAPTER 28 page 877

 

Ronald Reagan's domestic policy mostly involved delegated executive rule, unifying various shades of the conservative movement into one solid political action, national economic planning based on his administration's set of ideas called Reaganomics, and dealing with Soviet expansionism called the Reagan Doctrine.

Reagan was a master at assembling a team of Cabinet members, to which he delegated most of the day-to-day task of running the country. The University of Virginia's millercenter.org website (https://millercenter.org/president/reagan/domestic-affairs

) mentions his preference for delegating comes from his desire to focus on selling his economic programs to the American people. The same website also speaks about Reagan appointing a former political opponent to his executive department. This, combined with his openness to listen to advisers in matters of Cabinet appointments, makes Reagan a seemingly objective president who does not take things personally or is not ego-centric.

Ronald Reagan also had the ability to unify seemingly contradictory opinions in the conservative movement. According to scholarworks.gvsu.edu (please see link below), a repository of scholarly papers, the American conservative movement had three basic strands or viewpoints after World War II. The three major conservative camps were the traditionalists (basically those who prefer gradual reforms of government instead of popular revolutions), the capitalists (adherents of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who prefer the government did not interfere too much with businesses), and the anti-communists. Reagan, during his two terms as president, was able to get some ideas from the three conservative schools of thought and combined them into a more or less coherent government policy. For example, Reaganomics (as explained by the source below, thebalance.com) as an economic policy advocated reduction in government regulation of businesses and a cut in government spending. This is consistent with the view of traditionalists, who wanted the government to reduce its interference with enterprises. The Reagan Doctrine, on the other hand, caters to the views of the anti-communist spectrum of the conservative movement. According to a state.gov document (see sources below), from the State Department's website, the Reagan Doctrine advocated that Americans should actively support countries who were fighting invasions or incursions by the forces of the Soviet Union, the world's most powerful communist country at the time.

Business and religion played an active role in American society during the two administrations of Ronald Reagan. Since Reaganomics loosened up government control over businesses and minimized government involvement, these enterprises played an active role in developing the U.S. economy at that time. This is without discounting the fact that Reagan's tax cuts gave many Americans more money to spend, helping the economy get out of a recession and stagflation. Religion, on the other hand, also exerted some degree of influence on the Reagan Administration. According to csmonitor.com, a Christian periodical, many evangelical Christian pastors encouraged their congregations to vote for Ronald Reagan for a second presidential term. In other words, religion helped Reagan cement his socio-economic and foreign policies for a period longer than normal.

Reagan, like many U.S. presidents, left both his legacy and failures. According to millercenter.org (https://millercenter.org/president/reagan/impact-and-legacy

), Reagan's tax cuts did bring back to life the stagnating American economy. His effective control of the Federal Reserve also kept high inflation under control, ensuring a healthy economy. Aside from that, Reagan is also said to have contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.

Despite all these achievements, however, Reagan's spending on the military increased the U.S. economy's deficit. The same website also criticizes Reagan's inability to reach a certain level of economic growth for the country despite his ambitious Reaganomics program. In general, however, Reagan left a legacy of Conservative thought that still runs among Republican politicians until now.  

Step-by-step explanation

The questions about Ronald Reagan in your assignment require four Google searches in total. You should type the following keywords in the Google search box (in separate searches).

1. Ronald Reagan domestic policy

2. Reaganomics

3. Reagan Doctrine

4. Reagan conservative movement

5. How Christian leaders influenced Ronald Reagan

6. effectiveness of the Reagan Administration

For the first Google search (using the keywords "Ronald Reagan domestic policy"), many websites will come out of the first page of Google's search results page (SERP). Among the websites on the first page is https://millercenter.org/president/reagan/domestic-affairs, which answers what Reagan's domestic policy was like.

The second Google search ("Reaganomics") will yield the link for thebalance.com (please refer to sources below for exact URL), a website that provides clear and easy to understand explanations about economics and finance. The website also clearly summarizes in outline format what Reaganomics is all about.

The third Google search about the Reagan Doctrine will yield the link for the U.S. State Department's website (https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/rd/17741.htm). This is a good source for facts about the Reagan Doctrine since this is all about foreign policy. The State Department is the government agency that creates and implements policies regarding how America deals with foreign nations and non-state actors abroad. Therefore, the department's website is a good source of information for the Reagan Doctrine. In fact, for all searches involving school assignments, government websites are GENERALLY considered good sources of information. Again, discretion or your judgement is still important in assessing the case-to-case accuracy of websites. For example, Wikipedia articles can be accurate sometimes, but generally, this website should not be used as your only source of information because some articles contain inaccuracies. Wikipedia has a large community of contributors or editors, larger than what encyclopedia or government sites have. This huge pool of editors, who can update Wikipedia articles in a snap of a finger, may be good in keeping information up to date. However, having easy access to editing generally degrades the quality of information on a website. Government websites and encyclopedia sites like britannica.com, on the other hand, have relatively fewer people who can access editing functions, thus the chance of committing errors in editing or uploading information is minimized. That is why they are generally more reliable.

The fourth Google search ("Reagan conservative movement") was derived from the question "How did Reagan's domestic programs reflect conservative values?" The term "conservative" is usually attached to the word "movement" when talking about politics in general. Therefore, using the keywords "Reagan conservative movement" will help yield links that explain how Reagan's programs in the U.S. reflect conservative values. The search terms mentioned produced the link for scholarworks.gvu.edu (refer to link in the sources below). This URL explains how Reagan united various conflicting Conservative thoughts.

Search number five on Google ("How Christian leaders influenced Ronald Reagan") is derived from the URL from scholarworks.gvu.edu (refer to link in the sources below). If you read the article on that website, you will see that Christian leaders like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell (press Ctrl + F after you open that website and type their name in the "Find" box in your Chrome or Mozilla browser) were mentioned. Therefore, they had some influence on Ronald Reagan, hence the use of the keywords mentioned.  

The last search you will conduct will make use of the keywords "effectiveness of the Reagan Administration." These are good keywords for the questions "Were these approaches effective? Why?" Now this search will yield a lot of seemingly good links on the first page of the Google SERP. Hoover.org looks particularly promising. However, if you think about it, Herbert Hoover was a U.S. president, and also a Republican like Ronald Reagan. If you dig deep about the origins of hoover.org, it was founded by the same Herbert Hoover who was an American Republican president. A critical principle in assessing the objectivity of sources of facts is they must be non-partisan. For example, more often than not, given two politicians from the Republican Party, Republican A and Republican B. If you want objective information about Republican A, you must not totally rely on what Republican B says because being in the same political party, Republican B wouldn't want to ruin the image of Republican A because that would discredit both of them for they belong in the same political organization. Therefore, given this, Republican B would tend to skip or omit the flaws of Republican A and his programs. Though Hoover already passed away when Reagan came into power, it is reasonable to assume that those who run Hoover.org are still influenced by Republican ideals given that their founder was a Republican. Being thus influenced, their assessments of Reagan's achievements and failures may be less objective given they are assumed to believe the same political ideas as Reagan did. That is why the source I included below did not come from Hoover.org, but from millercenter The Miller Center, if you check the origins of the institution, is an organization attached to the University of Virginia which tries to objectively evaluate both the legacies and failures of all American presidents. This center is also non-partisan, meaning it is not affiliated with either Republicans or Democrats. Therefore, this is a good source of objective data for Reagan's successes and failures. The Miller Center link below, however, can be found on the second page of the Google SERP. This shows that not all links on the first page of a Google Search Results Page are quality links. Again, good judgment and verification of the origins and purposes of the organizations must be looked into. Usually, you can find their origins, etc. on the "About Us" or "About" link on their respective websites.