Morning again in America: The 1984 Election forty years on

Forty years ago, a twinkly-eyed incumbent president ran for re-election despite concerns about his age. He did so by running a campaign steeped in the idea that America was the last, best hope of earth. Ronald Reagan was no Joe Biden, and no one today expects a landslide victory. Yet there are echoes in today's divided politics in the 1984 election, especially within the Democratic Party, which, back then, just as now, was struggling to keep together its warring constituencies. And might there be lessons for today's fractious politics from Reagan's famous campaign ad, "It's morning again in America"? Adam talks to Bruce Schulman, William E. Huntington Professor at Boston University, who was the Harmsworth Professor of American history at Oxford last year and is the author of many books on twentieth-century America including a forthcoming volume of the Oxford History of the United States – and Dan Rowe, lecturer in American history at the Rothermere American Institute and author of the forthcoming, State of Development: Preserving the American Economic Century in an Era of Anxious Capitalism, to be published by Columbia University Press.

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