It was January 1983, and President Ronald Reagan was in trouble. Although he had handily defeated the Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter just over two years prior, Reagan’s approval rating now sat at a dismal 35 percent. His economic policies had not ameliorated the long-simmering recession nor delivered relief for the overwhelming majority of Americans. The country faced additional domestic and foreign policy crises, from the AIDS epidemic to the Lebanese Civil War, from the farm crisis to what Reagan called “the tightening grip of the totalitarian Left” in Latin America and the Caribbean. The uncertainty and misery of the moment did not bode well for the president’s reelection campaign.

But Reagan found a way. In her new book Righting the American Dream, Diane Winston shows how the president harnessed the power of the news media to popularize a new “religious imaginary” and thus to build support for his policies. According to Winston, beginning in Reagan’s first term, the US news media, particularly the newspapers on which her book focuses, “helped normalize a neoliberal worldview — a market-oriented outlook advocating individual freedom and unfettered capitalism.” As a result, Winston argues, Reagan sailed to reelection in 1984, and the “Reagan Revolution” would continue mostly unimpeded well into the twenty-first century. Even Barack Obama “proved more moderate than many of his supporters expected,” Winston laments, “and Reagan’s neoliberal framework remained in place.”

As compelling as this argument might be, it oversimplifies many of the key dynamics and processes that shaped the late twentieth-century United States. First and foremost, Winston envisions neoliberalism as primarily, if not exclusively, a right-wing project that more or less began with Reagan. In so doing, she obscures the role of liberals and Democrats in crafting the economic and political order of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century United States and ignores the continuities between the so-called New Deal and neoliberal eras. Next, the book distorts the very nature of neoliberalism and Reaganism. Winston curiously identifies the contraction of federal power and welfare state retrenchment as vital components of “Reagan’s neoliberal framework,” even though federal power actually expanded in many realms (including poverty governance) during the final decades of the twentieth century. Finally, by concentrating almost exclusively on the Reagan White House and its relationship to the press, Winston overlooks developments unfolding in other sectors of the federal government and at the subnational level.