American political historians and historically oriented political scientists have coalesced around an account of our politics since Ronald Reagan's 1980 election. The standard story goes like this: the Reagan Revolution swept conservatives into power and retrenched environmental protections along with civil rights; feminism ran aground as the Equal Rights Amendment failed; and all the while the Democratic Party morphed into a neoliberal apparatus that bent the knee to Reagan and George H.W. Bush's deregulatory agenda.

As historian Joe J. Ryan-Hume shows in Resisting Reagan (covering the first twelve years of the Reagan Revolution), this story is so incomplete as to be almost misleading—a just-so story that paints a bleaker picture than the actual historical record. Resisting Reagan is a valuable addition to the literature that should be read by Americanist political scientists, whatever their methodological persuasion. Ryan-Hume's most substantial contribution is the original archival research that makes the received wisdom difficult to sustain unmodified going forward.

Ryan-Hume frames the book as analyzing three strands of liberalism: its “intellectual” strand (defining what 1980s liberalism means); its “institutional” strand (Congress); and its “processes of mobilization” (int