"Reagan pulled together the Republican Party’s free-market optimists, ultraright libertarians, family-values moralists, and America Firsters. As had Nixon earlier, he won the votes of disappointed ex-Democrats disturbed by urban crime and resentful about stretching the aims of civil rights from nondiscrimination to corrective preference. Aided by superior speechmakers, Reagan had a fine ear for a divided country that relished partisan conflict while longing to feel good about itself as a nation. He appealed to both the left and right wings of American liberalism: New Deal Democrats and tight-money, big business Republicans. A divorced, nonchurchgoer, Reagan could tell a fundamentalist Christian audience with apparent sincerity that everyone was “enjoined by scripture and the Lord Jesus” to oppose “sin and evil.” He made the gospel of American liberty ring for latter-day Jeffersonians and Jacksonians across the West and Midwest proudly convinced of their self-reliance. He made it ring for whites in the South disturbed by dogooding liberal Northerners intruding once again on a society, it seemed, they did not understand, as well as for clever young libertarians scattered across the nation in its graduate schools. A good ear alone was not responsible for Reagan’s success. A thematic umbrella under which the factions of the right could gather was hostility to government. Reagan rocked audiences with jibes at the expense of “big government” so skillfully that they forgot that big government was what he was asking them to let him run. He spoke out against government spending and waste but watched deficits soar, boasting that he might be old but was not stupid, and never once sent Congress a balanced budget. No matter. In the antigovernment gospel, the right under Reagan found a thematic unifier that it had lately lacked. For each of the right’s factions, a convenient villain was big government: for business and banks, with its credit, work-safety, and consumer and environmental regulations; for moral conservatives, with ever greater liberal permissiveness of the law; for America Firsters, with its ruinous war in Vietnam, its foreigner-coddling multilateralism, and its boneless on-off flirtation with Soviet détente."