Since Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, the global community has witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the integration of Europe, the War on Terror and the Arab Spring, a hot Chinese economy and a major international recession. Reagan's Legacy in a World Transformed brings together scholars from diverse disciplines and persuasions to assess the fortieth president's policies and their ongoing impact today, and to offer a timely retrospective on his complex legacy. The authors consider the influence of Reagan's free-market ideas on economic globalization, showing how deregulation succeeded in spurring economic expansion. In foreign policy, Reagan favored significant increases in military spending ("peace through strength") and an assertive agenda abroad. His break with detente in dealing with the Soviet Union, notably expressed in his 1982 March of Freedom speech, effectively restored the early Cold War strategy of rolling back communism. More than twenty years later, President George W. Bush invoked this speech in describing his goals in the Middle East-a striking example of how Reagan's ideas affected the post-9/11 world. In contrast with his hawkish stance on defense, Reagan's efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals, negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev, constitute one of his enduring contributions to stability. Although Reagan's policies soared on rhetoric rooted in ideological conviction, the president engaged in pragmatic internationalism when a multilateral approach served America's interests. He believed that America had a special mission as a moral leader and beacon of freedom, a view that continues to inform U.S. foreign policy.

There is a huge concern in America today that the country is in decline, one of the few sentiments that - nationally - our increasingly polarized political leaders can agree on. Americans fear that the economy and our culture itself are in deep crisis. They are also frustrated that the ruling classes are unable to fix America's problems. Kim R. Holmes' Rebound taps into these concerns, taking a fresh look at how America has moved away from the principles and practices that once made it the world's greatest nation. Far from accepting America's inevitable decline, as so many today do, Holmes argues that decline is a choice, not an inevitability or destiny. To restore our culture, revitalize our economy, and ensure we return to being the world's number one power, America must reconnect with its historical DNA: the ingredients of its greatness. This book lays out the vision and roadmap for how America can bounce back, with examples from throughout our nation's history that prove we've always been able to meet the challenges facing us, no matter how largely they may loom.

A former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Kim R. Holmes surveys the state of liberalism in America today and finds that it is becoming its opposite-illiberalism-abandoning the precepts of open-mindedness and respect for individual rights, liberties, and the rule of law upon which the country was founded, and becoming instead an intolerant, rigidly dogmatic ideology that abhors dissent and stifles free speech. Tracing the new illiberalism historically to the radical Enlightenment, a movement that rejected the classic liberal ideas of the moderate Enlightenment that were prominent in the American Founding, Holmes argues that today's liberalism has forsaken its American roots, incorporating instead the authoritarian, anti-clerical, and anti-capitalist prejudices of the radical and largely European Left. The result is a closing of the American liberal mind. Where once freedom of speech and expression were sacrosanct, today liberalism employs speech codes, trigger warnings, boycotts, and shaming rituals to stifle freedom of thought, expression, and action. It is no longer appropriate to call it liberalism at all, but illiberalism-a set of ideas in politics, government, and popular culture that increasingly reflects authoritarian and even anti-democratic values, and which is devising new strategies of exclusiveness to eliminate certain ideas and people from the political process. Although illiberalism has always been a temptation for American liberals, lurking in the radical fringes of the Left, it is today the dominant ideology of progressive liberal circles. This makes it a new danger not only to the once venerable tradition of liberalism, but to the American nation itself, which needs a viable liberal tradition that pursues social and economic equality while respecting individual liberties.