Chapter 31: From Cold War to Culture Wars, 1980-2000
Key Terms
- Contract with America
- a list of eight specific legislative reforms or initiatives that Republicans representatives promised to enact if they gained a majority in Congress in the 1994 midterm elections
- gender gap
- the statistical differences between the voting preferences of women and men, with women favoring Democratic candidates
- Green Party
- a political party founded in 1984 that advocates environmentalism and grassroots democracy
- Heritage Foundation
- a professional organization conducting research and political advocacy on behalf of its values and perspectives
- HIV/AIDS
- a deadly immune deficiency disorder discovered in 1981, and at first largely ignored by politicians because of its prevalence among gay men
- New Right
- a loose coalition of American conservatives, consisting primarily of wealthy businesspeople and evangelical Christians, which developed in response to social changes of the 1960s and 1970s
- Operation Desert Storm
- the U.S. name of the war waged from January to April 1991, by coalition forces against Iraq in reaction to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990
- Reaganomics
- Ronald Reagan’s economic policy, which suggested that lowering taxes on the upper income brackets would stimulate investment and economic growth
- START
- a treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union that limited the number of nuclear warheads, ballistic missiles, and strategic bombers held by both sides
- Vietnam Syndrome
- reluctance on the part of American politicians to actively engage U.S. forces in a foreign war for fear of suffering a humiliating defeat
- war on drugs
- a nationwide political campaign to implement harsh sentences for drug crimes, which produced an explosive growth of the prison population
