The Politics of the Crash

The causes of Black Monday, October 19, 1987, were as incomprehensible to Washington as its advent was surprising. To politicians, markets are both occult and capricious, devoid of rationality. So, few policymakers connected the frightening plunge of the Dow Jones average with the steady disintegration, under a cascade of hammer blows from its enemies, of the Reagan Administration’s model for governance. Nowhere was the connection less clearly seen than at the White House, where one senior staffer told me that he imagined the crash was caused “by some kind of currency manipulations in Germany.”

Now that Thermidor has enveloped the Revolution, movement conservatives are wont to beat their breasts in frustration over how little has been accomplished in the nearly seven years of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency. In truth, however, the wonder is not how little but how much has been done in view of two severely limiting factors.

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Robert D. Novak

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The causes of Black Monday, October 19, 1987, were as incomprehensible to Washington as its advent was surprising. To politicians, markets are both occult and capricious, devoid of rationality. So, few policymakers connected the frightening plunge of the Dow Jones average with the steady disintegration, under a cascade of hammer blows from its enemies, of the Reagan Administration’s model for governance. Nowhere was the connection less clearly seen than at the White House, where one senior staffer told me that he imagined the crash was caused “by some kind of currency manipulations in Germany.”

Now that Thermidor has enveloped the Revolution, movement conservatives are wont to beat their breasts in frustration over how little has been accomplished in the nearly seven years of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency. In truth, however, the wonder is not how little but how much has been done in view of two severely limiting factors.