The magnitude of President Reagan s victory in 1984 obscured
some important underlying political trends. While it is true that it
is difficult to defeat an incumbent president during a time of peace
and prosperity， it is also true that Americans did not by any means
all support President Reagan for the same reasons.
Between now and 1988 there will be millions of words written
about the post-Reagan political world. In this volume several lead-
ing political observers try to focus our attention on the key issues.
In April 1985 the Cato Institute gathered these analysts together at
a conference entitled \"Reassessing the Political Spectrum.\" The
results of that conference are presented here.
It is difficult to analyze any problem unless our language is ade-
quate to convey a proper understanding of the issues under dis-
cussion. A reliance on inadequate language has hampered Ameri-
can political analysis for the last two decades. As Professors William
S. Maddox and Stuart A. Lilie pointed out in their 1984 book， Beyond
Liberal and Conservative: Reassessing the Political Spectrum， \"The lib-
eral-conservative dichotomy is inadequate to describe and under-
stand the opinions and behavior of the American public.\"
Maddox and Lilie argued then， as they do in chapter 4 of this
book， that many Americans cannot be rightly classified as either
liberal or conservative. Yet this does not mean， as political scientists
have traditionally assumed， that their political views are therefore
\"inconsistent\" or \"confused.\" There are consistent threads running
through their beliefs that simply can t be categorized on the tradi-
tional political spectrum.
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