Henry Tonks

Henry M. J. Tonks is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. A political historian, his research examines the transformation of American liberalism in the late-twentieth century United States, focusing on the Democratic Party from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Henry’s book project, Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Crisis and Transformation of American Liberalism, 1972-1995, traces how a network of Democratic politicians, policy entrepreneurs, business elites, and intellectuals (collectively described as “New Liberals”)  reshaped their party at the intersection of national industrial decline, global economic competition, and electoral realignment. In political and electoral terms, the “New Liberals” reoriented the Democratic Party towards highly-educated, metropolitan, “professional-class” voters, shifting liberalism’s center of gravity from the union hall to Whole Foods. In policy terms, however, these figures pursued an ambitious (if ultimately unfulfilled) agenda of high-technology industrial policy modeled on that of Japan. Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrowexplores the complex, often contradictory intertwinement of these historical threads, from the economic crisis of the 1970s, through the Reagan era, and into the presidency of Bill Clinton.

Henry’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in academic publications including the Journal of Policy History, Modern American History, and Pacific and American Studies. Additionally, he has commented on and written about the contemporary U.S. political scene. His writing has been published in, among others, American Affairs, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post, Time, UnHerd, and the Niskanen Center’s Hypertext.

Henry was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Study of American Democracy (CSAD) at Kenyon College in 2025-2026. Hereceived his Ph.D. from Boston University, an M.A. from the University of Missouri (where he was a Graduate Fellow in Political History at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy), and his undergraduate degree from the University of Oxford (Corpus Christi College). Raised in Britain, Henry worked in politics and local government before entering graduate school.