Note: Last night Paul Ramsey and I did a livestream on Reagan, so it is a good companion to this post. YouTube or Rumble.
If you were alive and following politics in the middle of the 1980’s, one of your base assumptions would have been that you were living through one of the great presidencies in American history. Ronald Reagan was a massively popular figure because he was credited with pulling the nation out of the tailspin that began in the cultural and political radicalism of the 1960’s. It was morning in America again and every normal person credited Reagan for it.
Forty years on and the only people who mention Reagan are the yesterday men of what is left of Conservative Inc. In fact, their mentioning of him is usually a trigger for people to heap abuse on them. The same can be said for Bill Buckley, who was similarly famous in the 1980’s. William F. Buckley was the intellectual engine of the conservative movement and Ronald Reagan was the man who made it possible. Like conservatism itself, Buckley and Reagan are fading from our minds.
One cause of this is generational. You must be over fifty to have a clear memory of the Reagan years. That is a lot of people, but younger people tend to drive the debate on the internet. They are going to be much more focused on the present. At the same time, the populist movement is to some degree a revolt against what is viewed as baby boomer culture. This is the singular focus on the economy and the stock market at the expense of cultural and demographic issues.
Another cause is that the big issues of this age have their roots in the 1980’s and may have been caused by Reagan. Immigration is the easy one. Not only did Reagan sign off on open borders policies like amnesty, but he was also instrumental in the romanticization of immigration as a core American value. The same can be said for the toxic individualism that has come to define the white middle-class. Of course, it was the Reagan military buildup that made possible the forever wars.
Of course, recency bias plays a role. In the Clinton years, there were people claiming that Bill Clinton was a great president. These were mostly sociopaths, but there were probably some people who believed it at the time. The biggest example of this is Barak Obama who was treated as black Jesus. Now he is forgotten. The importance of Reagan on the present has faded, so his grip on our minds, even for those alive back then, has loosened a great deal.
While all of this is true, it is generally true for every president. No one alive today remembers FDR. Obviously, no one is reminiscing about Lincoln or Grant, but we still talk about some presidents long after they are gone. Other than the yesterday men of conservatism, you never hear much talk about Reagan. There are far more references here to the Clinton years than the Reagan years. The 1992 election remains an important turning point in our politics.
One possible reason for why Reagan has faded is that the things he ushered in have become so normalized that people just assume they are the natural state of things, rather than an innovation of the 1980’s. Everyone just assumes the stock market is an important part of the American economy. Personal debt is just a normal part of life that one must manage. The dominance of the American military and its respect with the America people is just the way it has always been.
That is why you would have Reagan on the list of great presidents. The things he ushered in have stuck with us and are the new normal. Even though Nixon was president at a critical juncture in the development of what would become the Blob, his policies have had no lasting impact. The same can be said for Clinton, who was the first post-Col War president. While his presidency was an inflection point, no one can remember anything he did while in office¹.
On the other hand, this line of reasoning would put Lyndon Johnson on the list of great presidents because we still suffer from his blunders. The Vietnam war still haunts our foreign policy establishment. The civil rights act continues to torment us. It was Johnson who helped turn the Israel Lobby into the mind-altering force we see today. The fact is, the Lyndon Johnson administration is a nightmare from which we can never awake, so maybe the greatest American of the 20th century was Oswald.
As an aside, Lee Harvey Oswald is another example of how history can often pivot on the actions one anonymous man. Like Gavrilo Princip, Oswald changed what people assumed to be the flow of events in a terrible way. Most think that if he had missed and Kennedy had survived, the 1960’s would not have led to the cultural catastrophe that still haunts us today. Many argue the same with regards to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Speculative history aside, what seemed certain in the 1980’s and into the second Bush presidency, that Reagan was one of the great presidents, is now more open to debate, assuming anyone thinks to debate it. That is one of the most intriguing aspects of Reagan right now. Hardly anyone talks about him. There is more time spent on Clinton, Nixon, or Obama, and no one thinks they were great presidents. Reagan and the 1980’s have become a forgotten bit of our history.
That said, this may be the prelude to a revival of interest in Reagan. Once the geezers leave the scene and the remnants of conservatism are swept from the stage, a new set of eyes can examine that time without the bias of having experienced it. The first passes at history are always self-serving and flattering to the winners. Later passes turn the near past into justification of present agendas. It is further down the line that you get a more candid view of events.
Even if in the fullness of time Reagan is on the list of great presidents and the 1980’s are studied as an important time, what will be lost is the impact the man at the center of that age had on the people. Reagan was a towering figure who changed the culture simply by setting an example with his public presentation. It is a thing to keep in mind as we watch the final act of Donald Trump. Great men are great men because they inspire the great men of their age.
¹Get your mind out of the gutter.
If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!
reagan was non compos mentis his second term, which set a precedent for biden. all in all he was a good president (first term) with lots of failures to go with the triumphs. his illegal immigrant amnesty alone is enough to DQ him from greatness.
Reagan at his worst was still sharper than Biden ever was.
The madness with Israel started in Reagan’s 2nd term when he checked out. Bush and Baker tried to instill some sanity into it after Reagan was gone, but the damage had been done and DC was fully captured just a few years later.
I try to attach a date to the Israeli power grab. As much as I loathe the Bushes, Poppy did have the presence of mind not to kill Saddam. Shortly thereafter that reasoned decision would have been impossible due to Our Greatest Ally’s assets installed in the right places, so shortly thereafter 1991, which was in the time of Bush I and after Reagan’s first term, is my guess as to when Israel First became a thing. We are watching the Puritans split from the Judeo prong now, so that potential death grip was/is in place for in excess of… Read more »
Bush and Baker came from a generation that did not regard people like Shamir and Begin as their equals. They saw them as cheats and sneaks, which they were. The constant lying about settlements led to a very public rebuke from Bush.
Bush was dealing with the ascension of Ralph Reed and the Southern Baptists and their Israel First policies, and those folks eventually swallowed the Congress and then the presidential nomination process.
Puritans, interestingly enough, were the ones who let Jews back into England.
“As an aside, Lee Harvey Oswald is another example of how history can often pivot on the actions of one anonymous man.” It pleases you to jest with us. Oswald did not pull the trigger. The assassination was in the words of Peter Dale Scott a “deep event”, carefully orchestrated by forces planning the trajectory of imperial USA. But returning to Reagan. Reagan presided over a transitional period, when the USA moved from a Keynesian and liberal nation to something whose contours became very different. That’s why we only half-joking call Nixon the last liberal/ Keynesian president. A ruling-class consensus… Read more »
Remembering Reagan buddying up to Gorbachev and at the same time demanding an end to Soviet dominance ant the communist system. He did add his shoulder to the push.
Trying hard to think of more though. Deficit spending expansion and the astronomical debt legacy we have now. Immigration? Well we know he failed miserably on that.
Final note. Does anyone remember when he left office and received $200,000 for a speech in Japan? The uproar about politicians selling out was huge. Seems quaint now.
“Does anyone remember when he left office and received $200,000 for a speech in Japan?”
My wife used to work for a British insurance company that held an event in LA and paid Reagan $80,000 (I think) for a speech back in 1990 or thereabouts. Of course Bill and Hillary Clinton converted this into an industry, their day jobs.
What’s not well remembered about Reagan is that he was a Hollywood movie star before going into politics.
His political career was made possible by (((Hollywood producers))) who financed him and cleared the path for him to become governor of CA.
Needless to say, that made him beholden to our greatest ally and their interests. I think that explains the catastrophic 1986 illegal amnesty law, among other disastrous decisions.
Reagan getting blamed for amnesty is like Reagan getting blamed for the world being round. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been the next president. Or the next one. Not to absolve Reagan, but rather to emphasize his inconsequentiality.
The right tends to idolize certain figures like Reagan and Lincoln because collective memory works like grandmas photo album not a newspaper. Grandmas album only keeps the best moments from the past not the actual daily news from that era which is always a mix of good and bad. After enough time passes grandmas album seems like a true account of past history.
It’s hard to believe that most people are still so uninformed about Lincoln. The information is there; one just has to read it.
You can say this about nearly everything…
As Z noted somewhere, Reagan may well be remembered for allowing the system to stumble along for another 40 years. What should have been a reassessment – and, ultimately, rejection – of the cultural and legal changes of the 1960s and 1970s was put off.
Reagan brought back normalcy but didn’t put a stake in the heart of feminism, the Civil Rights Act, Melting Pot, etc., and other 1960s and 1970s lunacy.
He kept the spell going.
Reagan still was a product of Con, Inc., and saw his role as to defend the system even as the cliff’s edge came into sight.
What? Clinton was famous for playing the sax. Is that it? What’s the big deal?
And I think he had an intern playing some other instrument.
the intern was a skilled flautist
Bit of a dribbler though!
When I think of the Reagan years, it pains me, and is embarrassing, to remember just how naive and gullible I was with regards to politics, and how the world worked in general. I got married at the tender age of 21, and had a job as a draftsman. $253.00/week take home, and I was on top of the world. My wife and I stayed up to watch Dennis Conner try to get the Cup back from the Aussies. We stayed up till 1:00AM to watch. For me it was a simpler, straightforward time. I guess I didn’t know what… Read more »
I don’t care for Bob Seger, but he does have a great line: “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”
Another song reference that comes to mind is,”don’t know what you got, till it’s gone”.
It may be a cliche’, but if anyone is postponing anything they want to do with any loved one, do it while you can. There has been quite a few deaths in my life lately, and regret is a horrible state.
Practically the only thing anyone remembers about slick Willy is, “it depends on what the definition of is, is.” That and his tryst with Lewinsky…. As for Reagan, he was certainly a breath of fresh air after Carter and Ford, but as often is the case, the passage of time dims the former rose colored glasses as we’re now living with the results of some of those questionable policies.
Trump, for better or worse, has taken over the GOP and remade it into MAGA. he has started a real and enduring movement. he has ideas and the will to act on them. Ayn Rand would be writing the sequel to Atlas Shrugged if she were still around. Reagan did none of these things, he was just a figurehead. Which really is par for the course, so not a knock.
I own a hagiography of Reagan written by Buckley. I once thought highly of both men, not so much since I left conservatism.
It makes it all seem totally pointless. All of the debates, all of the panel discussions, the millions of work hours put into Firing Line and National Review, all of those boozy 1:30 a.m. arguments in upper East Side paneled libraries in tuxedos in 1971 over the latest essay in Commentary or Partisan Review — what a lark it all is now! The savages will eat it all! Christopher Buckley paints an unflattering portrait of his father pissing on the side of the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut — or somesuch road — in his Years of Lead in the 2000s,… Read more »
Reagan was the greatest president because he eased us out of the danger of nuclear annihilation, very real in the mid-1980s until he signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Gorbachev. Then both sides started cutting the number of nukes, from 35,000 then to under 6,000 each today. The worst president was Biden, who started the Ukraine War and until Jan. 20 was lobbing missiles deep into Russia, risking retaliation on U.S. bases in Europe, bringing on nuclear war. If Trump ends the Ukraine War and works out some deals on nukes with Putin, he will be the second greatest… Read more »
The mostly peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union was a great achievement by Reagan and his successor Bush. We should all be thankful for the removal of that threat of nuclear war. We lost a great chance to reset the course of the country when Bush lost to Clinton. A pity.
Bush had no intention of “resetting the course of the country” to anything other than going back to raping the American working class after his owners realized that they didn’t need us to protect their property from Soviet Communism. Evil with dignity is not to be preferred to evil without dignity, because the latter at least wears less effective camouflage.
At the same time Trump is trying to wind down this nonsense in the Ukraine, he is seemingly empowering Our Greatest Ally with its secret nukes to be more aggressive and trigger a massive conflict in the Middle East. So, I don’t really know what to make of that.
Oswald never shot at anybody
He was a patsy. Ted Cruz’s father, however….
Did Z choose to put up a piece about Presidential rankings or is it just a hardwired reaction to a slow news day?
Yes, Reagan proves that time matters. His greatest achievement – winding down the Cold War in a peaceful manner, and stepping back from the brink of nuclear war – is largely forgotten. Nowadays people look back to the “duck and cover” days with amusement and nostalgia, not the existential threat it actually was. Also, it needs to be said, the people who have been running our foreign policy since are mostly lunatics from the Pale of Settlement who hate Russia and actually want a war with it. They see the ending of the Cold War as a bad thing. At… Read more »
If the Democrats are fresh wet dog sh!t, Reagan was dried up dog sh!t. Sure, he stank less, but the pathogens (normalized immivasion, etc) he spread to the body politic were no less lethal to it than those of his opposition.
I watched the Buckley/Reagan interview on the ye olde intertubes a few weeks ago, and was pleasantly surprised with Reagan’s grasp of conservative ideas. Given that I was four years old when this happened, I had never seen it. They both, as an example, wanted all U.S. Bonds to be paid back in the future value of the dollar to restrain spending/inflation. Reagan wanted to end the Department of Education and return the federal overreach to the states. Did he achieve ANY of this? No, but the Democrats had controlled the House from 1954 to 1994. Amnesty was a deal… Read more »
Reagan was a very smart man, but he was happy to let people think he was dumb. Going back to his Hollywood days, associates marveled at how he would let people talk themselves into his position. Reagan wrote his own speeches, but people took credit for them. He would write the speech outline and then handed to the writers. They would fill in the blanks with the required stuff. He would then edit and rewrite it. I doubt any pol does that these days.
I was part of Pat Buchanan’s staff in NH in 1991/2 and then in 1996 for his national campaign. My memories of December 1991 up in New Hampshire in the snow, campaigning with Pat and Terry, will always be with me. Writing this just to note one thing: I honestly don’t recall Reagan having much of an impact on that campaign or even that period. I was a very young man, but Reagan had dominated my teenage years, yet by the time I was getting out of college, his impact on American life had already begun to fade. Both movies,… Read more »
The thing is though, Buchanan existed as the proposed antidote to the betrayal of Reagan conservatism. Without the enormity of Reagan, there is no Buchanan in 1992 or even a Ross Perot.
You raise an interesting issue though. There were people who were all in on Buchanan and really thought he would change things, but there were also people like me who knew it was a doomed fight. It would, at best, plant the seeds for future fights.
We knew 1992 was doomed, definitely. The idea was to stop Bush from handing the US over to China, and then, NAFTA. It was about sovereignty more than Pat Buchanan. I can tell you personally that Buchanan never once thought he would be president. He did not run for that reason. He knew that it was not his time historically. Never for a moment. It was an attempt to throw a wrench into a moving train’s wheels. A last gasp. It failed. We all knew it likely would. I can look myself in the mirror as a middle-aged man now… Read more »
Don’t forget the war on drugs and the militarization of our police. Another legacy of the “great” Ronald Reagan.
I just knew the footnote would be a cigar joke lol.
I remember in my old AP History class that nobody took any history seriously for at least one generation, and even then it was too small a period of time to evaluate a presidency. I remember the 80s. Even then it felt like a disaster. The rise of the credit card and conspicuous consumption and materialism. The normalization of aliens coming in and taking any and all opportunity, buying our companies and real estate (opening America and Our countrymen to international predation). There was Donald Trump and the rise of the service economy and celebration of wealth no matter how… Read more »
The 80s formed me. I was lucky to have survived them. Free range is both good and bad, like deregulation. Right now, I’m putting away the bad parts.
Funny footnote. I caught the replay of you and RamzPaul. It is a very good conversation and a fun podcast and I hope you two continue it. Mention was made there about the role the Internet has played in the Cult o’ Trump and you both speculated on how it would have effected Reagan. It is a good question so let me suggest it might have hurt him. Many of the problems he caused, primarily through illegal immigration and rampant militarism, were analyzed solely through the prism of Conventional Wisdom, so an actual nationalist perspective might have been quite negative… Read more »
Reagan (and the microprocessor) saved a system that should have collapsed 40 years ago. He defeated the communists but we foolishly let them live, so they went crypto and burrowed into the that very system, determined to subvert it from within.
Except for certain technological enhancements, our society, and certainly our culture is by all measures more pathological than it was, and the problems more intractable. Still, I should probably thank him. Because of Reagan I did not have to become The Road Warrior.
More’s the pity.
Reagan didn’t defeat the communists. That’s a bizarre American myth that refuses to die.
I don’t recognize very much agency in any of the modern presidents. All of them are credited with (or blamed for) things that would have happened anyway if someone else was president instead, processes that had begun prior to their terms. Such as LBJ and the CRA and Great Society (and Vietnam), Nixon and the opening to China, Carter and inflation, Reagan and the military buildup and modernization that actually began under Carter, Reagan and financialization, Reagan and amnesty, Clinton and the advent of neoliberalism. All of that is stuff that would have happened anyway no matter who the president… Read more »
“Even though Nixon was president at a critical juncture in the development of what would become the Blob, his policies have had no lasting impact.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Affirmative Action (AA) officially come in during Nixon’s administration? AA eventually morphed into Diversity Inclusion Equity (DIE — I refuse to refer to it as DEI). We’re only just now seeing significant pushback against DIE. Under Nixon, the War on Drugs was also ramped up considerably and, whatever one may think about that, the policy has certainly had a lasting impact. Just nitpicking a bit. I was 11-years-old… Read more »