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.
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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.
That was art imitating life. You don’t know what you got until it’s gone was an old saying when Cetera sung that line.
I thought it was Joni Mitchell?
I forgot about big yellow taxi a decade and a half before hard habit to break. But I think it was old hat even in 1971 or whenever BYT came out.
Paved paradise, put up a parkin’ lot…
….because of mass immigration!
I gotta feeling Joni never made that connection though.
What’s a draftsman?
A draftsman makes pictorial drawings of houses, machine parts, etc.
This was before Cad/Cam. With pencils and paper, that were turned into blueprints for the shop floor.
Ammonia was used as a fixer.
Good times!
Of course I’m kidding. Old enough that I took a few courses way back. Still have my Tsquare, french curve, compass, mechanical pencil and especially my Pink Pearl eraser.
The modern world was built from the engineering designs that draftsmen put on blueprints and, much later, diazo reproductions.
“Running Against the Wind” is a great song. Soulful and full of bitter wisdom. Give it another try.
It WAS a different time, fellas. Hindsight is always 20/20. What are the Dissidents going to look like in 40 years? A lot of today’s filth and corruption didn’t exist – or at least, what there was of it was carefully locked in the closet. I remember watching 60 Minutes back in the 80’s. They would take some controversial subject, gather all the evidence to support one camp of popular thought, and then do the exact same thing for the other side of the debate. Usually the result with the viewer was vapour lock because those issues were controversial for… Read more »
Populism is the vehicle.
As for your rest, yes. Before the Woke Curtain fell on the West, academics referred to “presentism,” which meant viewing historical events in terms of today’s morality. I am as guilty of this as the next guy at times. Reagan was responding to half a century of unchecked and unquestioned managerialism, and someone had to go first and that took a spine.
We aren’t meant to care about the goings-on in Washington DC and national politics. The fact that it has become both a ridiculous TV show and something we need to care about is evidence that the system has failed. The way the system was set up was that we little people care about what happens in our communities, towns, and states, with those layers taking care of the politics above them (e.g. state legislature selects senators). I think national politics started becoming like this when the carnival show known as the Bill Clinton administration swept in. Of course, the GOP… Read more »
I was a standard center-left guy well into my 30s. I voted Obama in ’08. I read a lot of politics, but they were of the mainstream type. Perhaps it’s good that you do a tour of the mainstream before you get into the stuff on the other side of the Great Divide. It’s probably bad for your mental health that you would be introduced to Jared Taylor at 18 rather than Ross Douthat or Ben Shapiro.
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.
So did every other president that followed him. You might as well cite Carter and then Nixon and then LBJ for creating, and expanding and extending the cancer.
When the time was not right for change—and it wasn’t—nothing could be expected. Reagan is being analyzed in the great post modern (Leftist) deconstructionist tradition—and just as such always is—incorrectly.
Carter was a Leftist who fully supported the cultural rot of the 60s. LBJ was one its architects. The putrifying process was too new for Nixon to have grasped it. Reagan, however, as a man of the right who came to power late enough to recognize the horrendous consequences of pomo Leftism, failed to do so.
Now I don’t hate Reagan, but his critics certainly have a legitimate beef.
Yeah, I think that’s a fair take. The only objection I have to that is Reagan prioritized what he thought was the hottest iron in the fire, then moved on. At the moment, our biggest problems were economic and the Cold War. So tax cuts and letting interest rates rise were essential. The buildup of tanks and missiles in West Germany had to stop, because Germany could no longer control it’s people’s objection to it.
Democrats applied the lessons they learned from Watergate to make Reagan’s second term inconsequential, which they repeated for Trump’s first.
The last Presidents that really rolled back the progressive project were Harding and Coolidge, but even then, their gains didn’t last, and we got progressives Hoover, FDR and Truman one right after the other.
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.
Yeah, he was a reform the system kind of guy. Given his age and the fact that the country seemed in good shape, I can’t blame him. Of course, the counter to that argument is that Pat Buchanan did see what was happening.
Once again, Buchanan is shown to the greatest of that time.
“Once again, Buchanan is shown to the greatest of that time.”
Exactly. And Ron Paul.
And Ross Perot
Funny how none of them ever got elected to the highest position. I remember the crowd in 2012 booing Ron Paul when he spoke against military intervention in other countries. We are not worthy of the good people who try to fix things, too many bad people. We will get what they deserve.
OK, here’s the challenge: name one modern president from Kennedy on—excluding Trump—who was in your opinion a president we should admire and whose policies we should promote?
That’s the trouble with the DR, it’s all or nothing. Hence always nothing. It’s not the man, it’s the society. Until the people wake up, the pol’s will simply reflect our degeneration.
I largely agree but did my comment indicate otherwise? If so, hope this clarifies it.
Reagan was one of the first guys I remember saying something like “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” That was regarded as a positive statement at the time, but think about it. If he didn’t change positions, that means the Republican party moved to where he was — a conservative ’80s Republican was a ’50s Democrat. :/
Now a lot of the progressive Johnny-come-latelies to the Trump train, including some very influential voices, are saying the same thing. So Trump MAGA Republicans are, sadly, early-2000s Democrats.
Like Regan, Trump has a chance to make a lasting change in this country. It is still early in Trump’s administration and we will have to see what he ultimately accomplishes. The 2016 Russian Hoax which hamstrung his first administration and the 2020 blatantly stolen Presidential election were legitimate coup attempts. If he lets the perpetrators slink off into the shadows with their stolen billions unpunished then I will consider him to have failed.
Since there is zero probability of reforming the courts fast enough to render a guilty verdict to anyone left of center, I’d settle for wetwork and white hats stealing all the assets back.
If that’s the criteria for failure – Trump will be a failure (although I’ve rarely hoped as much to be wrong).
Reagan was a great force culturally, but his economic policies were terrible. Though the decline started before Reagan, it is absolutely undeniable that the rate of decline picked up under Reagan. He appointed probably the worst Fed Chair in history who transformed our industrial economy into a bubble machine. Reagan’s tax cuts were insane, just like the amnesty. Like the amnesty, he gave the award before achieving the necessary conditions for the tax cuts and amnesty by securing the border and cutting spending. We also got Martin lufer Kang day under Reagan. His building up of the military is a… Read more »
Leftist control of the education system is tough to fight.
True that Greenspan turned out to be the worst, until each of his successors unseated him. But Greenspan’s bona fides were pretty good — he was in favor of a gold standard, and it was widely thought he would bring an end to the Fed.
Same with tax cuts. The Left hated the idea of the middle class keeping more of their paychecks. Even though the rich were stuck paying even more, the leftist class warfare types managed to demogogue the issue to people in their formative years.
Reagan promised to end the then new Dept of Education and was unable to fulfill the promise. The borg defends everything like its life depends on it. You cannot have tax cuts without spending cuts. Nobody wants to stop spending, so we need higher taxes. I support a “progressive” tax code. The ultra rich in America are a parasitic class, most of whom made their money being traitors. They support every evil we oppose. Eff em. The idea that higher taxes harms the economy is bunk. The best economy we ever had was under the progressive tax scheme in the… Read more »
“You cannot have tax cuts without spending cuts.”
Agreed. Tip reneged on the 2-for-1 deal.
“Nobody wants to stop spending, so we need higher taxes.”
No, we need people who want to stop spending.
“The idea that higher taxes harms the economy is bunk.”
Margin analysis was one of the greatest insights of economics in history. Morality aside, telling a man that you will steal his money if he doesn’t spend it the way you want is almost a guaranteed loser. Government cannot have the special knowledge required to know whether a given investment makes sense right now.
Let theory remain silent when experience shows it’s wrong. The government did not require anyone to make specific investments. “No, we need people who want to stop spending.” Good luck with that. We’ve been talking about cutting spending for 80 years. Every year, line go up. The wealthy in America should consider themselves lucky if all that happens to them is they get taxed at a higher rate. What they deserve is far, far worse. Talk about morality…. The wealthy and powerful have a duty to the rest of the nation. They have shirked that duty for decades and many… Read more »
“Let theory remain silent when experience shows it’s wrong.”
Absolutely! Every tax cut has had the effect of making the code even more steeply progressive, and, apart from the Reagan cuts, by shrinking the middle class. The same for every tax hike. An empiricist would say there’s something else afoot, while an ideologue would argue to stick with something that’s already proven to fail.
That’s why I said Z’s essay on the death of ideology was premature — most are not even aware they are ideologues.
“The government did not require anyone to make specific investments.“
Not important. The only thing that mattered was the timing of the investment. “Make that investment this year regardless of whether it is good for the company” is the mentality that financialized production, and forced companies to look not at the long term, but on this quarter’s figures.
And that’s what people get for trusting what a smol hat says.
Reagan and Con. Inc. were focused on global communism to the exclusion of all else. They were astigmatic. Fatal flaw, and we’ve all been paying for it ever since.
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.
Bush threw the election away. Period. “Read my lips: no new taxes.”
It’s important to keep campaign promises. Trump should take note. Soon.
Yeah, because he might not get re-elected!
This is probably the better interpretation. Clinton’s followup to the collapse of the USSR was the greatest failure in geopolitical terms so far made. Trump may match this wrt to China.
The way to have handled Russia after the USSR fell apart was how we handled Japan after WW2 or Europe. Instead we did it more like the treaty of versaille. We installed compliant oligarchs and locked out anyone else. Makes you wonder about the people who are super rich and the face of industry here………..
Japan is a small country and was militarily defeated country at the end of WWII. Russia at the fall of the Soviet Union was a continent-sized country with nuclear weapons and a functioning military of sorts. The former USSR could never have been occupied and treated like Japan.
No it wasn’t. Reagan and Bush had nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. People act like everything was going swell in the Soviet Union, but then the mean old RR showed up and suddenly everything went to pot. The neocons always played up the increase in defense spending on boondoggles like SDI as the primary reason the CCCP fell. They were always loaded with inefficiencies and problems they could no longer deal with because, among other things, low oil prices, not to mention Afghanistan. Perestroika was a total failure too. I couldn’t say if the pressure… Read more »
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.
I don’t see how the Ukraine war is good for Israel in any way.
Ammunition,attention, and money being diverted; potentially provoking Russian hostility on their borders,empowering Turkey,reinforcing the relationship between Russian,Iran, and China,strengthening the argument in US politics that foreign wars are bad…
Shut it down.
That is a great danger, to be sure. But the greatest danger is our open border, and he is not fixing that. The cartels have missile batteries (from what Biden gave to the Ukraine) about 200 yards from our border. They have an unknown number of soldiers inside “our” country. They have lots–lots–of FedGov officials in their pay. They control the Mexican State. Trump must deploy army regulars to the border and SECURE it. That is a far greater and more immediate threat than any European war. Yet he does nothing. He fiddles with a European war where NO American… Read more »
If by “secret nukes” you mean supplying such, no. Israel has its own and those are even more useful than what we have in stock. If you mean emboldening their use, who knows.
By “secret nukes” he means it is an open “secret” that Israel has nukes. Israel has never formally acknowledged it and they are not “officially” counted as a nuclear-armed country.
From List of States with Nuclear Weapons
“If Trump ends the Ukraine War . . . .”
IF.
It ain’t lookin’ good. He is all over the map. One day, it’s “no more stuff for the Ukraine.” Next day, it’s more stuff for the Ukraine AND Russia mist sign a cease-fire deal while on the verge of total victory. And that was the day *after* the Ukrainians had killed civilians in Russia’s capital city with drone attacks. Deportations? Stopping the war in Europe “on Day One”? Normal relations with Russia? The Epstein files? The JFK assassination? The Middle East?
No, it ain’t lookin’ good at all.
The problem for Trump, with regards to Ukraine, is that Putin is the one who actually holds most of the cards. He doesn’t really need to sign a ceasefire on a war he is winning, with a bunch of two-faced liars on the other side of the table. He doesn’t really need to cede anything in these negotiations unless he felt that the US was going to send its army to go fight his directly, and obviously there is less than zero appetite for that.
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.
When Bush I left office, within 2 months my wife’s company paid him $1M for a speech at their annual meeting. Reagan was small potatoes. This nonsense permeates the entire political spectrum—Dem and Rep.
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 amnesty was for 7M aliens and in exchange for a future overhaul of the system (which never happened). If Reagan had one fault, it was for signing off on such “futures”. His other big one was a “two for one” tax raise in exchange for spending cuts. Taxes happened, cuts did not.
He could have vetoed it, I don’t think that they had to votes to override it. But his masters wouldn’t allow it. But as you say, he was mostly a placeholder and remained an actor just like in his good old days.
As mentioned earlier, Reagan thought his enemies wanted the best for America. They were just confused in how to go about it. Tip was an honorable man generally, but showed no mercy on this upstart who wasn’t a professional politician. He reneged on every deal he made with Reagan. Had the border been truly closed and welfare ended for illegals, that would have been worth the amnesty.
Well, it’s not like a lot of Hollywood actors became president, and it’s my understanding that he was a largely an effective governor. I am not an expert on the illegal immigration amnesty law but I was always of the understanding that, unlike the 1965 immigration overhaul, it was largely driven by big corporations who wanted cheaper labor. There were of course provisions to enforce restrictions against employers and to “secure the border” but these were forgotten as they always are.
True, and Reagan’s main failure was a failure of imagination. He could not imagine the outright colonization of “our” country by the Third World, but most other people couldn’t either. Nor could most Americans at that time have imagined that *both* political parties would cooperate for decades to enable and then support the colonization of the country by the Third World, although millions of us did know what the Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Act of 1965 would mean. It’s hard to imagine the unimaginable, especially when simple vanity requires that the country be opened to Third-World colonization so that certain people… Read more »
Reagan was also the president of the screen actors guild. He was a political animal before CA Governor. If one wants a more outlandish example of the level of political decay, then look no further than Trump—who stepped into the ring with Vince McMahon in a WWF smack down challenge. I believe he broke a chair over McMahon. “Bedtime for Bongo” has nothing on Trump.
What I wouldn’t give to see him bust a chair over Hakeem Jeffries…
During the entire Reagan administration, the entire debt he added to the country was *less* than $2T! That amount is what Biden was adding every year and we now spend as current deficit. Uncorrected for inflation. Reagan made a deal with the devil. He got increased military expenditures in exchange for matching welfare spending, but no increase in taxes. That is his legacy. But to judge the effects of such policy in today’s economy and deficit level is absurd. What he started was never moderated—even when the effects proved positive under or future president Clinton. Clinton had a golden opportunity… Read more »
Yes, he and thatcher dismantled the industrial base (got the ball rolling) and replaced it with consumer credit. Also the 80’s was a lot of defaults on pensions and the beginning of making the stock market americas retirement account.
It’s funny, shock doctrine was ok in the 80’s. Because it was the working class, but in 08 everything was too big to fail and we must have bailouts.
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.
So the presidents that followed Reagan had no effect on today’s condition? You like the ad hominem I see, but the logic does not follow.
If a forever Cold War was in the interest of the omnipotent Finkels, why was it allowed to end?
Who says they’re omnipotent? Not me.
After the USSR collapsed they looted the place and when Putin put a stop to it they started working to bring NATO armies to their doorstep. Their ancient grudges never went away.
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 »
I volunteered for Buchanan in NH, so we may have met, but I was just a body handing out flyers and holding signs. One of my memories was of people who really thought if Pat won the NH primary, the Bush campaign would collapse. I was already heading down cynicism road and that experience convinced me that Republican politics was hopeless.
This is a good topic. Might do a show on it.
Yes, NAFTA was a big issue. Buchanan tried to appeal to the large “Middle American Radicals” that Sam Francis strategized about. Briefly, I recall, there was hope he could win the nomination. He won New Hampshire, and the next test was Arizona, I believe. Hopes were high, but unfortunately he lost. And that was it.
It wasn’t as directly stated as it would be today, but many of us at the time saw NAFTA and so forth as a precursor to the erasure of the white working class. Like others here I worked on the Buchanan campaign in 1992 and saw enough to realize there was no reversal of the coming betrayal. Clinton actually saw the opening in New Hampshire and forged a patently fraudulent but ultimately successful way to incorporate some of the rising and fully justified resentment.
“It failed. We all knew it likely would.”
I greatly admire your activism, even if you knew that you would lose. Thermopylae!
I was a very young adult at that time and I had no idea of the truths that you were grappling with.
“It was about sovereignty more than Pat Buchanan.”
Thank you. I hope that your activism then, and our efforts now, as doomed as they may seem, eventually turn the tide.
I was at Whittier College in 1992 and I went to listen to Buchanan speak. The gym was packed and I remember being transfixed on him speaking. He is a lot more engaging and electrifying in person.
I was there, too. Buchanan was an antidote to Bush. Bush was to Reagan as Pence was to Trump.
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 »
I will give Reagan and Ed Meese a little credit for at least attempting to fight what turned out to be an ultimately futile rear guard action against the relentless onslaught of porn
If the state governments can lock us all in our houses for 18 months straight over the sniffles, they can do something about porn. It doesn’t have to be perfect. They don’t want to. In the world I live in “I can’t do it” is respectable cover for “I don’t want to do it.”
Might be a dup, sorry: If the state governments can sentence all of society for 18 months straight over the sniffles, they can do something about that issue. It doesn’t have to be perfect. They don’t want to. In the world I live in “I can’t do it” is respectable cover for “I don’t want to do it.”
I always tell our guys who remember that aspect of Reaganism fondly to go back and read the “Meese Report.” It was not a conservative or rightist document. Its rhetoric was left-feminist, Dworkin/MacKinnon-style Women Against Pornography stuff, speech-as-literal-violence, photography = misogyny, etc. So it was just like all the other “Christian right” censorship campaigns of the era. They weren’t last stands against degeneracy. They were degeneracy, what we’d now call “woke” Christianity, animated by the leftist idea that Enlightenment-/Constitution-style rights are white male perversion, an oppressive imposition on women and minorities. (True in a sense.) If nothing else, remember that… Read more »
Great post! Made me want to stand up and cheer!
Ronald Reagan was also a hard-nosed governor of California. He was shaped by the Depression and WWII. And he was a former Democrat.
I know he was a great President because:
A – Only the Eisenhower/Kennedy era equalled the optimism and energy of the Reagan Years.
B – The Left/Liberals hated Reagan as much as they hate Trump today.
C – Reagan’s funeral was one for the ages. He is still missed by many of us who were there.
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.
He was just the man in the seat at the time. Since America has to be front and center in everything good, it’s natural Reagan gets the credit. Who else could you possibly argue? Tip?
Reagan gets credit for my first plunge into political and economic thought. He had the right answer. You can’t print your way to prosperity. And then he got played by Tip and the boys. In pretty much everything. He also popularized the “innovation” of controlling the states via withholding highway funds.
It wasn’t the US that brought down communism, assuming we are talking about the Soviet block. That is a feel good myth, but it has no basis in reality. The eastern block was stagnating, but it wasn’t terribly indebted and it was capable of going on for many more decades. However, there was a young aspiring elite, mostly children of the older secondary elites. They studied at the prestigious universities in Moscow. They had the ability to travel the world and see the opportunities they were missing under the commie system. These people, along with certain elements from the communist… Read more »
??? I was agreeing with you. America was only tangentially involved, but the zeitgeist was that America must be portrayed as the central character in everything good that happens.
OK, maybe I had an autistic moment. Sorry.
Pretty sure the commies burrowed into the USA in the 1920s and 30s.
Note how many commies emigrated to Stalin’s USSR and volunteered for the Spanish Civil War.
The Fifth Column aspect, even if not the same ideological one, is reflected in today’s support of Ukraine. Much of that support is due to the deleterious effect that shitshow has on the West. It is more PoMo than MLism these days but with the same goal.
We missed our chance!
Damn, would I have looked good in a pair of assless chaps.
And mohawks were a thing!
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.
Well, Reagan did earn a degree in Economics in a time when American universities were far more serious, rigorous institutions.
the great Phil Hartman as Reagan as Machiavelli
https://youtu.be/b5wfPlgKFh8?si=qBWLbkj9FZWvk74R
I thought of this very skit
What’s even more amazing is that he somehow managed to come to the conclusion the then-current rage in the profession, Keynesianism, was complete hogwash. Most very smart people never did. The closest they would get is coming up with a Neo-Keynsian framework that let them continue in their push to centralize power in DC.
Keynesianism might have worked just fine if anyone had the discipline to do “the other part”, which was raising taxes and cutting spending when the economy was good so that there would be a surplus available when the economy was bad. In actual practice it just created the situation we have now where deficits never end and the government spends like a teenager with her first credit card. A lot of what’s going wrong in general today is that deals are made where one side concedes something now, while the other side is allowed to just make a promise of… Read more »
“Keynesianism might have worked just fine…“
Maybe, but for the reason you cite, we would never know. Austerity measures when things are going great?
I think the knowledge problem sinks the Keynsian strategy. Think of how difficult it is to tell if we are in a boom or a bubble. Even if it were possible to distinguish in advance, do you really trust the guys who have an incentive to lie? That their answer to the Goldilocks question is the right one?
The U.S. national politician with the most prestigious economics degree today is […drumroll…] AOC.
Totally a real discipline—and the educated truly are our rightful masters.
The consensus opinion of Reagan was that he was a great speaker. He was called “the Great Communicator.” No doubt being an actor played a part in that, but he would say it was also his common sense ideas that appealed to so many people that made him connect with his audience.
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 »
High brow discussions about nothing mark the end of empires.
Unfortunately, that is the only question of importance under ZOG.
“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 »
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.
To me, Clinton is a very memorable president. Certainly Monica and his “definition of is,” but also his pushing of NAFTA, talking about his underwear on a late night talk show, the Arkansas crime scandals while being governor, and the Clinton Body Count. There also was Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the OKC bombing which occurred then. There was a lot of bad stuff going on in those eight years.
Don’t forget federal agents in with submachine guns raiding a trailer home in Florida to snatch a screaming child from his relatives to ship him back to Cuba.
[after the poor kid’s mother died trying to bring him to freedom].
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!
I went to the information desk at the Clinton Library once and asked why they didn’t have the infamous blue dress on display. The lady angrily stated that there was no such dress in their collection.
Oswald never shot at anybody
He was a patsy. Ted Cruz’s father, however….
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.
When people announce “we need a Cromwell” (which is generally true) I remind them of that unpleasant last fact you mentioned. The political influence of the SBC has waned greatly over the last few years. Israel First may remain GOP policy for a while longer but there is a split also opening on the Right over Middle East policy. Never again will we have what we once did but reality is reasserting itself all over the place of late. As you note, one of those realities was fully apprehended by George HW Bush and James Baker.
I never objected to the idea, but rather the term you chose to assign to it. The problem with the WASPs was not their Puritanism, but rather their Damn Yankeeism. Southerners will understand.
I am Southern and certainly understand, but disentangling the Yankeeism and Puritanism is above my pay grade and I would guess impossible.
Coming from the region but also being a relative outsider to it, it’s impossible to untangle Calvinistic viewpoint from the culture. It still exists to this day despite a collapse in the practice of the formal religion itself. Protestantism produces an impluse to direct all criticism at Catholics. “What ever else is going on, the Catholics are wrong” is a unifying dogma, in groups where there are precious few agreements. .Given a cage match between Purtians and Anglicans alone, the fight is quite impressive. Once we get other religions and particularly Catholics in the mix, they’re best buddies again (sort… Read more »
“What ever else is going on, the Catholics are wrong” is a unifying dogma…”
Ha, ha, ha, ha! Thanks for lifting my spirits with a good laugh. Most of us don’t spend any time thinking anything about Catholics. That’s projection, my friend.
To the extent we do, it’s to note that Catholics, too, have an obsession with hats, but big hats in their case. Psychoanalyze that.
It was the Puritans who allowed (((them))) to return to England after Edward III (I think) had expelled them in the 14th century.
That’s right.
The madness with Israel started in 1947 when Harry Truman recognized the place as a country.
biden isn’t the test
Well. . .Reagan’s pros: 1) cut taxes very high tax rates which seemingly helped the middle class at the time and overall economy 2) re-built military and defeat USSR 3) incredible presentation and communicator 4) implicitly White/Christian for then a still 80%+ majority country that still made great music and other things that make life liveable. 5) Said “well” a lot His cons: 1) AMNESTY! surrendered his own CA and that would happen quickly to rest of country 2) Did not stop hollowing out of manufacturing/middle class 3) Didn’t shrink govt in the slightest There’s nothing he could’ve done to… 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.
Don’t forget the war on drugs and the militarization of our police. Another legacy of the “great” Ronald Reagan.
The War on Drugs began in June 1971 when U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon declared drug abuse to be “public enemy number one” and increased federal funding for drug-control agencies and drug-treatment efforts.
Hel-lo, asset confiscation!
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.
“Trump […] has started a real and enduring movement.”
That remains to be seen. As of now, that is not at all clear.
Can anyone really imagine that a second Carter term would have been preferable to Reagan? The growing despair in the late 70s was palpable. America’s death was already locked in early in the 20th century when women gained political power, then economic independence, and the (((wreckers))), epitomized by the Frankfurt school scumbags, were given the chance to mold young minds. So, I think the presidents must be judged by whether they slowed or accelerated the disease, whether it would have been realistic to imagine and implement a better course than the one they chose, and by how good or bad… Read more »
I was 42, with a young family, new house and burgeoning career when I saw Clinton run, win, and inaugurated. I lost 30 pounds worrying about what the effects on the country and on my family would be. I was not to be disappointed.
Clinton’s effects on the culture, normalizing perversion, and his effects on the body politic, normalizing and commoditizing corruption are now in full flower.
DOGE notwithstanding, with $37Tr in Debt and the Second Color revolution against Trump in full flower, I see little hope for any n ormal people in the United States.
Good article, Z-man. Yes, LBJ was the worst. He allowed the neocons to get their foot in the door, and they’ve been smelling up the room since.
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 »
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 »
Nixon: “his policies have had no lasting impact”. I doubt that. Decoupling the dollar from gold surely does?
Reagan: he set out to end the Cold War. He succeeded, indeed he even won it. That should have been the invitation for the USA to shrink back from an Empire to a Republic. But it wasn’t. Can Trump pull it off?
Nixon had no choice but to close the gold window. The French were staging a run on the gold supply. The result was the dollar becoming the global currency backed by energy. Those agreements were hashed out after Nixon.
Nixon indeed had lasting impact. OSHA, EPA, CWaterA, CAirA, Endangered Species Act and the God Squad, 55 MPH speed limit, CAFE standards, DCA and the consequent War on Drugs, and that’s just a start. He presided over the greatest centralization of power in DC since at least FDR, maybe in all of US history.
“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 »
The term “Affi89rmative Action” comes from a Kennedy EO. Johnson then turned the aspiration into a program and it was off the races.
You got me on that one, Zman! At the very least, though, the AA policies were expanded and accelerated during Nixon’s time as president (see Philadelphia Plan; Revised Philadelphia Plan – Wikipedia). But you’re right that the concept did not originate with Nixon’s administration. Kudos!
Yes. I think I’m fairly informed on these matters and was shocked when Trump last month ended Johnson’s 1963 EO mandating AA. Nine presidents, including True Conservative Republicans, left it intact. None of these people are our friends. Ever.
I just knew the footnote would be a cigar joke lol.
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…
Re: JFK
If you listen to Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Chris Cuomo, Tucker seems to be on the “our greatest ally” was responsible for whacking JFK bandwagon. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but he asks a certain rhetorical question two or three times during the interview. If you see it, you’ll get the idea.
It’s the only thing that makes sense. They wouldn’t be protecting people long gone from government. It has to be Israel they are protecting.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. They wouldn’t be protecting people long gone from government. It has to be Israel they are protecting.”
False dichotomy.
Plus, if the Agencies were involved, they have just as much incentive to keep that covered up as they would if it were small hats.
Just as likely that Tucker is being protective of his people (American intelligence).
Children aren’t taught that Oswald, weird communist/glowie, killed Kennedy. They’re told that he shot him. They’re taught that “Dallas”—right-wing racism, American whiteness—was the killer, in preemptive revenge for the Civil Rights Act.
That was the story on day one. It’s not a story ’60s Israel would have invented. It’s a local production.
No one talks about Reagan anymore because the America of which he was president is long gone, swept away by the great brown and yellow flood.
He was a great man, and I miss voting for him, but this is a different country in which his ideas and policies are inapplicable, sadly.
Given that the future US will be primarily run by Jews, Indians, blacks and strong, independent women, Reagan will likely not be seen in a positive light. He will be viewed as yet another patriarchal, white supremacist oppressor. FDR, Lincoln, Clinton and Obama likely have the best shot of being viewed positively (at least by academics and the press) 50 years from now.
It will be run by those people until the collapse of the US. Then something else will happen. Trump to me is the red gaseous stage of both Boomer and American leadership. Thus the chaos and uneven temperature.
The something else will be shaped by the nature of the majority non white rule. Given the maliciousness of the Biden Jews I imagine it will be closer to South Africa and Zimbabwe than Brazil.
The numbers don’t allow the United States becoming South Africa. Also, the Biden Jews will suffer no lesser of a fate than their oppositional Tribal brothers and sisters; their mass migration plan bit them on the ass. The United States will fracture–it is happening now–and ethnic warlordism will prevail at least for a time.
Reagan allowed other issues to mostly percolate along while he prosecuted the destruction of the Soviet block. Doing so served the interests of the Military-Industrial complex (Star Wars and a rebuilt military create a lot of MIC bucks in a lot of pockets). The trade-off and letting domestic politics mostly go on as usual may have bought Reagan space and time to do his international thing. The three presidents who have tried to break up the see-eye-eh and what we now call the bureaucratic “Deep State”, JFK, Nixon, and Trump, all have suffered greatly (assassination, legal shenanigans, and assassination attempt… Read more »
I think Reagan and Trump are similar in that they both were optimists, and truly care about the country. They’re also both a little naive about what the true intentions of their domestic enemies. Trump seems to have partially remedied this in his second term, but Reagan thought his enemies just had a different point of view instead of them wanting to flush us down the toilet. I know Reagan gets blamed for amnesty and the debt/deficits. The criticism is valid, but I don’t know many who would have imagined we’d be where we are today. Pat Buchanan definitely did… Read more »
Clinton was fine putting America into third world squabbles: Somalia, Kosovo, Sudan. Sure, a lot of it was just dropping bombs and cruise missiles, but that only was because he was too busy having himself serviced in the Oval Office and killing children at Waco to get involved in a ground war.
I’m agnostic on the matter of Reagan and his real or ostensible greatness. However, regarding LBJ I have no such ambivalence. That sorry polecat is the worst president to ever sully the White House. And it causes me no little shame that he hailed from my home state.
It’s questionable if LBJ is truly a political product of Texas. Considering the elections he stole
LBJ is quintessential texan
“Toxic individualism”? Is that like toxic masculinity? Glad to learn that collectivism is the way of the future…
LBJ was a terror in the Senate. He also held meetings in the loo while he was taking a shit.
I know he’s behind JFK’s killing, Hart-Celler, and Vietnam, but he had some major alpha energy. Hard to imagine a Democrat with that kind of energy these days. He may have been America’s most alpha president after WW2.
Three points: 1. You forget that Reagan put us on this trajectory of deficit spending. The geniuses thought it was 4D chess to bring the government to its knees. Never happened. We just got used to living high on the credit card. 2. You’re right about the stock market. I was watching an old movie where the police were interrogating the wife of a bank teller suspected of taking $50,000. They asked for the usual questions, whether they are deep in debt, whether he has a drinking problem, whether he has a woman on the side, gambling problem … The… Read more »
LBJ didn’t inspire the great men of his age but he did leave a mark.
Did Z choose to put up a piece about Presidential rankings or is it just a hardwired reaction to a slow news day?
This week has been a review of the past, that is, of how we got here.
The Zman is examining the 20th Century that the 21st is trying to break free of.
Read the blog longer. Reactions to today’s news is not the norm. Seems Trump’s speed at trolling everyone has changed that a bit.
It was reference to yesterday’s “Choosing” piece. Sometimes my thoughts run longer than a day at a time.