What if Ronald Reagan’s Presidency Never Really Ended?

For many people, the 2016 election was a catastrophe. For Max Boot, it was a betrayal. He’d been a movement conservative: a loud voice for the Iraq War, an editor of The Weekly Standard, and an adviser to the campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio. Boot took heart when Republicans initially closed ranks against Donald Trump’s candidacy. Trump is “a madman who must be stopped,” Bobby Jindal said. “The man is utterly amoral,” Ted Cruz agreed. Rubio called him “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the Presidency.” For Rick Perry, he was “a cancer on conservatism.” Then, one by one, they all endorsed him, and he won.

Trump’s election shook Boot’s world view. Was this what Republicanism was about? Had Boot been deluded the whole time? He wrote a book, “The Corrosion of Conservatism” (2018), about his breakup with the G.O.P. The #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, he could now admit, made good points. His advocacy of the war in Iraq had been a “big mistake,” and he felt guilt over “all the lives lost.” Boot was like a confused driver who had arrived at an unintended destination and wondered where he’d missed the off-ramp. When was the right moment to have left the Republican Party?

For many anti-Trump conservatives, the lodestar remains Ronald Reagan. In his sunny spirit and soothing affect, he was Trump’s opposite. Their slogans differed dramatically: Reagan’s “Tear down this wall” versus Trump’s “Build the wall”; Reagan’s “It’s morning again in America” versus Trump’s “American carnage.” Both men survived an assassination attempt, and their instinctive responses were telling. Reagan, though gravely wounded, reassured those around him with genial humor. (To his wife: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” To his surgical team: “I hope you’re all Republicans.”) Trump, in contrast, wriggled free of his bodyguards, raised his fist, and commanded the crowd to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Three days later, he released a sneaker line featuring an image of him doing so, the FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT high-tops, priced at two hundred and ninety-nine dollars.

Boot grew up idolizing Reagan. “How I loved that man,” he recalled. In 2013, he started writing a book about the fortieth President. His “Reagan: His Life and Legend” (Norton) aims to be the definitive biography, and it succeeds. It’s a thoughtful, absorbing account. It’s also a surprising one. One might expect, given Boot’s trajectory, that this would be a full-throated defense of Reagan, the Last Good Republican. But it is not.

Although Boot once felt “incredulous that anyone could possibly compare Reagan to Trump,” he now sees “startling similarities.” Reagan’s easygoing manner, Boot acknowledges, concealed hard-to-stomach beliefs. Reagan viewed the New Deal, which he’d once supported, as “fascism.” He raised preposterous fears about the Soviet capture of Hollywood, and fed his fellow-actors’ names to the F.B.I. When Republican legislators largely voted for the landmark civil-rights laws of the nineteen-sixties, Reagan stood against them. (He’s on tape calling Black people “monkeys.”) He also campaigned against Medicare, insisting that it would lead the government to “invade every area of freedom as we have known in this country.” For unconscionably long into his Presidency, he refused to address a pandemic, AIDS, that was killing tens of thousands of his constituents, and he privately speculated that it might be God’s punishment for homosexuality. Then there is his campaign motto, ominous in hindsight: “Let’s make America great again.”

Recent events have forced Boot to ask if Reagan was part of the rot that has eaten away at Republicanism. Boot now sees him as complicit in the “hard-right turn” the Party took after Dwight D. Eisenhower which “helped set the G.O.P.—and the country—on the path” to Trump.

And yet Boot sees a redeeming quality as well: Reagan could relax his ideology. He was an anti-tax crusader who oversaw large tax hikes, an opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment who appointed the first female Supreme Court Justice, and a diehard anti-Communist who made peace with Moscow. “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” Reagan famously quipped. But he delivered that line while announcing “record amounts” of federal aid. He viewed the world in black-and-white, yet he governed in gray.

Reagan tolerated a gap between rhetoric and reality because, for him, rhetoric was what mattered. “The greatest leaders in history are remembered more for what they said than for what they did,” he insisted. (The example he offered was Abraham Lincoln, apparently rating the Gettysburg Address a more memorable achievement than the defeat of the Confederacy.) When it came to policy, Reagan was happy to hand things off to “the fellas”—his generic term for his aides, whose names he could not reliably recall.

This, too, sounds familiar. Like Trump, Reagan held facts lightly but grasped larger emotional truths. When he uttered falsehoods, as he frequently did, it was hard to say that he was lying. “He makes things up and believes them,” one of his children explained. Reagan’s lies, like Trump’s, were largely treated as routine, as if he were a child who couldn’t be expected to know better. Fittingly, both came from the spin-heavy world of sales and entertainment. Boot points out that Reagan and Trump are the only Presidents who had television shows.

“Did Reaganism contain the seeds of Trumpism?” Boot asks. Usually, that’s a question about each man’s beliefs. Looking at Reagan’s life through Boot’s eyes, though, one wonders about their styles, too. Was there something about Reagan’s way of operating that got us here? (...)

Reagan hovered above the material plane, and others indulged him. “You wanted to help Reagan to float through life,” his longtime adviser Michael Deaver explained. “You’d be willing to do whatever it took to take the load off of him of all the shitty little things that normal people have to do.”

Those “shitty little things” included running the country. Deaver was sometimes called the “deputy President,” but others bore that title, too—the whole Administration ran on delegation. The President offered little guidance even when it came to taxes, his signature issue. “In the four years that I served as Secretary of the Treasury, I never saw President Reagan alone and never discussed economic philosophy or fiscal and monetary policy with him one-on-one,” Don Regan recalled. “The President never told me what he believed or what he wanted to accomplish.” Without direction, Reagan’s aides—the fellas—held extraordinary power. He accepted their views (though he sometimes fell asleep while they presented them), and he rarely sought outside counsel.

Auteur theory interprets films as fundamentally the creations of directors. A similar notion prevails in politics: the idea that Presidents are fully in charge. But when has that ever been true? Reagan knew, from his years on film and television sets, that the face of a production is just a part of it. There was something refreshingly honest in his ceding policymaking to those who knew more than he did. There was also something ironic: Reagan, the foe of bureaucracy, surrendering to the state.

by Daniel Immerwahr, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis/Getty
[ed. Having lived and worked through the Reagan presidency (on the receiving end of some of his policies) there's no doubt in my mind that he (and especially his wife, Nancy) were more interested in cultivating his image than in running the country. Which is not to say he didn't install some of the worst ideologues one could find at the time in key positions - Anne Gorsuch at EPA (Supreme Court justice Neil's mother); James Watt at Interior (Rocky Mt. Legal Foundation); Cap Weinberger, Secretary of Defense (Bechtel); and many, many others. He encouraged Grover Norquist (Mr. drown government in a bathtub) to form the Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), which advocated for big corporate tax breaks and opposed any effort to regulate health care, and worked closely with Newt Gingrich, eventual House Minority Whip, who is credited with creating the extreme party polarization we see today. So, after that, it was game over for moderate, responsible Republicans. Talk about revisionist history, it's always been baffling to me how Repubicans nowadays almost confer sainthood on Reagan who checked out early with dementia, destabilized Latin America, and blew potential lasting world peace and nuclear non-proliferation by underming Russia's recovery after the Soviet Union collapse (see previous: How the Neocons Subverted Russia’s Financial Stabilization in the Early 1990s. In my mind, the last great GOP president was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who'd be considered a flaming liberal these days. Sad.]