“Let’s Make America Great Again” —
Ronald Reagan campaign slogan, 1980
In 2011, a Gallup poll found that when Americans were asked who the greatest president in U.S. history was, they were most likely to say Ronald Reagan. Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton were next on the list. George Washington came in fifth, after JFK. Reagan is less fondly remembered among certain groups, like Black Americans and LGBTQ people, who recall what his presidency meant for them. But on the whole, Americans had, and still have, a positive impression of Reagan the man.
His policies are a different story. They were unpopular then. They’re unpopular now. Americans didn’t want to see an upward redistribution of wealth, the bloating of the military budget, tax cuts for the rich, and the arming of Central American death squads. Reagan’s secret funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, in direct violation of U.S. law, proved staggeringly unpopular, with nearly 80 percent of the public disapproving. Yet even after the exposure of the Iran-Contra scandal, threefourths of Americans still approved of Reagan “as a person.” It’s not hard to see why. Reagan’s public persona was avuncular and self-deprecating. He was a Hollywood actor, and he performed the role of president perfectly. He peppered his speech with humorous, folksy anecdotes and spoke in a warm, reassuring voice. He conveyed an impression of complete innocence, so that when repeated ethical scandals hit his administration, he was able to convince much of the public that he couldn’t possibly be responsible for anything nefarious—hence the moniker “Teflon president.” Watch clips of Reagan joshing with the press, or making light-hearted references to his assassination attempt, and we can see easily how the Reagan mystique was developed.
Yet the actual record of the Reagan administration is horrendous. As Peter Dreier wrote in the Nation in 2011,
During his two terms in the White House (1981–89), Reagan presided over a widening gap between the rich and everyone else, declining wages and living standards for working families, an assault on labor unions as a vehicle to lift Americans into the middle class, a dramatic increase in poverty and homelessness, and the consolidation and deregulation of the financial industry that led to the current mortgage meltdown, foreclosure epidemic and lingering recession. These trends were not caused by inevitable social and economic forces. They resulted from Reagan’s policy and political choices based on an underlying “you’re on your own” ideology.
Beneath Reagan’s “gee whiz” and “aw shucks” persona there was a cruelty, a belief that people were responsible for their own suffering and it wasn’t the job of government to help alleviate social misery. Reagan famously said that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” This would be news to anyone who has ever been rescued by a firefighter or a park ranger or given a Social Security check. But Reagan didn’t try to make a factual, logical case that the government was incapable of doing anything but harm. Instead, he told stories that projected a vision of an idyllic small-town America where people bootstrapped their way to success. Beneath the stories, his actions were cruel and deadly. Reagan helped create many of the most devastating problems facing American society in 2024.
Reagan always denied being in any way racist and claimed to have had a “hatred for bigotry and prejudice” from an early age. Nevertheless, in a private phone call with Richard Nixon, he called African United Nations delegates “monkeys,” and rightwing economist Thomas Sowell departed Reagan’s 1980 campaign after he insisted on giving a “states’ rights” speech in Mississippi near the site of the infamous 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, a move that was widely interpreted (including by Sowell) as a dog-whistle to white supremacists. Reagan’s support for apartheid South Africa (and softness on white supremacist Rhodesia), his reluctance to approve a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., and his initiation of the “war on drugs” all help to explain why Black Americans did not look back fondly at Reagan’s presidency once it was over.
Reagan never cared much if what he was saying was true. He would pass movie scenes off as historical fact and even told the prime minister of Israel that he had personally helped liberate Nazi death camps, when in fact he had edited footage of them in Culver City, California, while working on films for the War Department. As Jimmy Carter said, with characteristic understatement, “President Reagan doesn’t always check the facts before he makes statements, and the press accepts this as kind of amusing.” In On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, journalist Mark Hertsgaard reports that eventually, the press just gave up on fact-checking Reagan, since so much of what he said was nonsense. The national news editor of Newsweek said that “I think everybody in the press corps is just a little bit astonished at how many times the President can make horrible mistakes in public[…] [F]or a long time we were writing practically every week a little box on what he said that wasn’t true. We ultimately just couldn’t stand doing it week after week after week because it seemed sort of unfair […] [I]t seemed like persecuting him or something.”
Much of what Reagan said was ludicrous. In the words of his daughter Patti Davis, “he [had] the ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless.” (...)
Simon Hoggart noted in The Observer in 1986 the peculiar way in which Reagan’s “errors glide past unchallenged. At one point […] he alleged that almost half the population gets a free meal from the government each day. No one told him he was crazy. The general message of the American press is that, yes, while it is perfectly true that the emperor has no clothes, nudity is actually very acceptable this year.” Mark Green notes that Reagan’s rigid anti-government ideology, his belief that the state could do no right, led him to wilfully misinterpret reality: “This loathing for government, this eagerness to prove that any program to aid the disadvantaged is nothing but a boondoggle and a money gobbler, leads him to contrive statistics and stories with unmatched vigor.” Those who interacted with Reagan up close were often shocked by his ignorance. “You sometimes wonder why it occurred to anyone that he should be president, or even governor,” commented Henry Kissinger. Richard Nixon called him a “man of limited mental capacity [who] simply doesn’t know what the Christ is going on in the foreign area.” House Speaker Tip O’Neill said that Reagan “knows less about the budget than any president in my lifetime. He can’t even carry on a conversation about the budget. It’s an absolute and utter disgrace.” Reagan was a hands-off and inattentive manager, nodding off in meetings or remaining silent and often leaving staff in the dark about what his administration’s actual policies were supposed to be. Many people have described Reagan as a mere figurehead or speculated that his Alzheimer’s symptoms began before his term in office was over.
But to treat Reagan as a vapid actor, a pleasant frontman for a rapacious oligarchy, is to underappreciate his talent and let him off the hook for his worst actions. Watch Reagan interacting with the press in 1987, and it’s clear that he’s fully lucid and engaged. After the Iran-Contra scandal, Congressional leaders declined to impeach Reagan that same year, perhaps because he successfully conveyed the impression that he was a bewildered innocent. (Famously, he confessed: “I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”) But he deserves to be given credit for his record.
The record was disgraceful. It’s chilling to go back and look at how Reagan’s press secretary responded to questions about AIDS, for instance. As a terrifying epidemic began to decimate the gay community, Reagan’s spokesman cracked homophobic jokes in the press room. The reporter who asked about AIDS was “met with dismissive wisecracks questioning the reporter’s own sexual orientation.” Reagan himself showed no interest in the issue and even proposed to cut funding for AIDS research, until the death of his friend Rock Hudson spurred him to action.
Despite being the only former labor leader ever to ascend to the presidency (he had been president of the Screen Actors Guild), Reagan did everything in his power to crush the American labor movement. In 1981, 10,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on strike for better pay and working conditions. Reagan simply fired them all. As Richard Sharpe writes,
The strikers were often working-class men and women who had achieved suburban middle class lives as air traffic controllers without having gone to college. Many were veterans of the US armed forces where they had learned their skills; their union had backed Reagan in his election campaign. Nevertheless, Reagan refused to back down. Several strikers were jailed; the union was fined and eventually made bankrupt. Only about 800 got their jobs back when Clinton lifted the ban on rehiring those who went on strike. Many of the strikers were forced into poverty as a result of being blacklisted for [U.S. government] employment.
Reagan’s crushing of the union “was interpreted by many as a green light from the federal government for union-busting, and ushered in the vicious employer attacks of the 1980s.” The head of Reagan’s Office of Personnel Management said this explicitly, writing that with the strike, “American business leaders were given a lesson in managerial leadership that they could not and did not ignore. Many private sector executives have told me that they were able to cut the fat from their organizations and adopt more competitive work practices because of what the government did in those days.” Journalist Jon Schwarz dates the beginning of the 40-year-long “murder of the middle class” to Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers. [ed. I do too.]
Reagan began what journalist Mark Ames calls “one of the most shocking wealth transfers in the history of the world, all under the propaganda diversion of ‘making America competitive’ and ‘unleashing the creative energies of the American worker.’” With the aid of Congressional Democrats, he substantially cut taxes on the wealthy and attempted to undo both the New Deal and the Great Society. This included making more than $22 billion in cuts to social welfare programs, while still massively increasing the federal deficit, in part by bloating the military budget. Poverty, homelessness, and precarity all increased.
It’s harder to measure the indirect cultural consequences of Reagan’s tenure, but he certainly did nothing to counteract the “greed is good” spirit of the times. As Mario Cuomo put it, Reagan “made the denial of compassion for the people who needed it most sound like a virtue.” Similarly, Cornel West says that “Reagan made it fashionable to be indifferent to the poor and gave permission to be greedy with little or no conscience.”
In The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America, William Kleinknecht summarizes the dire consequences of “Reaganomics”:
He enacted policies that helped wipe out the high-paying jobs for the working class that were the real backbone of the country. This supposed guardian of traditional values was the architect of wrenching social change that swept across the country in the 1980s, the emergence of an eerie, overcommercialized, postmodern America that has left so much of the populace psychically adrift. Reagan propelled the transition to hypercapitalism, an epoch in which the forces of self-interest and profit seek to make a final rout of traditional human values. His legacy—mergers, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization, globalization—helped weaken the family and eradicate small-town life and the sense of community.
Investigative journalist Greg Palast puts things even more bluntly:
The New York Times, in its canned obit, wrote that Reagan projected, “faith in small town America” and “old-time values.” “Values” my ass. It was union-busting and a declaration of war on the poor and anyone who couldn’t buy designer dresses. It was the New Meanness, bringing starvation back to America so that every millionaire could get another million. “Small town” values? From the movie star of the Pacific Palisades, the Malibu mogul? I want to throw up.
All of that’s just on the domestic front. Reagan’s foreign policy was a horror show. His administration supported Saddam Hussein as Iraq waged a brutal war of aggression against Iran, even covering up evidence of Hussein’s use of chemical weapons. Reagan violated both domestic and international law in his support for the Nicaraguan Contras. The Contras, according to Human Rights Watch, “were major and systematic violators of the most basic standards of the laws of armed conflict, including by launching indiscriminate attacks on civilians, selectively murdering non-combatants, and mistreating prisoners.” (Reagan repeatedly compared the Contras to the American Founding Fathers, labeling them “freedom fighters” and “our brothers.”) The Reagan administration funneled money to them through arms sales in explicit violation of U.S. law, while Reagan’s terrorism against Nicaragua (mining the country’s harbors and destroying civilian boats) was found to be illegal by the World Court, a ruling the administration simply ignored.
Like other presidents, Reagan supported friendly despots around the world when it served “U.S. interests,” including not only Hussein, but Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the deposed Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, Suharto in Indonesia, and the genocidal Guatemalan military leader Ríos Montt, whom he called “a man of great personal integrity and commitment.” Reagan freely violated international law, such as by invading Grenada without any authorization from the United Nations Security Council. Yet some Reagan policies look moderate and restrained by comparison with recent presidential actions. Reagan was willing to restrain Israel when its conduct became embarrassing and appears to have been sincerely committed to the issue of reducing nuclear weapons, going so far as to propose eliminating nuclear weapons altogether in one meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Unfortunately, Reagan was rigidly committed to his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, derisively known as “Star Wars”), an attempt to intercept inbound nuclear attacks on the United States. Reagan thought nothing could be objectionable about defending against a nuclear attack, but it disrupted the logic of deterrence (if the U.S. could defend itself from a nuclear attack but the Soviet Union could not, there was less reason for the U.S. to avoid attacking the Soviet Union), and the Soviets saw it as a serious threat, which led to one of the worst nuclear scares of the Cold War.
The Reagan presidency was a giant fraud. He promised safety but brought us closer to Armageddon. He promised prosperity but crushed American workers. His kindly demeanor belied a nasty streak. (For instance, Jon Schwarz writes in the Intercept that “when Patty Hearst’s kidnappers demanded that her family start handing out free food to the poor, Reagan privately said, ‘It’s too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.’”) TIME magazine called him “a Prospero of American memories, a magician who carries a bright, ideal America like a holograph in his mind and projects the image in the air.” Reagan, “master illusionist, is himself a kind of American dream.” Well, as George Carlin said, “they call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Reagan smiled at the country in a big cowboy hat while robbing people blind.
From Ronald to Donald
An ignorant, deceitful entertainer bamboozling Americans into thinking that plutocracy is good for them. Does this sound familiar? We’ve had another one of those recently, one even more cartoonishly dishonest in his promises to “Make America Great Again” (a slogan Trump simply lifted and repurposed from Reagan). As Schwarz writes, Trump and Reagan share the “same political DNA”: “Reagan was Trump’s progenitor, and Trump is Reagan’s degenerate 21st-century descendant. Trump is to Reagan much like crack is to cocaine: cheaper, faster-acting, and less glamorous. Still, in their essence, they are the same thing.”
There are some important differences. Reagan exuded positivity, even utopianism, promising that “America’s best days are yet to come. Our proudest moments are yet to be. Our most glorious achievements are just ahead.” He was capable of seeming reassuring and reasonable, as in his well-received address after the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Trump’s tone is dark, hateful, vindictive, while Reagan’s was sunny. But both carried out variations on a similar fraud.
Reagan promised to tame the worst excesses of government. But in office, he let corruption and abuse run rampant. His Department of Housing and Urban Development was “enveloped by influence peddling, favoritism, abuse, greed, fraud, embezzlement, and theft” according to the House Government Operations Committee. His presidency ultimately resulted “in the investigation, indictment or conviction of over 138 administration officials, the largest number for any president of the United States.” Reagan should plainly have been impeached and removed from office over the Iran-Contra scandal. The irony is that we only need to have a Reaganesque fear of government when people like Ronald Reagan are running the government.
Let’s Make America Great Again, Reagan said. Did he? Of course not. It was a fantasy, an image. Trump is the same, offering an appealing lie that desperate people would very much like to believe in. But if it’s trivial to point out that these men are selling snake oil, the question is: how do you convince people not to buy it? That’s much more difficult. Reagan won two landslide victories... Perhaps one lesson of Reagan is that because appealing visions and stories can be so powerful, we need one of our own. People voted for Reagan even though they disliked his policies, because he seemed personable and he projected an image of forward-looking confidence. Trump does not seem kind or personable, but he has a powerful story to tell, one of a country being ruined and awaiting its redeemer. Counteracting salesmen like these requires a powerful alternative story, with a promise of a different, better future. Democrats since Barack Obama (who himself was an admirer of Reagan) have failed to offer such a message—consider Hillary Clinton’s “America is Already Great” or Joe Biden’s promise to his donors that “nothing will fundamentally change.”
Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are two of the greatest con men of the age, successfully convincing many people to do immense harm to themselves and their country. Their political talents, however, should not be underrated. Reagan has, incredibly, been successfully sold as one of the greatest presidents ever, with Republicans viewing him as something close to a saint, an achievement that Noam Chomsky says would have impressed Kim Il-Sung. We need not just to puncture the myths, which is done well in both Kleinknecht’s The Man Who Sold The World and Will Bunch’s Tear Down This Myth, but to offer a more inspiring alternative that will keep people from falling for the pitches of vicious grifters.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |
Read more:Image: uncredited
[ed. Good summary. I lived through it all, and in fact had to deal with a few of Reagan's policies directly (like leasing the entire coastline of the US to oil and gas development in an acceleratated 5-year OCS leasing schedule). But it wasn't just Reagan. Equal blame (if not more so) should fall on other ideologues at the time including Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist ('drown government in the bathtub' fame); Alan Greenspan, and the numerous cabinet secretaries and others that faithfully, if not gleefully, set forth to carry out Reagan's agenda (like Interior Secretary James Watt, and EPA's Anne Gorsuch, mom of present Supreme Court justice Neal Gorsuch). Never could have imagined it could get much worse (ha!), but then we ended up taking a few detours into Afghanistan, Iraq, legalized torture, and black sites. Connect the dots. Reagan lit the fire that hollowed out the middle class, deregulated government, crippled unions, jump started neoliberalism (later supercharged by Clinton), and set us on the path to where we are now. At this point, with a completely useless Congress, weaponized military and Justice Department, open corruption, unapologetic criminal pardons, and DOGE-depleted government things can't possibly get much worse, right? Right? (ha!)]
