“Republicans” Embrace the Worst of Reagan & Jettison the Best
The MAGA Party is composed of literal RINOs
As the also-rans, also-crawled, and also-boot-licked of the race for the nomination to oppose President Biden next year gather tonight for a second non-debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library while whatever mind the front-walker had is disintegrating before our very ears—in just the past two weeks, the self-described “very stable genius” has said at rallies that he ran in the 2016 primary against George W. Bush and in the general elections of 2016 and 2020 against Barack Obama and that Biden will lead us into World War II—and he is pledging to replace the American Constitutional Republic with a brutal authoritarian regime, execute opponents, shut down media that dare to tell the truth, and more, it seems an opportune time to have a look at Reagan’s legacy and how much his party is following or rejecting it.
Donald Trump is again skipping the debate, in part because he is angry with the board of directors of the Reagan Foundation, which runs the Library. One of the board trustees called Trump a “spoiled brat in a sandbox. … So many of the things that Trump did, and what he stood for, are just not consistent with the Reagan philosophy.”
When the Reagan Library launched a speaker series on the future of the Republican Party in 2021, the first presenter was former House Speaker and 2012 Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan. He said the conservative movement is not just about fealty to the defeated president. Trump, whose opposition to the republican form of government and to much of the legacy of the Republican Party make him a “Republican In Name Only” and who had just lost the election, angrily projected onto Ryan, calling him a RINO and a loser.
Ronald Reagan’s legacy is mixed, though from my perspective on balance negative.
His “supply-side” (aka trickle-down) economic policies marked the start of the Second Gilded Age. He was entirely committed to massive tax cuts for the rich and to opposing organized labor. He stopped using antitrust laws to promote competition, as Heather Cox Richardson put it in her latest letter, “abandoning the idea that capitalism fundamentally depends on competition.”
Reagan’s coming into office in 1981 marked the beginning a four-decade concentration of ever more wealth and income at the very top, as has been detailed in such works as Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, Kurt Andersen’s Evil Geniuses, and Jane Mayer’s Dark Money.
Running in 1980, Reagan said the nation was in a death-spiral under Jimmy Carter, an approach Trump reprised with “American carnage” in his inaugural speech. At a time when there were large budget deficits, Reagan promised to cut taxes drastically, massively increase military expenditures, maintain the social safety net, and balance the budget, which is to say: start with a large negative number, subtract from it substantially and the result will be a positive number. Before he became Reagan’s running mate, George Bush had called it “voodoo economics.” I suggested at the time that the only way Reagan could accomplish it would be through a Constitutional amendment repealing arithmetic.
Reagan was, in short, using the same sort of accounting that Trump does in his businesses.
Boston Globe cartoonist Paul Szep captured the essence of Reagan’s social policies nicely:
Reagan didn’t hesitate to utilize racism, but he did it with a smiling face and dog whistles, as opposed to the current MAGA open promotion of hate. Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. Neshoba County was associated nationally as the place of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964 and Reagan’s speech there championed “states’ rights,” which had long been—and still is—code for opposition to racial equality. He repeatedly used a story about a “Welfare Queen” to turn middle-class white people against social programs.
A decade earlier, while he was governor of California, Reagan had spoken to President Richard Nixon in a telephone conversation that Nixon was secretly taping, about watching a United Nations meeting. “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries,” Reagan said, “—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”
In all those respects—the worst of Reagan—today’s “Republicans” follow him and take him to more extreme levels.
Today’s RINO MAGAs are all in on Reaganism when it comes to helping the superrich, but have abandoned democracy. Reagan was a champion of democracy and a strong supporter of NATO, which Trump sought to weaken. The extreme right in today’s “Republican” party seeks to cut aid to Ukraine. Like their leader, they prefer Vladimir Putin and other brutal autocrats to American democracy.
Ronald Reagan would be horrified by them. He didn’t help to bring the Soviet Evil Empire to the brink of dissolution with the intention of having the United States later acquiesce in Putin using aggression to rebuild it.
It was not Reagan's intent to defeat communism only to replace it with fascism.