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So, the Ontario Reagan ad thing.
As the governor of Ontario, Doug Ford (Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario) produced a 1-minute ad in favor of free trade ad targeted at US residents, with some high-profile airings during some sports events. The ad consists of spliced together sentences of a 1987 Reagan address.
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation claims that "the ad misrepresented Reagans address". The reaction of Trump was to suspend trade negotiations with the Carney (Liberal Party) government of Canada:
I watched the original they linked, and I honestly can not see what their problem is. In the original 5 minute version, there was also a message of "we have introduced duties on semiconductors from Japan because their companies were not competing fairly, but we do not want a general trade war". But having watched both the ad and the address, I agree with the fact-checkers that Reagan was not quoted out of context. The ad agency basically took a five minute speech, of which at least three minutes were a spirited defense of free trade as the foundation of prosperity and condensed it into a one minute defense of free trade.
I understand how the ad would annoy Trump. Reagan is a time-honored hero of his party, and his voiced ideals are in stark contrast to Trump's policies. The message "this man is stepping way out of line of the tradition of his political ancestors" certainly seems a good way to persuade traditional conservative demographics to reconsider Trump.
But for all his annoyance, I think Ontario is basically well within it's rights to use ads to affect US trade policy. Even without Citizens United, the US would be the last country in the Americas to have any standing to object to foreigners interfering, especially if the interference is only attack ads and not coups.
And as far as attack ads go, it is incredibly tame. A clear policy message without any ad hominem jabs or name-calling.
This makes Trump's reaction utterly bizarre to me. Diplomacy sometimes means negotiating with people who would love to murder you and dance on your grave, never mind seeing you voted out of office. Then there is the fact that Canada is not an absolute monarchy, and their federal government does not control its provinces. Assuming that PM Carney has control over Ford would be like assuming that Trump has control over Newsom. If you are willing to walk away from negotiations because of that, then either you were not seriously negotiating before or you emotions are making you irrational.
Even if the ad was paid for by Carney, Trump's reaction would not be appropriate for an adult. It seems that he is mentally sorting people into two buckets, the ones who support him and are loyal to him, and the ones who are opposed to him. This is basically the world view of a toddler. Reality is more complex. Of course Canada would love nothing more than the US electing Democrat majorities in the mid-term and them killing Trump's tariffs. Presumably, Trump in turn would love for Canadians to elect a MAGA fan who is willing to bend over backwards and give Trump all the concessions instead of retaliating. But in the likely event that neither side get what they want, it still makes sense to negotiate.
To me, it seems pretty clear that a mass media campaign like this is directed at the electorate. In Trump's mind, it is meant to influence the SCOTUS. This makes me question his world model even more. What is the proposed mechanism of action? A SC justice is watching a sports event on TV, sees the Reagan free trade ad, gets the message 'tariffs bad' into his head, then decides a case which hinges on what powers Congress can delegate to the president purely based on if he likes how the president has used these disputed powers. It seems that Trump is a victim of the typical mind fallacy here -- just because he could persuaded by a TV ad to make unprincipled changes to his policy to get some desired object-level outcome, he assumes that the minds of justices work the same way. At the risk of likewise typical-minding, I think that he is wrong. Perhaps, some judges are partisan hacks who will rule for or against Trump on general principle. But my model of the median SC judge is someone who cares about the long term policy outcomes and making consistent rulings, rather than someone starting by writing "therefore, Trump's tariffs are legal/illegal" at the bottom of the page according to their leanings and then filling the space above with some legal argument. (Which is kinda what Roe v Wade did.)
In short, if Ontario wanted to influence the SCOTUS, TV ads seem like the worst way to go about it. I would recommend they pay high profile legal scholars to publish in academic journals. Or more cynically, invite some justices to an all-expenses-paid retreat.
On an unrelated note, I'm guessing the Republican reevaluation and demythologization of his legacy is something that is bound to happen at some point.
Its been a long running trend among younger generation Republicans that Reagan was tricked by Democrats on numerous issues, particularly immigration and balancing the budget.
Also general amnesty in return for securing the border.
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Also: abortion, the Long March through the institutions.
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But will Democrats become double-negative-polarized in his favor then?
I can see it, especially with the Abundance bros.
Dankest timeline, etc...
Is it really even worth giving that brainfart a capital letter? That ironically named "movement" is already dead and has no popular appeal at all on the left.
I'm not sure why would you be antipathetic towards the only part of the Dem apparatus that produces something least resembling nonsense? What purpose could that possibly serve? To elevate the AOC weirdos?
Have you seen the polling results? The "abundance" doctrine has no purchase in the left-wing base at all. Even without going into the issues with their actual ideas, there's simply no viable path to victory for them. If you think the abundance platform is good, you should go work with the party that actually supports them - which is the Republican party.
As for AOC, I don't actually like her either - and I think she's done enough damage to her reputation with the left that she's going to have a very hard time getting the top job even when the current crop of ghouls in the DNC gracelessly expire.
Oh I agree, I'm not particularly partisan anyway. But Republicans (or conservatives generally) should probably root for the wing of the Democrats (or liberals generally) that are somewhat less than completely insane.
Even if they are rooting for them quietly.
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Probably yes.
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... after the demythologization of FDR, by the Democrats. Reagan was mythologized, to begin with, because the last good Republican president was Eisenhower. Trumpists obviously don't parrot the party line about Reagan, but I'm guessing the median and modal Republican's image of Reagan is about what it was in 2015.
Apples and oranges. The demythologization of FDR would necessarily entail the demythologization of the American role in WW2, and I wonder if Democrat-aligned normies are ready for that. In Reagan’s case there’s no such taboo present.
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My completely arbitrary vibe as just another post-liberal shitlord floating around the internet is that boomers and dorks love Reagan but based chuds think he was a cuck on guns and immigration, if they think of him at all.
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I've mentioned this before, but I return to it because it remains true.
Circa 2016, when we were starting to realize that Trump was a real candidate, I attended a lunch talk with the Yale constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar. Amar is a brilliant scholar, whatever you think of his political opinions. One of his core arguments that day in 2016 was that Barack Obama was about to become what he labeled at the time a "Turning Point President." His basic thesis was that when you look at American political history, when a President wins 1) Two consecutive terms and then 2) gets his chosen successor elected after him, then that sets the paradigm (a Turning Point) that the country operates under until another Turning Point when a new paradigm is established. So if Clinton had won in 2016, Obama would have been a bona-fide turning point, and we would be operating under the Obama paradigm today. It's a Hegelian triad, Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, kind of system; a turning point president represents a new Synthesis that becomes the next Thesis.
But the upshot of this logic is that we are currently operating under the Reagan paradigm. Developed and attenuated, altered with each passing presidency, but we're still within that paradigm. When Reagan came into office, the last president to achieve this feat was FDR, and between FDR and Reagan we were operating within FDR's New Deal paradigm. The Democrats during that time tried to expand the New Deal, the Great Society and whatnot. Even Republican presidents during that period, Eisenhower and Nixon, were operating within the New Deal. Eisenhower adjusted the New Deal to make it more conservative, and Nixon signed a lot of liberal legislation but otherwise tried to reign in the New Deal and not to overturn it.
Reagan overturned the New Deal paradigm. He struck a fresh synthesis, of social conservatism that would manage change, pushing family values while mostly surrendering on race issues and the sexual revolution. Free market capitalism, free trade, race neutral corporate meritocratic success, these were the core values of the Reagan Revolution. An assertive foreign policy that brushed off post-Vietnam malaise with short and sharp foreign interventions that did the job and left town.
And we've operated under that ever since. Clinton's third way Dems were an adaptation to that paradigm, an effort to soften it and move it left. Dubya operated within that paradigm, dominated by the overseas interventions of his term. Obama said forthrightly that Republicans had been the party of ideas since the 1980s*, and sought to change that, but he still operated within a corporatist, capitalist, free trade, Washington-Consensus paradigm, with a foreign policy built around assertive American exceptionalism and short sharp interventions. Perhaps Obama thought he could establish a new paradigm, but he didn't, and I debated with Amar at the time if he even could claim one regardless of HRC's results.
If you hate the status quo, you have to hate Reagan as he actually existed. You can, of course, revise Reagan to make a myth of something you do support, but you can't love Reagan and hate the world we live in today. It's his world, it's his America.
*"I think it's fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10-15 years in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom," Obama said in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal.
That doesn’t seem right.
Short, sharp interventions have been out of vogue since some time around Iraq. Neoliberal economics survived the dotcom bubble only to become a permanent wedge after 2008. Obama hollowed out the Democrat apparatus; now Trump’s completed his own skin suit. The Tea Party was completely suborned. Identity politics got a second, third and fourth wind. American exceptionalism shares space with a multipolar model.
Whatever we’re in, it’s not the same paradigm as Reagan.
Were there any short, sharp and successful interventions besides Grenada and Panama?
Kuwait in 1991? Arguably Operations Praying Mantis and El Dorado Canyon, too.
Some might consider Kosovo / bombing Yugoslavia to have been successful, too.
The obvious problem with the Kuwaiti, Iranian and Libyan examples, as opposed to the interventions in Panama and Grenada, is that the military operation, no matter how splendid, did not result in the long-term political settlement of the crisis that prompted the invasion in the first place. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario after all where the 1991 Gulf War is not followed by another Gulf War eventually. Also, the Libyan regime stayed in power and kept supporting terrorist groups after 1986 as well (I suppose). In the case of Kosovo I think the long-term negative repercussions are too palpable. The ‘rule-based international order’ might have worked in another scenario but surely was never going to work after Kosovo.
It's very easy. If the US doesn't start the 2nd Gulf War, there isn't a 2nd Gulf War. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours in 2003 and his WMD programme was kayfabe to deter an Iranian invasion. The only terrorism he was sponsoring was Palestinian terrorism against Israel, which the West was and is comfortable tolerating in countries they don't have any other beefs against. Israel and Saudi Arabia both wanted Saddam gone, but by 2003 both saw Iran as the real threat, which means that the most likely outcome of a 2nd Gulf War (a Shia-dominated government inclined not to oppose Iran) is net negative for them.
There are good reasons for thinking that the world would have been better off without Saddam if he could have been removed by someone competent, but nobody had to remove him. There is no credible scenario where Saddam starts a 2nd Gulf War from his side.
Those are all good points, but I was referring to US domestic politics.
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Obama did... not run a noninterventionist foreign policy. Nor was there a major move away from neoliberal economics until very recently.
I didn’t say noninterventionist. More… disillusioned with the pretense of shortness and sharpness.
Maybe I’m applying too much hindsight. We did get out of Libya pretty fast, and the we didn’t know at the time that it would slump back into civil war. But the Afghanistan slog continued. We waffled on Syria. It’s not entirely pur fault, but it’s just not what I’d call short and sharp.
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No, we just argue about making them shorter and sharper, but we still haven't moved into another paradigm. Obama's foreign policy operated within the same system as Dubya's, the Reagan paradigm, but trying to keep it to drones and special forces instead of heavy ground troops. Obama's interventions in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen were all built around the same foreign interventionist playbook. Trump made lots of noise about being an isolationist, and at times I've applauded him for it, but he kept up drone and special forces campaigns begun by Obama in his first term, including the strike against Abu Bakr and Suleimani, and in his even-more-schizo second term he's bombed Iran in the shortest and sharpest way he could. Trump is trying to break the paradigm, but he hasn't yet constructed a cohesive edifice that shows what he actually wants to do: he talks America First then acts Israel-only. Arguably Biden's pull out from Afghanistan was a move against that paradigm...and it was roundly panned by everyone, sometimes on dishonest technical ground, but really for spiritual reasons.
People are dissatisfied with neoliberal economics on both sides of the aisle, neither side has constructed an alternative. Our economy still functions as a neoliberal Washington consensus corporate financial system. The big banks are still big and still bailed out by the government, the big insurance companies are still causing the same problems as before the ACA, outsourcing and deindustrialization continued apace. Have corporations been pushed from power in any way since 2008, have admins since 2008 been any less in bed with corporations? Sure we've swapped General Motors and General Electric and IBM for Nvidia and Oracle and Meta, but the economy is still built around corporate profits and the stock market. The way it has been since Reagan.
Obama and Trump both talked about moving past the current paradigm into new territory, nobody has done it yet. Trump has yet to build a cohesive economic model or foreign policy. He gestures in new directions, he has not yet completed the change. Maybe President Vance will.
Your general point is correct, but every time this comes up I feel compelled to point out that it's the one thing I have and will always unequivocally praise Biden for. I've had some interesting debates with @Dean on the subject.
Biden's pullout was also executing a deal made by the 1st Trump administration which the Deep State were trying to manipulate Biden into ratting out of.
I tease "Trump makes us stronk" MAGA supporters about the fact that Trump surrendered to the Taliban, but under the circumstances it was clearly the right call for Trump to surrender and clearly the right call for Biden to implement the surrender agreement. The war had ceased to be winnable long ago.
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I dont recall if you have addressed this point in the past, but given what appear to be tactical blunders on just about every level, how do you defend Biden's failure to fire multiple Generals and other high level commanding officers that participated in the withdrawal?
The same way I defend Trump's failure to fire the generals who admitted to lying to him to prevent his lawful orders from being carried out. My assessment is that the Bureaucratic layer is out of control, and I'm much more worried about getting it back under control than I am about ensuring that the Executive is giving maximally-good orders. Given the choice between assigning blame to the bureaucratic layer and assigning it to the executive for failing to punish the bureaucratic layer... If we punish the executive, how does this translate to the bureaucratic layer receiving accountability for their fuckups?
Perhaps more firings?
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I'm kind of excluding you and me from the category "everyone" here. I guess "everyone relevant on the political spectrum" would be more accurate, but less felicitous.
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The right wing critique of Reagan would be that he was a Judas goat who created the strong appearance of rolling back Johnson’s Great Society program while actually solidifying and entrenching it. Another thing to keep in mind is that one of Reagan’s main conservative bonafides was winning the Cold War, and it is starting to feel more and more lately like America didn’t actually win the Cold War. China won the Cold War, while the USA and USSR both lost.
"Clinton and Gingrich actually did more to roll back the welfare state and control spending in general" is very much a valid criticism of Reagan. Empirically, the US is only fiscally responsible when there is a Democratic President and a Republican deficit hawk leads at least one house of Congress.
"Starve the beast" is a failed Reagan policy - it turns out that if you cut taxes while promising to protect popular spending, you don't force your political opponents to cut spending when they get in, you just blow out the deficit. The reason why Reagan still has a good reputation on tax is that most of what he did to the tax code was fiscally neutral simplification (lower rates, fewer loopholes).
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The Soviet Bloc was a spent force by the time he assumed office. Their best available future option was ongoing stagnation followed by limited market reforms that end up preserving the political system while abandoning the Cold War, as in the case of Cuba and Vietnam.
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The timing doesn't line up. In 1991, China was still sorting itself out while the US had emerged from the Cold War wealthier, more powerful, and more unchallenged than ever. It wasn't like the US exhausted itself crushing the USSR. You could compellingly argue that the US fumbled its post-Cold War international supremacy through a combination of complacency, arrogance, and sheer stupidity, but that's a matter quite separate from China winning the Cold War.
That won't necessarily stop people from re-imagining Reagan as the guy who sold the world to China, but they'll be wrong.
@anon_ I’m not saying Reagan personally whiffed it. That’s mostly on the people that came after him. I mean that with hindsight it starts to seem less and less like a grand achievement, which is going to tarnish his reputation even if that part of it wasn’t his fault. Ozymandias built a pretty amazing temple and monument complex, but all I’m seeing at the moment is a disembodied stone foot sticking out of the trackless desert and it’s hard to be impressed.
One of my favorite random facts is that after Shelley wrote the poem, the mummy of Ramses II (in Greek, Ozymandias) was discovered and is currently in a museum in Cairo.
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Oh come on. China ended 1988 with a GDP of $325B as compared to the US $5.XT
Almost all of China's growth and power has accrued after 2000.
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Exactly. If you don't like the America we live in today, you can't love Ronald Reagan. He compromised with the New Deal, he made Social Security and Medicare understood as permanent entitlements for "hard working" old people, even as he tried to roll back welfare benefits for working age young people. Reagan brought on The End of History, but maybe that wasn't such a good thing after all for conservatives.
I don't know where the saying originates, but I've heard many times that Athens recovered from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War very quickly, while Sparta never recovered from its victory. America may never recover from what it did to win the Cold War.
The Christian Right also supported him in the belief that he'll help them advance their goals. In fact, the opposite happened. At the same time, the Left largely completed the Long March through the institutions with most distracted Reagan supporters not even noticing.
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For over a decade at least I've seen the right blame Reagan's amnesty for turning California from deep red to deep blue. And also the reason to never believe in another amnesty deal every again.
I think for the longest time the GOP loved Reagan almost just because he won 49/50 states. He won the cold war, and there are still a terrifying number of unreformed cold warriors in and around Washington dictating increasingly deranged policy.
But it's also easy to forget that Reagan was a Hollywood liberal until he reinvented himself as a conservative. Liberals flocked to the GOP under his banner, and this weird combination of pro-interventionist, pro big spending liberals with pro free trade conservatives birthed the Neoconservative movement, which has been hated my entire life. Neocon was a meaningless smear word the entirety of my childhood and early adulthood.
But the lived experience of the Reagan years were amazing. My father until the day he died talked about what a relief it was to just survive in America under Reagan. The way he remembered it, taxes and cost of living was destroying everyone in America until Reagan came along and finally fixed everything. Reagan was elected in 80, my dad got married, bought a house and had a kid (me) shortly after. I can't speak to the accuracy of how he remembered things, but his actions certainly speak to some faith that it felt that way to him at the time at least.
Actually kind of reminds me of the trajectory of my own life with respect to Trump getting elected. The tax cuts were among the best raises I ever got, and my investments went through the roof. Made me feel good enough about my life after too long feeling like I was barely treading water, unable to keep up with a constantly shifting goalpost, that I got married, bought a house and had a kid.
I did the math about a year ago and guess what? At least if we're talking about amnesty creating eventual citizens who eventually vote and vote Democratic at disproportionate rates, the numbers simply don't work and would have had only a minor impact at best in turning California blue. So, I'm sorry if that's a long held belief of yours but it doesn't seem true.
It's probably more a mix of tech boom + urbanization + marginal changes in demographic makeup + a few more local concerns + national trends. It's worth noting how fast this was, though, and that makes me suspect the last two especially: +16 R for Reagan in the 1984 wave, to +3.5 R for Bush Sr 1988, to a total collapse to -13.5 (Ross Perot shenanigans though) as Clinton took the state for good in 1992 with about the same margin again in 1996. A bungled post-Reagan, post-amnesty GOP push for a 1994 anti-immigrant bill is often cited... but that post-dates the first massive swing against Bush and Republicans. So unless you mean that somehow that amnesty almost singlehandedly turned pre-existing Reagan fans against Bush Sr, I don't see it. California only went about 2 to 3 points more Democratic than expected (the 4-year swing as compared to national trends) in 1988, the closest election after the 1986 amnesty. Even if you think that "unique" delta is purely the result of amnesty, it's still only a drop in the pond compared the overall swing and certainly wasn't the sole difference even remotely. An easier holistic explanation is right there: Bush was an East Coast insider. And you probably had some early stirrings of social liberalism gaining ground. Looking again at the numbers, it seems to me that a mix of Bush Sr's weaknesses plus the Clinton era is more responsible than anything else (in 1996, actually, since Clinton did better than 1992 generally, you could actually characterize it as a small amount of backsliding, but 2000 seemed to cement the vote differential as noticeably Democratic).
I'm sure you could do more analysis with more local knowledge and county data, not just presidential numbers, but I'm pretty sure the explanatory power of the lazy equation above is pretty high, and doesn't leave much room for a uniquely amnesty blame-game.
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Vietnam has low taxes, social conservatism and super business friendly policies while having hammer and sickle flags along the streets and a political system that celebrates Lenin. The republicans are going to talk about how great Reagan was while under no circumstances wanting to talk about his policies since Reagan's agenda are pretty much the opposite of MAGA. Republicans will like the aesthetic while refusing to even acknowledge the ideas.
Reagan's big thing -- building up the military in opposition to the USSR -- is no longer relevant.
Reagan was big on the War On Drugs. So is Trump.
Reagan liked lower taxes. So does Trump.
Reagan made a deal for immigration amnesty. Trump saw the results of this deal and won't. So not really a conflict.
Reagan talked big about free trade, which Trump doesn't. But despite that he did engage in trade warring, including YUGE tariffs on agricultural goods.
They aren't the same, but they aren't "the opposite" either.
Reagan liked cutting rates (and in particular top rates which were far too high at the time) while closing loopholes and simplifying the tax code. Trump likes opening new loopholes and making the tax code more complex.
Arguably, the huge increase in the standard deduction is the biggest simplification of the tax code since Reagan. After the 2018 (Trump administration) changes there, the number of filings taking the standard deduction went up from 70 to 90 percent.
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Reagan was a neocon globalist. A strong focus on military interventionism, free trade and shipping jobs abroad. He didn't really focus on America but a globalized American empire.
Military interventionism during his presidency was rather limited in scope though.
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What actually is the opinion of Republican voters toward Reagan nowadays? Do they even care? AFAICT among Democrats his name is still mud--HIV, the homeless, the decline of unions, and rise of inequality are all his fault--to the extent that even Bush Jr. seems to have a better reputation nowadays. But I don't see Republicans on the Internet referencing him much, for good or ill.
What exactly should he have done? Closed down gay bathhouses, interned and tested every patron and resettled the HIV-infected ones on Angel Island?
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I don't think this is true, except in the sense that he is a conservative Republican and therefore the enemy. He tends to score well in polls of academic historians, for example, who are 80-90% Democrats. It is (and was at the time) mud among leftists, who resent the fact that he successfully deprived their beloved USSR of the moral high ground. Most Democrats are not leftists, although for most of the last decade this hasn't been obvious because the non-leftist Democrats were afraid of the leftists calling them racist.
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I think it's worth considering that our current Vice President is not old enough to remember Reagan being in office.
That said, this Millennial Republican voter's opinion is that Reagan is both overrated and over-hated. Why? Because he was mostly a continuation of Carter's neoliberal agenda with a more optimistic presentation. Good or bad, neoliberalism should be understood not as something imposed by the GOP (who, let us remember, never controlled Congress during Reagan or H.W. Bush's Presidencies) but also as a change in elite consensus within the Democratic Party. Pick something that Reagan is blamed or credited for and odds are that Carter really started it. Union busting? Carter appointed Volker whose interest rate hikes wrecked the sort of private sector jobs that were heavily unionized. That big military buildup? Also started under Carter, and for all his peacenik vibes post-Presidency he took a more confrontational tone toward the USSR (compare Carter's Zbigniew Brzezinski to Nixon's Henry Kissinger) than Nixon. Maybe we buy the idea that Reagan didn't care much about AIDS but I've yet to see a convincing argument that the US handled it radically worse than the rest of the developed world. Most Democrats voted for Reagan's tax cuts. As Governor of California Reagan was hardly a conservative firebrand. He signed off on tax increases while legalizing abortion (and he'd go on to screw over the pro-lifers again by nominating Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court) and no-fault divorce. Free trade and immigration? The Democrats have been free traders more or less continuously for the party's entire existence, and Congressional Democrats were more likely to vote for Reagan's amnesty than members of his own party.
IMO his legacy is outsized for both sides because it allows a certain brand of Republicans to act as if they had more to do with the good things that happened than is arguably the case and a certain brand of Democrats to avoid facing the fact that they'd largely been betrayed by their own party's politicians. Amusingly, certain right-wing ideologues figured it out first, which is why both Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan ran campaigns against Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush.
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That's a good question. His final approval poll was 63-29, at the higher end of a presidency that went up and down around an average of 53. His retroactive approval went as high as 73-22 in 2002, and as of a couple years ago it was still 69-28, 2nd only to JFK among the 9 recent presidents Gallup asked about. The left-wing opinion still seems to be "Reagan screwed up the AIDS epidemic" so I'd have to assume that his support still leans right and he's at 70+ among Republican voters.
But this might be just one of those things that's uselessly sensitive to poll wording (YouGov says 44-29! Is that just because they emphasize their "neutral" option more?) or to poll methodology (Gallup says 90-8 for JFK!? Is it just getting harder and harder to correct for "only boomers answer the phone for pollsters" effects?).
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It has been my experience that Bush II has a better reputation among the "respectability" wing of the GOP, who seem to sincerely believe that if only Trump had been more like Romney in 2020, the loss would have been closer, and they could have lost again in 2024, instead of being saddled with a GOP president in the current year.
Among the rank and file of "occasional voters" that form a lot of Trump's base, Reagan is a remote, vague, yet positive figure who hearkens back to a time when America Still Had Balls.
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You may have recently heard of a certain slogan of his, though -- 'Make American Great Again'.
Democrats always hated him, as much as they hated anyone up until Trump.
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