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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25258 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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