FREE FOR ALL: How Ronald Reagan opened the Republican Party to the far right
Author Max Boot on the roots of Trumpism in the party Reagan remade
When we first published this interview back in July, it was just after the Pennsylvania rally shooting; we return to it following a second apparent attempt on Trump’s life, but more significantly as a racist hate campaign — spearheaded by Trump and his running mate — unfolds against the Haitian immigrant community of Springfield, Ohio and new revelations have emerged about how significantly the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court appears to have tipped the scales for the former president.
Again, we are wondering, how did we get here, from “Morning in America” to the American carnage of Trumpism?
Max Boot’s critical biography of Ronald Reagan, Reagan: His Life and Legend explores in detail how the Great Communicator was both more of a conservative ideologue and pragmatic politician than was understood at the time and reveals the roots of Trumpism in Reagan’s opening up of the Republican party to the far right and his reliance on barely veiled racist appeals and what we’d understand nowadays as “alternative facts” — the hodgepodge of half-recalled statistics and events and figures drawn from fiction that are all too familiar in the language of MAGA Republicans.
Boot’s study grows out of a personal journey; a longtime Republican, over the course of researching the book he left the Party, disillusioned with Trump and the MAGA movement:
I'm really trying to examine how the Republican Party and the United States got this way and to think about, the rise of Trump and the changes we've seen in the country in the last few years; those provide a new perspective that previous authors would not have had on the Reagan presidency and the Reagan legacy.
I can see both his foibles and his strengths, his achievements, as well as his failures, and try to present both to readers, trying to figure out how America got this way.
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Often people look to characterize Reagan by asking, "Okay, was he a pragmatist? Or was he an ideologue?" The answer is both, but you've taken on both sides of the received wisdom about his presidency and problematized both of those questions quite a bit.
I did not really come into this project with any preconceived notion beyond wanting to get the story straight. But out of my research, two somewhat contradictory conclusions emerged, which was that Reagan was both more ideological and more pragmatic than most people realized. And that's the inherent contradiction or mystery at the core of Reagan's being. And he was a very mysterious person, even to many of the people who were closest to him.
People know he was conservative, but I'm not sure they understand just how conservative he was, especially in the early 1960s when he was very influenced by the ideas of the John Birch Society and other right-wing extremists. He was warning that every social welfare program like Medicare and Medicaid was going to lead to communism in America. I'm not sure people realize the extent to which he was opposed to civil rights legislation. Instead, he focused on what he saw as the supposed attacks on private property in America in telling property owners they could not discriminate against African Americans.
He rose to political power in 1966 in his first race for governor of California, among other issues, by one, attacking those kids in Berkeley, attacking student protesters, but also attacking on the theme of law and order and the threat of a breakdown of law and order, which, as I think we know now, has often been a veiled form of appealing to white backlash politics.
The substance and the themes of those attacks are very familiar now, part of the playbook.
The big difference between Reagan and Nixon on the one hand and Wallace on the other is that Reagan and Nixon pioneered their southern strategies, their appeals to white working-class voters without using explicitly racist language by talking about law and order and using dog whistles. But they were certainly appealing to the same kinds of voters.
So as to his pragmatism, when Reagan was elected governor in '66 and president in 1980, a lot of people thought he would be this extremist, this right-wing lunatic. I was pretty young at the time, but I remember in 1980 living in Riverside, California, a college town, so many of our neighbors thought that you elect Reagan today and you're going to have World War III tomorrow.
That said, they took his hardcore right-wing campaign rhetoric as an indication of what he would do once in office. And in fact, it didn't actually work out that way. He was actually a much more pragmatic and much more centrist governor and president than his most fervent right-wing supporters expected or his most fervent left-wing critics feared.
For example, as governor of California, he signed the largest budget in state history with the largest spending increases as well as a small tax cut. And he signed the most liberal abortion law in the country at the time. He signed a tough gun control bill.…
So as he’s moving right he’s also developing this fabulism, presenting himself as a heroic figure where that was not the case and adopting fictions as truths, correct? That sets the stage for a lot of what's happened since Reagan in the Republican Party.
There are many, many more differences than similarities between the Reagan Republican Party and the Trump Republican Party, but there are certain disturbing trend lines and continuities. And one of them is this disdain of facts, which Reagan exhibited throughout his career. By the early '60s when he was very right-wing and kept insisting that the Democratic Party was leading America to communism, he developed this battery of faux quotes to support this ludicrous contention.
These quotes, supposedly from the likes of Lenin and Stalin and others, explained this supposed communist plot to first turn America socialist and then to turn it communist, which was absurd. That was never a communist strategy. These were basically made up by the John Birch Society and other extremists, but Reagan would repeat them year after year, even when it was pointed out to him that they weren't accurate.
He read a lot of dodgy sources. And he had a great memory. So these facts lodged in his brain and it was very hard to dislodge them. If they agreed with his ideological vision, he kept repeating many of these faux facts for decades to come. And he didn't really seem to care whether they were true or not because their literal truth was of no concern to him. He cared about some higher ideological truth, which he thought they supported.
If you think about the notion of alternative facts, would you say there’s a through line to what we're experiencing now on a much broader scale?
There was a limit to how many people were going to believe these things because at the time people still got their news from a major newspaper or one of the television networks, which were pretty centrist and factually oriented in their coverage.
The difference now, of course, is that if you're on the right, you can be in this information bubble where Donald Trump says something ridiculously false. And then Fox News or other sources or radio hosts just reinforce that. So you're never exposed to anything approaching reality. So Reagan was just operating in a very different environment. And that made a huge difference.
I think especially when he was in office and was exposed by aides to non-ideological points of view, given actual accurate information by the government, or exposed to Democrats' actual arguments instead of caricatures of their arguments, he would respond to that in a good-faith way.
But now so many people on the right never have to respond to anything that Democrats say in any kind of serious way. They never have to respond to any actual facts reported by The New York Times or Washington Post because they live in their alternative reality bubble.
If you look at the ideological trajectory of the Republican Party, you can argue very broadly that it's been moving to the right since Goldwater in '64, and Reagan's election in 1980 certainly moved the Republican Party to the right. But it was still far to the left of where it is today. You can imagine that 40 years of moving even further and further to the right has brought the Republican Party to a very different place from where it was in the 1980s
[H]is policies set the country on a path to rising income inequality. And that’s perhaps had the most impact, correct?
At the time, people tended to focus on the strength of the economy, although I would mention parenthetically that if you actually look at economic indicators, they're actually better today than they were in 1984 when Reagan was campaigning on “Morning in America,” and now Biden is getting attacked for the horrible economy. It's actually stronger than it was in '84.
One of the aspects of Reagan's legacy that didn't get enough attention was how his tax cuts were exacerbating income inequality. And so many of the economic gains of the 1980s went to the top 1 percent. Now, that's not something that conservative Republicans would express much concern about because they would say, "Well, we don't care about income distribution. All we care about is economic growth."
I was sympathetic to that argument at the time, but with the benefit of decades of hindsight, we can see that having this widening economic inequality has very corrosive political effects. And it really mobilizes extreme populism on both the left and the right, whether it's Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party on the right, or now Trumpism, a lot of it has fed off of the hollowing out of industrial towns, the lack of opportunity for working-class Americans, even as the rich are getting richer than ever. Right now, if you look at American income inequality, we're up there with some Latin American countries. We're very far removed from our democratic peers in Europe or elsewhere.
It's a much more serious concern than Reagan or his aides realized. But there's no question that if you look at charts of income inequality in America, they really began to open up in an alarming way in the early 1980s. And that gap has never really closed.
We’re dealing with those corrosive effects in a really big way. And now we have Trump, who is also a performer, a fabulist, and a threat to democracy. Is he a Reaganesque figure?
Reagan and Trump are very different personalities in ways that are largely to Reagan's credit. Reagan was very sunny and optimistic, very inclusive, whereas Trump is, of course, very dour, and apocalyptic. And Reagan was fundamentally small-d democratic. He believed that when the voters elected Democrats, he had a duty to work with them for the benefit of the country. He didn't think that he should be out there trying to destroy the Democrats or put them in jail as Trump says.
But again, there are similarities: playing to white backlash politics, their disdain for facts. Also, their appeal as TV performers because let's remember, these are the only two guys ever to become president after hosting highly ranked national television shows. And that's where a lot of their name recognition and credibility comes from. And they also, interestingly enough, both had this kind of conceit that they were master negotiators or dealmakers.
And it's interesting to see how the cult of Trump has kind of overtaken the Republican Party. But up until Trump, Reagan was the cult-like figure. He was the unifying figure in the Republican Party. And now if you're still somebody who worships Ronald Reagan, you're kind of an outlier, an old-school RINO, Republican In Name Only.
Max Boot’s forthcoming book is Reagan: His Life and Legend.
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