The Greatness of Ronald Reagan

“With bloated bureaucracies and top marginal tax rates at 70% when he entered office, President Reagan also carried in his mind a basic script about overreach of the federal government that resonated with Americans after a decade of stagflation and presidential scandals.”

Former President of the United States Ronald Reagan has rarely, if ever, been considered a friend of progressive politics. Although he started out as a Roosevelt Democrat, President Reagan eventually migrated to the Republican Party. In 1964, he launched himself into the national spotlight with his “Time for Choosing” speech, repudiating “a greater government activity in the affairs of the people” while endorsing ultraconservative Republican nominee Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential campaign.

Ever since, President Reagan has been seen by progressives as a villain in a story that casts him, among other things, as an opponent of a “Great Society” of active, centralized government; as a warmonger; as a prominent spokesman for the “Southern strategy” which played on racist sentiments to bring the South into the Republican fold; and perhaps most notoriously, as chief spokesman for a “neoliberal” ideology which paved the way for deepening inequalities not only between rich and poor but also between white and black. For race scholars, President Reagan adopted a set of “racist and classist policies” (in the words of anti-racist activist Ibram X. Kendi) that bears much responsibility for a retrenchment of racial and economic justice over the course of the last half century.

President Reagan is even regarded with some suspicion among conservatives who traditionally have lauded him as an icon who, in the words of M.E. Bradford, “put to rest forever the old axiom that no candidate for the presidency can run as a conservative and be elected.” Former Reagan administration official Linda Chavez notes that President Reagan “is remembered by some on the right now with some dismay because he was the man who signed the biggest amnesty for illegal aliens.”