When Ronald Reagan finally passed in June of 2004, a friend of mine, overweight, into his 40s and suffering from significant heart arrhythmia issues, waited six hours in the DC sun to walk past and get a momentary glimpse of the embalmed corpse in the Capitol Rotunda. When he boasted to me of his pilgrimage I incredulously asked why he felt compelled to extend such a thankless gesture, and believe me, thankless gestures were not familiar elements of this guy’s makeup. He declared that, except for Lincoln, and maybe Washington, Reagan stood alone in the pantheon of US Presidents, and it was the least he could do for so great a man.
Since I had known this friend since 89’, just after the Reagan years ended, I quipped that I didn’t remember him being so devout back in the day, when #40, fully debilitated by an Iran-Contra scandal that would claim most of his national security team, and paint him as either feckless and fully disengaged or at the top of a criminal conspiracy, limped away from the White House. He declared something to the effect that history had been very good to Ronald Reagan. I scratched my head and chuckled to myself; that’s one way to put it. He of course was a dedicated Fox viewer.
In 2004 the shit river was not the torrent it has become, but it’s growing influence was on display with the burial of Reagan, who was not so much being celebrated as used to create destructive dogmas employed in his name, with the glorification of his achievements pursued to create credibity instead of the full throated rebuke they deserved. Supply side economics, trickle down, unfettered deficit spending, welfare queens, mindless deregulation, unchecked military budget increases, not to mention culture wars boogie men like affirmative action, planned parenthood and attacks on the 2nd Amendment, all would become party sacred cows as part and parcel of homage to Reagan.
Miscreants like Grover Norquist and Wayne LaPierre would ride Reagan’s cold dead bones to become repulsive litmus testers for party candidates, and destroyers of bipartisanship. And when all was said and done, a nihilist party would emerge, unconcerned with even employing the dogmas created in Reagan’s name to govern so much as using them as the basis for nostalgic days past, lost to “progressives” bent on destroying the “Reagan Revolution”. Forget, of course, the fact that Reagan would be mercilessly dismissed as an addled RINO in today’s GOP, the picking through his remains continues to be an ongoing cottage industry.
So it’s now clear sanctification of Reagan was far more ominous than it appeared and portended a voter base fully detached from fact and self-examination. Victory in the Cold War forced a diminishment across the media spectrum of the ugly corruption and peccadillos of the Reagan years, confronting the Fox/AM mythology with merely a neutral counterpoint. So Reagan, who we now know was suffering from dementia during at least the final months of his presidency, became the apex of Republican executive leadership, even if accepting such a distinction dramatically lowered the bar for fresh GOP talent, ushering in a generation of mediocrities, whose lack of policy gravitas became less and less of a concern. Dan Quayle, W, Sarah Palin, not to mention the full subsuming of the GOP by the Tea Party wave of 2010, all can be traced to Reagan idolatry.
And so here we are, 30 years later, with a GOP POTUS, who really does consummate Reagan as the Best and Brightest by comparison! Trump is the reckoning that comes with, not just refusing to learn from history, but allowing a major party to get away with reimagining it’s failures as triumphs, its bankrupt dogmas as fresh ideas, and a movie actor, who needed help remembering why he was in Reykjavik, as one of our greatest Presidents. It’s hard to imagine where the GOP is going to find the vibrancy and intelligence to survive Trump, but if it thinks going back to the drawing board means discovering “another Reagan”, it is indeed up the shit river without a paddle. BC