An essay by Torben Lütjen in the last week’s issue of the highbrow German weekly Die Zeit picks up the habit. He presents Ronald Reagan as Der gute Amerikaner (The Good American). (1) The online version shows Reagan sitting at the Presidential desk bathed in some kind of divine light, or something similar.
When America no longer knew where to go, a man from the entertainment industry appeared to the country as a savior and promised to make it great again as a candidate for the Presidency. He was considered a political lightweight, intellectually unfit to lead a world power. When he made it to the White House, against all odds, half of the country continued to vehemently reject him. They saw him as a cold-hearted turbo-capitalist who, out of opportunism, had also gotten to bed with the Religious Right. Moreover, the new President was simply embarrassing to many Americans, and the fear was not entirely unjustified: It was not only in Germany that people turned up their noses in indignation and considered the President to be the incarnation of everything that went wrong in the USA: the greed of Wall Street, the stupefaction of shallow American pop culture, religious fanaticism, and the glorification of brute force. [my emphasis]The point of that argument is to offer Reagan as someone who looked like a disastrous choice but who really practiced a more humane version of conservatism. The point of such comparisons is that reactionaries of days past can offer inspiration for the Republicans to again become a responsible democratic political party.
None of us should kid ourselves about St. Reagan. He was a rightwing who pandered to some of the most hardcore rightwingers in the US body politic.
None of us should kid ourselves about St. Reagan. He was a rightwing who pandered to some of the most hardcore rightwingers in the US body politic.
To be fair, Reagan was never quite the stone reactionary that Trump’s political mentor New York Mob lawyer Roy Cohn, was. “Not as bad as Roy Cohn” is about the lowest possible bar for political decency imaginable. Although I guess “not as bad as Jeffrey Epstein” might be a contender.
Reagan had a career in show business and made films in support of the war effort during the Second World War. He actually was kind of a lefty just after the war, getting involved with peace activists types in Hollywood. His account of how he met his second wife, the actress Nancy Davis was that she had been invited to join the Communist Party, and someone suggested it with Reagan. The later story was that the CP confused her with another Nancy Davis, though last I heard, no one had figured out who that other Nancy Davis was.
Reagan was a leader of the Screen Actors Guild, the main actors’ union. But when the postwar Red Scare heated up and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) started searching for Reds in Hollywood, Reagan willingly cooperated with them. He was later rewarded by the Hollywood moguls by sweetheart real estate deals that made him wealthy. This is a similarity with Roy Cohn, who made a reputation as a Red-hunter before devoting his career to being legal counsel for mobsters.
Reagan later became the host of the TV show GE Theater, a TV series sponsored by its namesake General Motors, which brought him before a broad TV audience as a benign and respectable personality. He became heavily involved with Republican politics, campaigning for rightwing Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and warning how Lyndon Johnson’s sinister plans for Medicare would wipe out American liberty forever.
He managed to get elected Governor of California campaigning against dope-smoking hippies and antiwar demonstrators and “Berkeley.” He won a second term so that he served as California Governor from 1967-1975, succeeded by a young Jerry Brown. This meant that he actually served eight year as Governor of the largest state in the Union before he became President, a qualification that Donald Trump certainly didn’t have.
Reagan was a much slicker rightwing demagogue than Trump. He promoted hard-right economic policies and was devoted to ever-increasing military budgets, an aggressive anti-Soviet foreign policy and some irresponsible and reckless policies like support for the far-right Contras fighters opposed the then left-leaning government of Nicaragua. Which in turn led him to the disastrous “Iran-Contra” deals which provided weapons to the Iranian mullahs who were supposedly America’s deadly enemies in those days. Oh, yeah, the circumstantial evidence is very strong that Reagan as a candidate made an arrangement with Iran in 1980 to not release the American hostages they were holding until after the election, an arrangement of which the Iran-Contra dealings were likely an extension.
Reagan successfully raised the Social Security retirement age, doing so by postponing the date for decades at which the full retirement age would rise from 65 to 67. In the ensuing decades, the availability of private pensions which had been a staple of the postwar “welfare-capitalist” system of roughly 1945-1975, so that the decrease in Social Security coincided with a trend that made Social Security, which had been envisioned as a supplement to private pensions, became the primary retirement income for a far larger number of people.
His military policy included the “Star Wars” project of trying to achieve a antiballistic-missile-system that would provide a protective shield against nuclear missiles. If there has been a example of a greater boondoggle in the history of the world, I couldn’t say what that might be. Trump has been talking up the same nonsense.
And he contributed mightily to promoting Christian nationalism as a force in the Republican Party.
But Reagan did have a couple of solid policies that Trump will never have. One was that he liberalized national immigration policy in a pragmatic recognition of how “non-documented” immigration had become a key feature of the economy, something he learned as Governor of California. Neither the two Bushes nor Clinton nor Barack Obama achieved anything so constructive in immigration policy. Reagan never staged the kind of Gestapo scenes of attacking Latinos that has become a signatory feature of Trump 2.0 fascism.
And the effect of those pinko peace-activist groups with which Ronnie and Nancy associated themselves apparently had some lasting effects. Because when Michael Gorbachev was ready to made expansive new nuclear-arms-control agreements and to pursue friendlier relations with the West, Reagan was willing to go along with what was a hopeful and successful reduction in US-Soviet tensions.
But Reagan clearly had an authoritarian streak, as well. And the “respectable callousness” he promoted as a key part of his politics of trashing poor people had toxic and long-lasting effects. And, oh yeah, we should give him due credit for initiating the homelessness crisis in California with his cutbacks on mental health facilities as California Governor.
Ronald Reagan and Dick Cheney were two of the most key figures putting the US on the road to Trumpist authoritarianism, for which more and more “respectable observers” are now using the correct term of “fascism” to describe. It was Reagan’s mission to turn the US into a paradise for antisocial billionaires like Elon Mush and Jeff Bezos.
So, please spare us the nonsense about the good ole days of respectable and responsible Reaganite conservatism. It’s a fairy tale. And a dishonest one, at that.
And, yes, Reagan’s “respectable callousness” included encouraging white racism, which was one of his most toxic contributions to American political life.
Notes:
(1) Lütjen, Torben (2025): Der gute Amerikaner. Die Zeit 27.11.2025, 50-51. My translations to English. <https://www.zeit.de/2025/50/ronald-reagan-usa-praesident-demokraten-republikaner-donald-trump>
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