Ronald Reagan is the papier mache saint of the Republican Party. People look back and see what they want to see. Artificial nostalgia was his brand; this magical elixir is still being offered up today. But it was all image and ‘photo ops’; phony then, phony today. So how do you de-construct a mirage?

Start with the record. Reagan was supposed to be the ‘white man’s candidate’; one Klan leader even endorsed him, though this was repudiated by the Reagan campaign. Why embarrass yourself with support you don’t need.

As we all know, Reagan campaigned against the government he was proposing to lead. But the anti-government jargon was selective in practice. One casualty was the Border Patrol; Reagan quit guarding the border as part of his anti-labor crusade. Lower the wage level for his Big Business base. Later, his Administration would pass an Amnesty bill that was honest enough to call itself amnesty.

Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’ was done by credit card. His deficit-spending even left ultra-liberal Democrats in the dust. By September 16, 1985, the USA became a debtor nation for the first time since 1914. Except for a brief interregnum under Clinton, that debt spiral has continued and gotten worse. Mark that date: 9/16/85. THAT’S when America’s decline accelerated.

The deterioration of America’s decline on the home front was masked by military bravado on the world stage. The Mr. Republican of his time, Robert Taft (who died in 1953), was an America First isolationist. His credo was set forth in his book, FORTRESS AMERICA. In it, he was for a dinky Army & Navy but an Air Force with big bombers. He voted against NATO. Taft spelled out that a regime of limited government and low taxes was incompatible with the National Security State and a Global role.

But Taft’s putative successor, Barry Goldwater, altered the blueprint. He adopted the Truman foreign policy and tried hitching it to Taft’s image of government. This shotgun marriage of Limited Government and Unlimited National Security State was justified by the Cold War. This deviation from Taft was promised to be only ‘temporary.’

With the Democrats & liberals flinching at what they had wrought in Vietnam, Goldwater’s successor, Ronnie Reagan, and the GOP, took over the Democrats’ “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace” as their own.

Of course, a honking gaggle of preachers and other hustlers did their part in The Great Reagan Masque. Still, this by itself was not enough. Polling data during the Reagan years still showed a New Deal majority in the country. But that alternative wasn’t offered. For in the meantime, New Politics liberals had taken over the Democratic Party and dispossessed the white working-class base of the New Deal.

I could go on, but why? Avril Lavigne at the bottom of this page, gives my view.