So...perhaps one of the most commented on aspects of Slotkin's cringey SOTU response was the fact that she invoked Ronald Reagan. This rubbed a lot of lefties the wrong way. Since when do THE DEMOCRATS invoke people like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush? For some reason (we all know why, money), the democrats keep trying to draw closer to invoking conservative leaders from what is now the previous era of politics, as if they should be role models for anything. They're doing this because they're trying to appeal to this moderate republican suburbanite who now leans democrat. And it's cringe. And no one likes this stuff.
With that said, I want to discuss Ronald Reagan's overall ideology and legacy.
The one time it is a okay to invoke Reagan in my book
So...the 1980s were different times, and the one thing I think Reagan did right AT THE TIME was foreign policy. Given Russia's aggression in Ukraine, the west needs to have an aggressive stance in opposing them. Ronald Reagan was one who actually is a fairly decent role model here. He was strong on the soviets. He did star wars. He helped fund the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in fighting the Soviets, which is really the model that should be done with Ukraine. He told Gorbachev to "tear down this wall." I might not like Reagan on everything but if you're invoking him on Russo-Western relations, okay. You get a pass.
This isn't even just a republican thing. Democratic congressman Charlie Wilson is the mastermind behind my approach to Ukraine. You know "Charlie Wilson's War"? It's about how this congressman Charlie Wilson was the mastermind that helped fund the Afghan resistance to the Soviets. And that basically helped break the Soviet Union. You see, back then, being anti Russian was bipartisan, and it was kind of a national obligation at that point. It was the evil empire of the world that had to be stopped at all costs, and we learned how to fund a proxy war to drain russia of resources while still having plausible deniability ourselves. Outside of some special forces we didnt put boots on the ground in Russia, and those who did go were basically on their own with little to no support, we'd deny they even existed for obvious diplomatic reasons, but yeah. We helped the Afghans fight Russia.
And just like that, we should have Ukraine...fight Russia.
Still, it's just this one context
Obviously, a lot has changed in the past 40 years since then. Reagan's "tough on our enemies" approach later became the blueprint for future foreign policy aggression that hasnt aged well. It's weird. In the 1990s, after the USSR felt, the conservatives did become more isolationist as liberals wanted to be more multilateral. Clinton wanted to fund a bunch of UN stuff that ended up not being very popular, including putting boots on the ground in Somalia, and the right was like "we should mind our own business." They wanted to stay tough, but they didn't want to engage with the rest of the world.
In the 2000s, 9/11 pushed the GOP toward hawkishness. They were aggressive on wars, and accused those of not being so unpatriotic, while at the same time being very unilateral. The anti UN sentiment of the 90s was responsible for why we were so churlish toward our allies during that time, when a lot of them were questioning of our actions and motives. In the long term, the Europeans were right, and the democrats largely sided with the idea that we should work with our allies toward common threats, not go it alone and come off like jack###es.
When Obama won in 2008, we had another realignment. The democrats would be multilateral, but try to scale down conflicts. And this is where I got my core foreign policy views from. I do believe in being less active overseas where we can be. But we should maintain good relations with our allies and I do believe in collective security.
The right...accused Obama of being weak on everything. But then in 2016, we saw another realignment. The democrats started screaming about Russia, while the republicans...suddenly became okay with Russia. This was because the democrats cynically used national security arguments to try to bully both the right, and also the bernie left into supporting them, while the right and the bernie left...became extremely anti war to a fault. This is where we start getting the modern views.
Since then, the republicans have come off weak on russia, even as it's been shown that the democrats had a point. And while the democrats were way too aggressive with this stuff back in 2016-2018ish or so to the point that no one really believed them, well...as it turned out they were right.
In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. We've had little conflicts like this over the years. In 2008 Russia invaded Georgia and that actually made McCain go up in the polls temporarily. But the invasion was only a few weeks and then it was over. In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine to take Crimea. They did this so they had access to a warm water port. Like Georgia in 2008, it was a short lived invasion and we hoped that Russia would stop there. But then in 2022, Russia manufactured consent around and launched a full on invasion of the entire country of Ukraine. The goal was to take the eastern regions, but ultimately, they also went after Kyiv and tried to decapitate the government. This was a full on invasion, a full on show of force, it was unprovoked, and it was wrong. And that's where things realigned for me. Biden closed out Afghanistan in 2021, and in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. We are now functionally back in the 80s. The 90s-2010s foreign policy approach of just sitting back and not doing anything won't work here. We're back to the evil empire that has to be stopped...again.
And the republicans...sympathize with the evil empire, and share the values...of said evil empire, as Jon Stewart pointed out this week. And the democrats...well...we have to take up the mantle of being fiercely patriotic and defensive of western values....actual western values, enlightenment values. Values of democracy and freedom. Because MAGA's idea of western values is just a dogwhistle for christianity, which is regressive. And that's something that both Russia and MAGA agree on. So, if we, democrats have to channel our inner Ronald Reagan in pushing back against tyranny and naked imperialism, so be it. We gotta defend western culture. ACTUAL western culture. Not what the right dogwhistles as western culture.
As I said, everything with the right is culture war, and the final legacy of Reagan's alliance with the religious right....is a realignment in geopolitics toward Russia within the republican party a generation later. Which is why Reagan should never be taken seriously on ANYTHING ELSE.
Reagan, the culture wars, and the religious right
In a sense, the 1980s and 2020s are very much the same, but also very different. It IS liberty vs authoritarianism for me. Western enlightenment values vs authoritarianism. Russia was the evil empire then, and they're the evil empire now. But...due to the nature of horseshoe theory, they represent opposing ideals. The evil empire of the 1980s was "godless communism", a mixture of marxism leninism and atheism, where it made sense for Christians to be aligned with capitalism and freedom.
But, fundamentalist Christianity is not really in favor of freedom. It's based in authoritarianism, and now Putin represents RIGHT WING dictatorship, not LEFT WING dictatorship. Which is the difference. Reagan's coalition has always had an authoritarian tinge. I've seen articles about this in Trump's first term, and how Nixon, who helped realign the parties for Reagan, managed to secure all of the authoritarian people in the republican party. And the religious right is very much correlated with authoritarianism.
Of course, in the 1980s, this took the form of gatekeeping their values as what the real America is about, and calling anyone else unpatriotic, including those godless commie liberals, because they're too stupid to tell the difference between liberals and communists.
And now a generation later, the inmates are taking over the asylum. The coalition that Reagan built radicalized over coming decades, first through the repeal of the fairness doctrine and the establishment of right wing propaganda centers in the late 80s and 90s, then through the rise of the tea party around 2010, and it culminated with Trump, a guy who basically is as far from actual christian values that we can get and comes off more to me like the hypothetical antichrist, but is willing to pay lipservice to those values and give those guys material policy gains in the real world. Trump might be just about the worst Christian ever in the real world, but he's the one who is finally banning abortion, finally taking on "wokeness" and cancel culture, finally putting trans people back in their place (not that I agree with that...), blah blah blah.
And we liberals...we shouldn't invoke Reagan at all. F Ronald Reagan. All of our homies should HATE ronald Reagan with a burning passion, since he was the one who made this alliance from hell possible. His political skills in the 1980s brought the GOP great success, but a generation later it's causing them to march toward literal fascism and theocracy. And now the pretense of freedom is gone. All we're left with is, as Stewart put it, the knights templar. As we discussed recently with the fundamentalist christian worldview, perhaps the seeds of this were always there. After all, the christian worldview has always been about God being the ultimate dictator of morality to the rest of us, and any pretense of freedom came from the idea that humans are too sinful to wield power. But if they wield power FOR GOD...well, they'll walk us right into a dictatorship without second thought. And that's where we're at now.
So should we invoke Reagan at all? No. Exactly the opposite. We should invoke liberal democratic values. Freedom, tolerance, equality. We should be the libertarians that the right pays lipservice to, but doesn't actually believe in. Except when, you know, there's legitimate reasons to regulate things. After all, freedom stops being valid when it harms or negatively impacts others. Your right to swing your fist ends at the end of my nose. Your right not to be vaccinated ends when you cough in my face. So yes, we should be for VACCINES. You stupid, stupid people. Sorry, not sorry.
But yeah. We shouldnt invoke Reagan here, F Reagan, he's responsible for this mess in a way.
Reagan on economics
And given my love affair with my own brand of economics, this is where I must come down REALLY hard on Reagan. As I keep saying, virtually everything wrong with modern economics comes from Reagan. Capitalism since its inception has sucked for most people who have been subjected to it. It really took the labor movement, and the unions, and the new deal, and regulations, and safety nets to make capitalism tolerable. And I'm not saying any of that is perfect, mind you. I have my own vision for the economy that believes that stuff didn't go far enough. But it's done a good enough job where it made things...better than they were.
Reagan came in and he destroyed FDR's legacy. He signalled the end of the new deal coalition for good. He fired the air traffic controller's union. He deregulated the economy, cut taxes, and created this modern right wing ideology that government is reflexively bad and the free market was reflexively good.
I guess, in the face of literal communism, capitalism IS good. I dont support communism, mind you. But...not all state action is the same as a centrally planned economy and dictatorship. If anything, as we're finding out now, small government seems to inevitably trend toward dictatorship as well. Because all of those inefficiencies are sometimes checks and balances. So...in a sense, we're once again regressing backwards. The trump administration wants to run government like a business, but businesses are basically dictatorships in capitalism. So these guys actually are for dictatorship too. Just corporate dictatorship. Dictatorships that you can theoretically leave, but you have nowhere else to go.
In a sense, socialism kinda comes off as the good guy sometimes. They always talk about democratizing the economy. And while I have some serious questions about the logistics of their ideas working, I can't disagree that I'm for freedom. I'm for democracy. I just end up prioritizing freeing people from coercive institutions in the first place to serve as a check on their power. If the worker can say no to the employer, then the employer loses their power. In a sense, for many on the left, it's capitalism that's always been dictatorship. Dictatorship of the work place. Dictatorship over peoples' private lives. Some want literal workplace democracy, while others just want regulation to limit what those dictators can do. I seek freedom from the dictatorships in the first place, while also attempting to bypass the pitfalls of socialism and communism.
But again, looking back at Reaganism can we say that they're really about freedom? No, they're about dictatorship in practice. It might be better than what the literal marxist leninists were doing, but let's face it, Reagan is very much responsible for the overall loss of living standards, and the scaling back of worker protections that has led to this new second gilded age. And Trump...just represents the desire to go back to the first one at this point. That's always been the end goal. But for these people, "freedom" means being forced to work from a selection of employers who tell you what to do with the details of your daily lives. Yay...
So what can we conclude?
This didn't actually go into the direction I expected it to. I literally just wanted to post about how yes, invoking Reagan on Russia is good, but in virtually every other context it's bad, but it basically evolved into how ideologies have realigned since the 1980s, and what was reagan's coalition is now aligned with putin, and now democrats and the left stand for freedom, while the right is basically authoritarian. For the record, they've always been authoritarian. Ever since the southern strategy. And now the chickens are coming home to roost, as right wing ideology turns into metastatic cancer. It was like stage 1 back then, now it's like stage 4. And now, the republicans align themselves with the evil empire, and represent the values of that empire, while it is on the right to represent freedom.
But never forget, Reagan was one of the ones who brought us here. His coalition is what created the monster we deal with today with MAGA. We should NOT seek to run to the right to invoke Reagan, and appeal to people based on conservative values. Rather, we need to show people that WE are the ones who truly stand for freedom, and carve out our own path, rather than relying on the discussions from the past. The democrats need to get out of the 6th party system already. It does us no good. We need our own ideology with our own values. We need to stop being the moon party and start being the sun again.
Basically, the left should embrace MY values if it wants to find its way in the 21st century.
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