4399

Yes, and I might argue that it isn’t good leadership.

4400

I was a teenager when Reagan was President. Like every other (straight white middle class) teenager I knew, I thought he was great. I never noticed any of this stuff, and it would have been hard to convince me how freaking evil he was.

My first wake-up call on Reagan was Rachel Maddow’s book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, which I read in 2012. Great book, BTW. At this point, it’s clear that he was basically Photogenic Nixon, a racist homophobe with a nice smile for the camera.

4401

Well you weren’t an adult. To clarify, my expectations are going to apply to adults. The African American community did not support Reagan so when someone says everyone, they’re not including them right, what’s new there. And then there is the entire concept of welfare queens, and the war on drugs (somehow targeted not at all drugs nor at all populations). But yes, there are a lot of articles and reviews, academic and otherwise… there is just no way an adult in this day and age should be surprised by what that man said… today. And there were a lot of people who recognized that man for what he was, decades ago.

4402

People wrote about Reagan’s dog whistles at the time. He launched his campaign with a speech about states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of a famous racist killing of civil rights activists. He supported the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and famously vetoed a bill to impose sanctions on the white nationalist government there. He campaigned by demonizing welfare queens and talked about ‘young strapping bucks’ who used food stamps to buy T-bone steaks.

It wasn’t a secret. He dog-whistled rather than openly using racial epithets, but it was there for anyone to see. I certainly saw it at the time. I was 20 when he came into office.

4403

Well, Reagan didn’t demonstrate overt racism like on that tape in public.

When were your parents born? I mean, they were almost certainly a good deal younger than Reagan, I have to assume. Reagan was born in 1911.

I think there’s a significant difference between Reagan and Nixon, given that Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace. Reagan generally left on fairly good terms with the population.

Winning by a landslide is simply an indication that Reagan was quite popular. During his time in office, his popularity averaged at around 53% approval.

However, an even more important metric, is that in historical retrospect, Reagan enjoys EXTREMELY high approval numbers. In 2002, for instance, Reagan’s approval rating in terms of how he handled himself during his presidency was 73%. That’s crazy high.

What this means is not that you have to think Reagan’s great. Clearly, that’s not gonna be common here. Hell, in that post I already made, I admitted that he’s pretty clearly racist.

But, given that he’s perceived favorably by so many, it’s unwise to link him to Trump, from a purely tactical perspective. If you say, “Reagan was a terrible racist and awful and I hate him”, it is going to weaken your plea to someone who liked reagan, but might otherwise be amenable to the idea that Trump is a terrible racist fuck.

Once Trump is out of office, go nuts with the Reagan hate… but it seems like it’s a bad move, at this particular junction, because it may push away folks who liked Reagan, but aren’t supporters of Trump, of which there are definitely many.

Right now, I feel like we need to keep our eye on the ball, and that ball is “Get Trump out of office.” Because if that fails, then this conversation becomes entirely academic, because the stuff you guys want to do is never gonna happen in a million years.

4404

Am I understanding that your point (or at least part of it) is that by ignoring the prior pattern of racism (and other bad things) in the Republican party over the last decades, it allows them to pretend that Trump is some novel racist problem, as opposed to just a more overt sign of a party that has very deep roots of racism for a very long time? To avoid acknowledging and admitting the problem that the party is full of racists, by pretending Trump is the aberration instead of the (much more brash) norm?

Sort of like pretending that Trump has just appeared out of nowhere as some Republican racist, as opposed to being a plant that has simply shot up from buried roots and burst into full color from a long standing that has always been there, if less obviously and overtly noticeable?

4405

Yes.

Also, by extension, that somehow removing Trump would actually fix anything with that party. It would only help the country because another party can presumably take control, but the rot in the GOP exists with or without him… by design. It was no accident.

4406

Yeah. I hadn’t really thought about that, and you’re right, that is very frustrating. I could see it seeming like Republicans bashing Trump for racism in that way is less like trying to address the real problem, and more like telling the drunk uncle who is talking too loudly at the restaurant that he needs to tone it down so the family can still look presentable (while they all actually holding those views, they just aren’t as overt with them).

Kind of one of those, “We all think it, but for god’s sake Donald, you can’t be that obvious about it,” situations.

4407

The never-Trumpers are for the most part explicitly selling that Trump is an aberration from otherwise ‘good’ conservative Republicanism. So @Nesrie’s concern is not a theoretical one. What they want is for Trump to go away and the reputation of the party to be rehabilitated instantly.

4408

I feel like this attitude is setting you up for potentially major disappointment. I’d like to prefer the attitude of 4 more years of Trump being a given, what with the economy being good and incumbent President having pretty favorable odds for getting re-elected. I think it’s more productive instead to focus on structural changes and changes in Blue States that will lead to overall better conditions. In Climate change news for example, even though Trump wants to set low fuel efficiency standards, a lot of car manufacturers are having to keep increasing efficiency anyway because of California’s more stringent requirements. Those sort of changes get you at desired results without having to rely on something that might not happen (Trump’s defeat in 2020).

4409

Believe it or not I understand this point. I don’t know if i agree with it, but given human nature it’s certainly plausible.

With that in mind … I was a teenager in the Reagan years and I couldn’t stand him. I thought he was full of shit then and now I know he was full of shit. What I never quite understood at the time was the love affair the media had with him.

This book (from 1988) chronicles it:

This piece is from June 2016, well before the election and at a time when most everyone thought trump was going to lose. It’s eerily prescient.

Some choice quotes behind spoilers (for length.)

Summary

But Reagan’s and Trump’s opposing styles belie their similarities of substance. Both have marketed the same brand of outrage to the same angry segments of the electorate, faced the same jeering press, attracted some of the same battlefront allies (Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Phyllis Schlafly), offended the same elites (including two generations of Bushes), outmaneuvered similar political adversaries, and espoused the same conservative populism built broadly on the pillars of jingoistic nationalism, nostalgia, contempt for Washington, and racial resentment.

But if Reagan was free of Trump’s bigoted nativism, he had his own racially tinged strategy for wooing disaffected white working-class Americans fearful that liberals in government were bestowing favors on freeloading, lawbreaking minorities at their expense. Taking a leaf from George Wallace’s populist campaigns, Reagan scapegoated “welfare chiselers” like the nameless “strapping young buck” he claimed used food stamps to buy steak. His favorite villain was a Chicago “welfare queen” who, in his telling, “had 80 names, 30 addresses, and 12 Social Security cards, and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexistent deceased husbands” to loot the American taxpayer of over $150,000 of “tax-free cash income” a year. Never mind that she was actually charged with using four aliases and had netted $8,000: Reagan continued to hammer in this hyperbolic parable with a vengeance that rivals Trump’s insistence that Mexico will pay for a wall to fend off Hispanic rapists.

Only 40 percent of Republicans approve of the job performance of Paul Ryan, the Establishment wonder boy whose conservative catechism Noonan summarized, while 44 percent disapprove. Only 14 percent of Republicans approve of Mitch McConnell. This is Trump’s party now, and it was so well before he got there. It’s the populist-white-conservative party that Goldwater and Reagan built, with a hefty intervening assist from Nixon’s southern strategy, not the atavistic country-club Republicanism whose few surviving vestiges had their last hurrahs in the administrations of Bush père and fils. The third wave of the Reagan Revolution is here to stay.

(Included because it’s such a great quote.)

More likely a Trump presidency would be the train wreck largely predicted, an amalgam of the blunderbuss shoot-from-the-hip recklessness of George W. Bush and the randy corruption of Warren Harding, both of whom were easily manipulated by their own top brass. The love child of Hitler and Mussolini Trump is not. He lacks the discipline and zeal to be a successful fascist.

(After outlining what Republican elites could have done to stop trump.)

Dream on. That’s not happening. It’s easier to write op-ed pieces invoking Weimar Germany for audiences who already loathe Trump. Meanwhile, Republican grandees will continue to surrender to Trump no matter how much they’ve attacked him or he’s attacked them or how many high-minded editorials accuse them of failing a Joe McCarthy moral test. Just as Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus capitulated once Trump signed a worthless pledge of party loyalty last fall, so other GOP leaders are now citing Trump’s equally worthless list of potential Supreme Court nominees as a pretext for jumping on the bandwagon.

4410

Preach.

4411

This is outstanding stuff, thanks!

4412

Sure, but you and everyone who thinks like you is already going to vote against Trump.

4413

I fully expect a Trump win will result in more infringement on states rights on things Dems want to push, like anti-pollution standards, which will be backed by a fully compliant court.

I’d go so far as to say a Trump win would likely result in future elections being total shams.

4414

If Trump wins reelection, you guys aren’t gonna be able to vote in another one.

4415

You write this a lot. What does it mean? Seriously.

4416

In this case, i mean all of us, but it’s mainly directed at anyone who thinks that things are gonna be ok if Trump wins reelection.

4417

Who the fuck thinks that? Squirrels? Rocks? Various lichen? :)

4418

Anyone who is prioritizing anything over beating Trump… Also, to some degree, you got Rock8man saying that we gotta plan for Trump to win.

If Trump wins again, i don’t think this country is gonna survive as it is. I mean, it probably won’t end the world… but i don’t think we are going to live in a free democracy.