The Reagan Legacy
Today we are going to see the new Dennis Quaid movie called Reagan. It chronicles the life and times of the 40th president of the United States. After the difficult transitional years with Jimmy Carter in the presidency, when so very little got done in what was, admittedly, a difficult moment in American history, it was not at all surprising that America wanted something different. It always does. I remember those times very well and I remember thinking that the best man for the job was George H.W. Bush. I liked Bush and I was decidedly not committed to the rigors of party politics. So, when Reagan trounced Bush in the Republican primaries, I shrugged and lent my support and ultimately my vote to Ronald Reagan. I wasn’t keen on having a film star as president, but his trickle-down economic concepts seem to have some value to them. I was in the early days of my working career and remember feeling that promoting more investment was a very sound approach to spurring a rather moribund 1970’s stagflation economy into a new gear. I’m not sure I ever stopped being a liberal during those years, but I certainly thought a pro-business approach to economics was sound. I used to call myself economically conservative and socially liberal, something that sounded OK to be. I had voted for Carter in 1976, but Reagan in 1980. I hadn’t gotten Bush as I had wanted, but Bush sat proudly in the vice presidential chair and I felt good about how things were going in 1984, so I voted for them again, helping to give them their landslide victory over Walter Mondale, who had been Veep for Jimmy Carter.
I don’t plan to take you through my voting history altogether, but I will say that I voted for Bush in ‘88 against Michael Dukakis, only to find his one-term presidency lackluster and a series of one gaffe after another. The “kinder/gentler” approach to leadership that sounded so appealing to me just wasn’t working and before we knew it, Bill Clinton was on the scene in 1992 out of nowhere, looking better in much the same way that Reagan looked better in 1980. Now flash forward to 2024, fully 44 years since I first voted for Ronald Reagan. World population has gone from 4.4 billion to 8.2 billion, an 86% increase. Everything has changed and yet we are still dragging the bulk of the Reagan economic legacy with us thanks to the Republican Party. With the advantage of full hindsight, I am prepared to admit that the Reagan economics program of trickle-down policies simply did not work then and works even less well now. The biggest evidence of its failure can be seen in the wealth distribution disparities. In 1980, median household income in the U.S. was $21,000. In 2024 it is $78,000. That means it increased 271%, which sounds OK, but really isn’t. U.S. GDP has gone from $2.857T to $28.781T, an increase of 907%. Had median income risen at the same rate, it would be $190,000. Instead, U.S. wealth concentration has driven massive amounts of wealth from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 10%, and especially the top 1%. We all know these statistics whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. More importantly, we all may or may not attribute them to the policies started by Reagan and those of us who supported him in 1980.
In addition to the evidence which exists about the massive shift in wealth distribution, there is the compounding problem of that massive growth in population. What I say to friends all the time is that even if the policies of Reagan might have worked in 1980, they surely would have no chance of working in a world of 8 billion people. It was funny watching Dennis Quaid, speaking as his Reagan character, explain that Supply-Side economics was important to drive consumer spending, something it hardly did at all. Demographic shifts require different economic policies to be sure. Unless you believe that the human race is prepared to move into a cycle of extreme indifference to humanity and the lifestyle disparities will go unnoticed by the masses, the existing economic distribution policies simply do not work any longer. The advent of the internet itself assures us that everyone in every corner of the world knows exactly what they lack and what everyone in the 1% has. Its almost as though we are somewhat out of synch with our tech development. It is said that AI will drive massive changes in human productivity and that fewer and fewer workers will be needed to generate greater and greater economic prosperity. Once you look at the demographic projections that show world population starting to decline in 2050 and continuing that fall for 100-150 years, you might say thank God we are getting AI ready. But AI is coming on so fast that job destruction and replacement through automation is way ahead of population decline, so for the next 100+ years we have a critical species-defining decision to make. We can either sacrifice our humanity and allow billions of people to fall to economic deprivation or we can share some of those good fortunes to support those less fortunate until the world can come into balance with technology and human demographics coming into synch with one another. I imagine this is what gives rise to all the talk about universal income as a palliative.
I’ve now seen the Reagan movie and despite the critical ambivalence towards it, I thought it told one side of the Reagan story quite well. The focus was on Reagan’s foreign policy of doing everything he could to thwart communism. The movie explains how early in his life he determined that communism was the great threat to America and that we were at war against it, whether it was formally declared or not. After his movie career began to wobble, Reagan took charge of the Screen Actor’s Guild (SAG) and as a union leader, had to grapple with the more communistic elements in the labor movement at a time when Hollywood and Communism were not on good terms. As a reverential biopic, the movie steered clear of the Joe McCarthy moment because Reagan was a supporter of this historically denigrated partisan figure. To do otherwise would have cast a shadow on his march towards the destruction of the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union.
So, the movie suddenly finds itself in the 1960s as Reagan moved into mainstream politics via the governor’s mansion in Sacramento. This is shown as a positioning move to the presidency with one swing and miss in 1976 followed by a successful attempt in 1980. The movie then cherry-picks moments of his presidential career, focused mostly on his drive to eradicate Communism. With the sequential deaths of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, it was hard for Reagan to know who to fight with or negotiate with. Ultimately it was Mikhail Gorbachev, who he met with on multiple occasions and negotiated a nuclear disarmament treaty. It ws Gorbachev who fell on the sword of Communism and took down the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the Iron Curtain. That was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union and that stands as Reagan’s foremost presidential achievement. It is noteworthy that while a moment or two was spent on budget cutting, tax reduction and union-busting (pretty ironic for a union man), Reagan’s domestic economic policy was not highlighted. I suspect that history has a mixed view on that versus the universally accepted success of bringing down the wall of Communism.
History has a way of defining our successes and failures. Reagan has long been revered (especially by Republicans, but by Americans in general) and we are only now seeing how history chooses to reflect on his legacy. It will be interesting to see how she treats Clinton (overshadowed by sexual misconduct), Bush W. (overshadowed by WMD fables) and Obama (overshadowed by race). Given that we still have at least one or two chapters to write on the Trump story, I will not even speculate about where those shadows lie.