9/2/2023 0 Comments Wizard with a gun destiny![]() All those efforts failed, but their stark themes of isolationism, lost national greatness, immigrant invasion, and racial fear provided a template for Donald Trump’s MAGA campaign a quarter-century later. Then he followed up with another bid for the Republican nomination in 1996 and an independent campaign in 2000. Bush in the 1992 New Hampshire primary with his “pitchfork brigades.” His convention speech later that year laid out the culture wars to come. In the waning days of Reagan’s presidency, Buchanan remarked that “the greatest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan.” He tried to fill that vacuum himself, nearly defeating President George H.W. Lindbergh and the diatribes of the right-wing “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin, with their eccentric fixations on imaginary Jewish internationalist cabals. Buchanan’s politics were rooted in the 1930s America First isolationism of Charles A. The Reagan White House also harbored the former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan as its communications director. Gordon Liddy and, on cable TV, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News to amplify antigovernment paranoia. It was the Reagan administration that eliminated the FCC’s fairness doctrine, which mandated that broadcasters provide balanced coverage of controversial public issues, paving the way for right-wing talk radio inciters like Rush Limbaugh and G. It was his attorney general Edwin Meese, in tandem with the newly formed Federalist Society, who started packing the federal judiciary with the conservative judges who have gutted federal protections for voting rights, abortion rights, and more, while inventing, with fake history presented as “originalism,” an individual’s Second Amendment right to own and carry military-grade armaments. The antigovernment fervor that grips the nation today is the long-term product of the right wing that Reagan called to arms (literally, in the case of the National Rifle Association) forty-odd years ago. Before they were done, the Reagan Republicans had absorbed into their coalition an array of aggrieved Americans, including quasi-theocratic white Christian nationalists, the gun-manufacturing lobby, antiabortion militants, and antigay crusaders. Accordingly, behind his cheerful veneer Reagan made sure that he tapped into the fierce resentments of federal authority, dating back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, that fueled that resistance. Reagan’s Republican Party of 1981 was very different from Herbert Hoover’s of 1933: it had become the refuge of millions of formerly Democratic white conservative voters in the Solid South who resisted the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. But Reagan’s antigovernment politics and policies went much further than rolling back the New Deal. He aimed, above all, to revive the laissez-faire economic and social policies that the Depression had discredited, that Roosevelt had supplanted, and that even Richard Nixon had repudiated when he declared himself a Keynesian. Summoning the American people to “a rendezvous with destiny”-a line he had shamelessly filched from FDR in the 1964 speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign that established him as the Republican right wing’s future leader-and pretending that the stubborn stagflation of the 1970s was a crisis of the same magnitude as the Great Depression, Reagan channeled Roosevelt’s optimistic rhetoric to attack the instrument of Roosevelt’s great reforms: the federal government. ![]() ![]() Having won a smashing electoral victory, Reagan acted as if he were the latter-day inverse of his long-ago political hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Ronald Reagan’s pronouncement, in his first inaugural address in 1981, that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” marked a signal moment in what has become the most successful political counterrevolution in modern American history. ![]()
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