The American Right is obsessed with Ronald Reagan. He is the ultimate conservative hero: the actor turned politician who saved the United States from the disasters and disillusionments with New Deal liberalism. His name to be invoked on the debate stage, not just with praise, but with reverence. He is a 20th century conservative messiah, the man who restored the American dream and, in his own words, brought “morning again in America.” However, the Reagan presidency, despite the apotheosis it receives from conservatives, was incredibly harmful to the social and economic landscape of the United States; its legacy continues to unsettle and destabilize in our own era. Tracing the policies and legacy of the Reagan administration sheds light on the despicability of his “Reaganology” and its wider place within the context of the United States.
Reagan’s trickle down economic policy, coined Reaganomics, has had deep consequences for both conservative policy and the wider economic state of the U.S. over the past four decades. The main tenets of Reaganomics were as follows: raising defense spending, cutting other government spending, reducing federal income and capital gains taxes, reducing government regulation, and attempting to reduce inflation. In other words, it was a free market Neoliberal supply side economic jump start of entrepreneurial talent and innovation fueled often by political favoritism. It was unabashedly pro-business, unabashedly a counter revolution to the progressivism of prior decades and the remnants of the New Deal left. At the start of his presidency, Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Act of 1981, lowering the top marginal tax bracket by 20%, slashing estate taxes, and lowering taxes on corporations by 150 billion dollars over five years. Reagan’s presidency also saw an increase in national debt from 997 billion to 2.85 trillion dollars, changing the position of the United States on a global economic scale.
These changes and cuts set out to stimulate the economy, marketed as a method for causing a mythological “trickle-down” effect for the middle and working class people of America. The idea was pretty simple: by cutting taxes on big business and the ultra-rich, the money they saved would inevitably “trickle down” to the American worker.
The problem with Reaganomics is that it didn’t work. That may be a bit of an overexaggeration; in reality, Reaganomics worked very well for the wealthy and corporations. While it is true that unemployment declined, GDP growth rose, and inflation bettered throughout Reagan’s eight years in office, homelessness also increased due to cuts on housing and social services, and income inequality massively accelerated. Later, as the AIDS epidemic hit, further divides and inequalities surfaced in American life, revealing the vast underbelly of underserved citizens. The deregulation aspect of Reaganomics continued to dominate federal economic policy in the decades to come. Deregulation of the financial sector that occurred after Reagan left office but had roots in his ideas led to the breakdown of laws like the Glass-Steagall Act, which had prevented commercial banks from speculating with other peoples’ money, and the removal of the prohibition on interstate banking. The majority repeal of the act has been at least partially linked to the 2008 financial crisis.
The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act highlights the main issue with Reaganomics: its takeover of American economic policy long after Reagan’s time in power. While there were issues with Reaganomics during the Reagan era, his prioritization of deregulation and low taxes for the wealthy have stayed in place. Not only do these ideas persist, but they have persisted across party lines no matter how much Democrats may forswear their Republican colleagues. No one can deny that Bill Clinton signed the law that killed Glass-Steagall.
The most obvious consequence of Reaganonmics’ staying power is the hypocritical and twisted way in which government spending is either justified or derided. During Reagan’s tenure, defense spending, unlike social spending, health and the environment, was never on the chopping block. Today, the United States’ defense budget is in the hundreds of billions and takes up a large percentage of America’s annual federal spending, while spending on policy that would actually benefit the American people is always met with the question of “how do we pay for it?” This whole dissonant situation is all the more frustrating with the reminder that the ultra-wealthy and corporations are rarely forced to pay their fair share in taxes. From Reagan, our most prominent gift has been mind-numbing rhetoric and roadblocks served with a side platter of wealth that never quite seems to trickle down.
Apart from wide economic policy consequences, Reagan dabbled in social issues like drug use with disastrous consequences. The United States’ War on Drugs has destroyed millions of lives in an attempt to crack down on illegal drug distribution and use. It has cost the United States upwards of a trillion dollars and has consistently led to the mass incarceration of black and brown Americans. While Reagan didn’t start the idea of a “war on drugs”, he helped expand and escalate it on the national scale. Reagan increased the budget for the FBI’s drug enforcement units from eight to 95 million dollars and passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act in 1984, which created harsher prosecution penalties around marajuana and included a program that allowed local law enforcement to receive proceeds from asset seizures. First Lady Nancy Reagan began the youth-targeted “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign, which created a prominent slogan that helped fearmongers while utterly failing to change youth drug use. Most effectively, Reagan fostered fear and negative public opinion on the severity of crack cocaine and encouraged the Drug Enforcement Administration to focus on spreading the message of its harmful effects. This fearmongering allowed him to criminalize drug use to an extreme level by passing the Anti-Drug Abuse Act. The act in effect targeted non-white drug users by creating harsher punishments for possession of crack and not methamphetamine, which was as much of a problem with low-income white Americans.
The War on Drugs did not die with Reagan; on the contrary, it continued into the 21st century and only recently has more attention gone into decriminalizing marajuana use. Even so, drug use is still highly stigmatized and criminalized across the country, with hundreds of thousands of people currently in jail on drug-related charges and obvious racial disparities persisting.
Reagan was also one of the foremost contributors to a late blooming cold war American imperialist cause. Reagan was the Anti-Jimmy Carter. If Carter returned the Panama Canal to shed the image of the Yankee Imperialist, Reagan wanted to hold onto The Americas a little more tightly. If Carter wanted a “moral foreign policy” accountable to congress, Reagan was all about clandestine operations and big nuclear build ups. The Reagan Doctrine was delivered in his 1985 State of the Union Address and commanded that “We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives—on every continent from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.” To Reagan, this ideology meant that supporting right-wing terrorist insurgent groups trying to overthrow leftist leaders in Latin America was the obvious next step. Most infamous is his backing of the Contras in Nicaragua who, financially and militarily supported by the U.S. to fight a war against the leftist Sandinista provisional government, notoriously committed over 1,000 terrorist attacks and numerous human rights violations as part of their campaign. Not only were the Contras supported by the Reagan administration legally, but even after Congress banned support, the Reagan administration continued in secret. Nicaragua was just one example of the bloodshed Reagan helped spread outside of the U.S. To Reagan, any end to leftist power justified the means, regardless of the human rights violated in the process.
The places where Reagan decided not to act created just as many issues as where he did. AIDS has killed millions of people since 1981. It was during that year, Reagan’s first in office, that the AIDS crisis started in the U.S. However, AIDS was not publicly mentioned by Reagan until four years later in 1985. By that point, thousands had died and thousands more were infected. The Reagan administration’s incredible mishandling of the AIDS epidemic remains one of the defining atrocities of his career. Health officials had been aware of the severity of the situation for years, yet the administration consistently ignored pleas from both protesters and health officials to address it. Additionally, Reagan cut the budgets of both the CDC and NIH as part of his plan to cut down on federal government spending, hindering funding for AIDS research. Not only did Reagan ignore the AIDS epidemic, but his flawed economic policies actively helped worsen it.
Despite (or more likely because of) this context, the way the Right speaks of Reagan has consistently been full of praise. The term “Reagan Republican” has been thrown around as a badge of honor, a symbol of standing up to threats to American safety and promoting a triumphant and popular conservatism. Hear the late John McCain shame fellow Republicans with a Reagan reference when talking about sending aid to Ukraine back in 2014. Hear bigots praise Reagan for his “small government ideas”, often code for destructive social policies. Hear proponents of supply-side economics cite his tax cuts. Reagan offers a little something for every type of conservative, and they handily ignore or outright support any harm he did.
Recently, trouble has been brewing in the field of Reaganology. The Reagan Foundation and Trump do not get along, which seems to pose a problem for Reagan’s legacy in a Republican party still dominated by Trump. Higher ups within the foundation have frequently ridiculed and derided the former president, while Trump himself has in turn made jabs. While Trump has occasionally brought up Reagan in public, it has usually been in comparison to himself and never quite seems to mimic the rhetoric of Reagan Republicanism.
While this apparent animosity may seem like a shift away from Reagan Republicanism in the age of Trump, that picture is surface level. In 1980, Reagan’s campaign slogan was “Let’s Make America Great Again.” While Trump may have often been in conflict with Republican establishment and Reagan’s legacy, especially while in office, there is no mistaking this obvious correlation and antecedent to “Make America Great Again”. While this is a small example of Reagan’s continued presence, it serves as a reminder that Reagan’s legacy still looms large.
Policy and politics don’t care about what Trump and the Reagan Foundation think about each other. It’s no coincidence that social events at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum are filled with “ordinary Republicans who hold Reagan in enough esteem to patronize his library” but when asked about the 2024 election still say that “Overwhelmingly, their choice [is] Trump” (Source: Politico). Since the end of last summer, discussions around the Republican “Presidential Transition Project” and policy agenda known as Project 2025 have raged across the political spectrum, especially in online spaces. Even this “modern” representation of the terrifying goals of the Republican Party has deep roots in Reagan’s Right. Technically, the main policy agenda document of Project 2025 is just the latest in a series by The Heritage Foundation known as Mandate for Leadership, which started with the first Mandate during Reagan’s first term in office. The first Mandate gained approval from the Reagan campaign just before the election, and consisted of 3,000 pages of suggestions on how to shift the political landscape to the Right. The Mandate and the Reagan presidency went hand-in-hand; Reagan passed out copies of the Mandate at his first cabinet meeting and his administration was full of its contributors. The Mandate and the continuing influence of The Heritage Foundation demonstrate the staying power of Reagan-era conservative policymaking in the modern era. Trump does not mean the end of Reagan by a long shot.
Ronald Reagan may have died 20 years ago, but we are still forced to live with the consequences of his presidency. While the Republican party is in a strange position right now that is only sure to get stranger following the 2024 election, Raegen’s influence on conservative politics has remained consistent. There is no other more defining Republican president, besides perhaps Trump, that conservatives can mythologize to the same degree–and it’s telling that a man like Reagan who has destroyed so much has received that mantle.
Most importantly, it’s integral to remember that Reagan and his legacy is a product of the American political and economic system rather than an outlier. It’s easy and accurate to point to Reagan and his mythification as evidence of the repulsiveness of a Republican Party that essentially praises social harm, but his legacy has only lasted the way that it has because it fits so neatly within more systemic American issues. Reagan-esque tax cuts for the wealthy would not have the same impact if the American capitalist system did not create incentive for the ultra-wealthy to use those tax cuts for the purposes of lobbying and political maneuvering to increase their wealth even further. The Reagan Doctrine exemplifies a broader American capitalist insecurity about ideologies, particularly leftist ones, that contradict its own and may offer an alternative to capitalism. In the political establishment, Democratic Party definitely included, it’s rare to find those that completely rebuke many of the lingering outgrowths of Reaganomics. Reagan and his legacy can be a tough pill to swallow, and should serve as both a crucial reminder of what the United States can produce at its worst and an inspiration to strive for something more.
