It's not Trump's America, this is Reagan's America
Last edited Wed Oct 31, 2018, 12:18 AM - Edit history (1)
In the last weeks as we've watched Trump's actions compared with the patterns of his predecessors, one name that's made that list of imagined presidential actions has been Ronald Reagan.
"Reagan would have condemned the bombs and hatred."
"Reagan would have stood in Pittsburgh and consoled the grief-stricken by talking about America as a shining city on the hill."
Maybe. What's positive is that Reagan would have dutifully stood on stage and repeated the lines that had been diligently created for him by the real powers behind his presidency. Among their lines of thought were just as often strains of xenophobia, suspicion and outright racism.
That's why Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign by standing at the Neshoba County Fair and dog whistling about "states rights," where three civil rights workers were murdered and buried in a muddy grave by night riders. That's why Reagan propagated stories about "welfare queens" and "strapping young bucks" essentially gaming "good, hard-working Americans" -- read: white folks -- from their money.
That's why Reagan stirred a hornets nest when he made plans to honor dead Nazis and SS members with a 1985 visit to their graves in Bitburg, Germany. After the controversy arose, a visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was hastily added to his itinerary.
Reagan made Americans comfortable with their worst instincts. His diminishment and ignorance of the AIDS crisis sent a tacit message.
Trump's war on the environment? Reagan went there first. He looked to erase his predecessor's advances, too. He had the solar panels removed from the White House roof, an act of momentous symbolism. He appointed the disastrous James Watt to be Secretary of the Interior, a man who never saw federal lands he didn't think should be opened to commercial interests.
Trump's comfort with despots? Reagan paved that road, opening his arms to the oppressive dictators Baby Doc Duvalier and Ferdinand Marcos after the Carter administration adopted a strong stance against the authoritarians.
The propagandizing of radio airwaves got its first foothold with Reagan's elimination of the Fairness Doctrine. Granted, the proliferation of cable channels carried it into the next realm with the advent of FOX News but that was built on the legacy of the 1980s.
The canonization of Reagan continues unabated, absent the controversies of his era because we are living in a reality he helped reshape to conservative America's favor. The growing storm belongs to the Gipper.
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Last edited Wed Oct 31, 2018, 12:55 AM - Edit history (1)
Remember the furor over "Senator" Obama's talk in 2008 about people "clinging to their guns"? He really seemed to get it:
...You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/obama-no-surprise-that-ha_b_96188.html
I think this explains a lot about what is going on now with "nationalist" Trump, other strongmen in Europe and elsewhere, and the continued growth of racism, hate, and opioids. Many local economies are struggling because they're based on small business, and they're not likely to recover much as long as Reagan/Thatcher/Trump/Republican neoliberal policies continue to concentrate so much of the wealth by rewarding wealth rather than work.
