How Ronald Reagan's Coded Racism Paved the Way for Trump [View all]
A former entertainment personality decides, in his later years, to go into politics. To curry favor with the Republican Party whose nomination he seeks, he cozies up to red-state extremists and evangelicals via a healthy dose of racist dog whistles. He couples that with decrying communists, liberalism, and anyone out in the streets protesting for social justice. To top it off, he then aligns himself with corporate America, running on a pro-free market, anti-regulation, tax-cutting ticket that aims to benefit the 1-percenters who make up the most powerful portion of his base—and help keep him and his family living in the lap of luxury.
Sound familiar? Of course it does, although in this instance, I’m not talking about our outgoing president, Donald Trump, but our 40th commander-in-chief, Ronald Reagan.
Such similarities are hard to miss in The Reagans, Matt Tyrnauer’s four-part Showtime docuseries (premiering Sunday, Nov. 15) about the beloved (by some) Republican president and his wife Nancy. A skillful assemblage of archival footage and talking-head interviews with former colleagues, journalists, and scholars, it casts a critical gaze at the Gipper, investigating his rise to power—and subsequent ability to charm the mainstream even through tumultuous times—from a sober remove, free from the magnetic spell he cast over the public during his tenure as California’s governor (1967-1975) and in the Oval Office (1981-1989). While it sometimes undercuts itself by leaning too heavily on certain voices, it’s a valuable examination of a leader whose legacy is more complicated than it often appears, and whose political career established the foundations upon which the present Republican Party is built.
Central to Tyrnauer’s portrait are the concepts of storytelling and myth-making. After growing up during the Great Depression, which his parents survived thanks in large part to FDR’s New Deal, Reagan parlayed his good looks and charisma into cinema stardom—or, at least, into numerous B-movie parts and roles that took advantage of his handsome stoutness. Thanks to bad eyesight, he wasn’t able to enlist in WWII, but from the beginning—and, to some extent, with the help of gossip columnist Louella Parsons—he was able to fashion a persona predicated on all-American wholesomeness by appearing in wartime propaganda movies, Westerns, and Knute Rockne, All American, which allowed him to figuratively fulfill his gridiron dreams. He was a self-made man who willed himself into being a celebrity. As his son Ronald Reagan Jr. opines, “We’re all the heroes of our own stories. He was just a little better at it than most people, I think.”
https://news.yahoo.com/ronald-reagan-coded-racism-paved-095855325.html
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