Note: Last night Paul Ramsey and I did a livestream on Reagan, so it is a good companion to this post. YouTube or Rumble.

If you were alive and following politics in the middle of the 1980’s, one of your base assumptions would have been that you were living through one of the great presidencies in American history. Ronald Reagan was a massively popular figure because he was credited with pulling the nation out of the tailspin that began in the cultural and political radicalism of the 1960’s. It was morning in America again and every normal person credited Reagan for it.

Forty years on and the only people who mention Reagan are the yesterday men of what is left of Conservative Inc. In fact, their mentioning of him is usually a trigger for people to heap abuse on them. The same can be said for Bill Buckley, who was similarly famous in the 1980’s. William F. Buckley was the intellectual engine of the conservative movement and Ronald Reagan was the man who made it possible. Like conservatism itself, Buckley and Reagan are fading from our minds.

One cause of this is generational. You must be over fifty to have a clear memory of the Reagan years. That is a lot of people, but younger people tend to drive the debate on the internet. They are going to be much more focused on the present. At the same time, the populist movement is to some degree a revolt against what is viewed as baby boomer culture. This is the singular focus on the economy and the stock market at the expense of cultural and demographic issues.

Another cause is that the big issues of this age have their roots in the 1980’s and may have been caused by Reagan. Immigration is the easy one. Not only did Reagan sign off on open borders policies like amnesty, but he was also instrumental in the romanticization of immigration as a core American value. The same can be said for the toxic individualism that has come to define the white middle-class. Of course, it was the Reagan military buildup that made possible the forever wars.

Of course, recency bias plays a role. In the Clinton years, there were people claiming that Bill Clinton was a great president. These were mostly sociopaths, but there were probably some people who believed it at the time. The biggest example of this is Barak Obama who was treated as black Jesus. Now he is forgotten. The importance of Reagan on the present has faded, so his grip on our minds, even for those alive back then, has loosened a great deal.

While all of this is true, it is generally true for every president. No one alive today remembers FDR. Obviously, no one is reminiscing about Lincoln or Grant, but we still talk about some presidents long after they are gone. Other than the yesterday men of conservatism, you never hear much talk about Reagan. There are far more references here to the Clinton years than the Reagan years. The 1992 election remains an important turning point in our politics.

One possible reason for why Reagan has faded is that the things he ushered in have become so normalized that people just assume they are the natural state of things, rather than an innovation of the 1980’s. Everyone just assumes the stock market is an important part of the American economy. Personal debt is just a normal part of life that one must manage. The dominance of the American military and its respect with the America people is just the way it has always been.

That is why you would have Reagan on the list of great presidents. The things he ushered in have stuck with us and are the new normal. Even though Nixon was president at a critical juncture in the development of what would become the Blob, his policies have had no lasting impact. The same can be said for Clinton, who was the first post-Col War president. While his presidency was an inflection point, no one can remember anything he did while in office¹.

On the other hand, this line of reasoning would put Lyndon Johnson on the list of great presidents because we still suffer from his blunders. The Vietnam war still haunts our foreign policy establishment. The civil rights act continues to torment us. It was Johnson who helped turn the Israel Lobby into the mind-altering force we see today. The fact is, the Lyndon Johnson administration is a nightmare from which we can never awake, so maybe the greatest American of the 20th century was Oswald.

As an aside, Lee Harvey Oswald is another example of how history can often pivot on the actions one anonymous man. Like Gavrilo Princip, Oswald changed what people assumed to be the flow of events in a terrible way. Most think that if he had missed and Kennedy had survived, the 1960’s would not have led to the cultural catastrophe that still haunts us today. Many argue the same with regards to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Speculative history aside, what seemed certain in the 1980’s and into the second Bush presidency, that Reagan was one of the great presidents, is now more open to debate, assuming anyone thinks to debate it. That is one of the most intriguing aspects of Reagan right now. Hardly anyone talks about him. There is more time spent on Clinton, Nixon, or Obama, and no one thinks they were great presidents. Reagan and the 1980’s have become a forgotten bit of our history.

That said, this may be the prelude to a revival of interest in Reagan. Once the geezers leave the scene and the remnants of conservatism are swept from the stage, a new set of eyes can examine that time without the bias of having experienced it. The first passes at history are always self-serving and flattering to the winners. Later passes turn the near past into justification of present agendas. It is further down the line that you get a more candid view of events.

Even if in the fullness of time Reagan is on the list of great presidents and the 1980’s are studied as an important time, what will be lost is the impact the man at the center of that age had on the people. Reagan was a towering figure who changed the culture simply by setting an example with his public presentation. It is a thing to keep in mind as we watch the final act of Donald Trump. Great men are great men because they inspire the great men of their age.

¹Get your mind out of the gutter.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!