Landing In Reaganland

IN 1976, when Ronald Reagan was sixty five and lost the Republican nomination to president Gerald Ford, he was considered washed up in politics, too old. But he began campaigning for 1980 immediately, and the rest is history. By today's standards, he was a young buck. He led the United States into an era of conservative politics, in which it remains mired today. A fascinating description of this comes from Rock Perlstein in his new work "Reaganland: America's Right Turn", the fourth in a series of books by the author discussing the rise of modern American conservatism. Reagan was once a New Deal Democrat. Like a newly converted Christian, his political conversion was complete, and extreme. He was also a notorious womanizer in Hollywood, and, like someone we know well, lied his way to political fortune. When he ran for president and won in 1980, his campaign slogan was "make America great again." he differs from Trump in one important aspect: he favored open borders, and loved immigrants, believing them the backbone of America. Reagan called for open borders in 1979, and during his presidency, granted asylum to millions of illegal Mexicans. He out-debated Jimmy Carter with charm and simplistic catch phrases, even though both Carter's and Reagan's people knew full well that Jimmy Carter was the far more intelligent man, and the far more moral, and far more honest. When carter pointed out that Reagan had been the American  Medical Association's spokesperson opposing Medicare, Reagan denied it, claiming that he simply opposed the way the bill was written, which was a complete fabrication. During the presidential campaign of 1980, Reagan treated the electorate to an endless series of lies, abut Jimmy carter considered it beneath his dignity as a Christian to fact check and challenge Reagan's lies. When Carter finally started calling Reagan out for his dishonestly, teh American public thought Carter had turned mean. Modern conservatism rose when the business community started pumping billions of dollars into political campaigns during the nineteen seventies, a new phenomenon. Also, the evangelical community mobilized, as old segregationists reinvented themselves as anti-feminists and anti gay rights traditionalists. Although Reagan was during his time not much more popular nationally than Trump, he, like Trump, succeeded in the electoral college, and, like Trump, succeeded in exploiting anger at modernity to make American conservative, again.