STEVE HAYWARD: Reagan, the Original MAGA President?
Reagan was an anti-establishment figure, deeply troubling to many Republicans, just like the current president. Rather than heap contempt on Reagan, serious students of politics ought to contemplate the parallels that made both men so unique and consequential. Reagan had a completely independent and unconventional mind and expressed his unconventional views fearlessly and usually with original language — that is, a vocabulary that didn’t use the regular Beltway terms that everyone else in politics used. In these traits, Trump and Reagan are very much alike. Trump’s tax cuts, both in his first term and last year, were influenced by some of the supply-side thinkers who helped craft Reagan’s tax cuts, and keep in mind that Reagan’s embrace of supply-side economics was a controversial departure from Republican orthodoxy of the era. Now it is the conventional GOP wisdom that Trump builds upon.
Trump and his team acknowledge considering the lessons of the Nixon years, and Trump himself has said Reagan was a great president (though he was “bad on trade,” a claim that may be contested). One might also wonder what Reagan might have accomplished if he had had two full terms to devote his skills solely to domestic policy rather than having to devote so much time and political capital to what turned out to be the climax of the Cold War.
A century ago, G.K. Chesterton observed that “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” This proved accurate for most Republican administrations over the subsequent century. If the nation is restored to its intended constitutional boundaries, future historians will likely apportion credit to Reagan, Trump, and Trump’s successors, as it is certain that it will take several more elections and sustained efforts to fully reverse the administrative state. At the end of Reagan’s presidency, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that the most powerful man in the world is not powerful enough to do everything that needs to be done. A good lesson to keep in mind, while taking seriously the wisdom to be acquired by studying those statesmen who came before, rather than haughtily dismissing them for not aligning with our present frame of mind.
Read the whole thing.