This isn’t rocket science. There’s a whole cottage industry devoted to creating a mythological hero out of Raygun.
What else is the rightwing going to do? They don’t have populist heroes, or people that can be broadly and widely admired. Movement conservative ideology is reactionary; it doesn’t have a progressive tradition, it never worked on behalf of the disenfranchised, or to expand rights in to women, or gays in any sustained or substantive way. It doesn’t have a tradition of being on the side of working schmucks. It’s the ideology of status quo, boot straps, and big business. Who else can they mythologize into a populist hero? Strom Thurmond? Jesse Helms? Newt Gingrich? Sarah Palin?
Raygun was an amiable, Hollywood dunce whose lasting legacy is the farce of deregulation theology, corporate-sponsored “free trade”, union-busting and stagnation of the middle class. The S&L meltdown, through Enron, through the meltdown of 2008 can all be traced back to Ronnie’s legacy of deregulation and his simple minded get government out of the way rhetoric.
I kinda dug his efforts at arms control with Gorby. That was cool, and was mildly balls-to-the-wall on his part, because he had to listen to the rightwing complain about him “caving” to the Soviets. Other than that really not much any enlightened person can find to admire in a dude who opposed the civil rights act, joked about welfare queens, engaged in thinly disguised racial-identity politics. His reaction to the HIV breakout was a joke; the doddering old fool obviously felt it was a gay problem, and not an American problem. He was enamored with rightwing dictators, he illegally gave American weapons to Iran, committed constitutional crimes, and he started an illegal war against Nicaragua. WTF did Nicaragua ever do to us, and how did they threaten us? There’s no doubt that Reagan is responsible for the deaths of untold people in Central America. And is there any enlightened Republican left who is really happy that Reagan turned the GOP from a semi-respectable party of moderate business people, to an extremist party run by theocrats, teabaggers, and birthers?
So, what exactly is the great legacy of Ronnie? The economy? He abandoned trickle down economics after it failed in 1982-83, and the economy of the 80s didn’t lift the poor or the working class up. The downfall of the Soviet Union? Ha, laughable. Those fucks collapsed under the failures of their own corrupt system. And because of the containment strategy of seven U.S presidents, including but not limited to Reagan.
Ronnie was a charismatic dunce, and a talented politician, who bested the two worst Democratic nominees of the last 100 years. He pretty much sucked for america.
