Reagan Derangement Syndrome Haunts the Left

“Decline of Reaganism”? Not so fast

President Reagan. Courtesy Reagan Library.

An above-the-fold, front-page article by David Leonhardt in today’s New York Times reports what the paper calls “the decline of Reaganism.” 

Not so fast. Reports of the death of Reaganism are greatly exaggerated.

As evidence for his claim of “decline” of Reaganism, Leonhardt declares that, “Unlike the Reaganites, Trump criticized free trade and praised government programs like Medicare.” Yet the reality is that as president, Reagan imposed so many tariffs—on Japanese motorcycles to protect Harley-Davidson, on Japanese computers, television sets and power tools— that Milton Friedman said the Reagan administration had been “making Smoot-Hawley look positively benign.” Nor, as president, did Reagan repeal Medicare or Social Security, or make doing so at all a priority.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Times front page is a report on a “new Star Wars plan” for space-based weapons, a new twist on a signature Reagan policy initiative. Also meanwhile, the Saturday Wall Street Journal carries an interview with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who other than Trump is the Republican Party’s most significant figure at the moment, and who regularly invokes Reagan in making his own case for American international leadership. “I think isolationism is a dangerous thing,” he tells the Journal. “Ronald Reagan used to say that the leadership of the free world was placed upon the shoulders of the United States after World War II, and a strong America is good for the whole world—that’s how I paraphrase it.” 

The Times is still blaming Reagan for things that aren’t even his fault. In a negative review by Laura Kipnis of the book “Morning After the Revolution,” by

Nellie Bowles

, the Times writes, “When inequality rises, so does homelessness, which seems unfair to pin on progressives. Nor were they the ones who decided that deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill was a great idea. That would be Ronald Reagan.”