You hear that what's missing for the Republicans in this presidential election is another Reagan—someone who can evoke the spirit of the Gipper.
But does the average American need another Reagan? That average voter is drowning in a sea of problems whose causes either are drenched with Reaganite values or actually stem from measures implemented by the mystifyingly misnamed "Great Communicator."
The first that leaps to mind is the way in which multitudes have been hurt by the deregulation of banking, a movement that got its start under Reagan. The end of the old firewall between the banking business and the investment business, to say nothing of the tacit permission to put profits over service that it fostered, played its part in creating the climate that led to the subprime lending disaster.
Reagan cut taxes, but not in a way that helped most Americans. To quote economics professor John Miller, writing in Dollars and Sense, "… most low-income taxpayers missed out on the Reagan cuts. The bottom 40 percent of households paid out more of their income in federal taxes in 1988 than they had in 1980…. For the richest 1 percent, on the other hand, the Reagan tax cuts were pure elixir. This group saw their effective federal tax rate drop from 34.6 percent to 29.7 percent" (Congressional Budget Office figures).
Those who remember the Reagan era also know that the Gipper and his sidekicks had a way of talking about the environment as though it were just a construct in the minds of eccentric people called environmentalists—as though environmentalism were just another "ism," like the femin-"ism" many of them found so annoying. James Hodel, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, gained fame for his remark that the best way to deal with ozone depletion was to use more suntan lotion. One of Reagan's first acts was to remove the solar panels his predecessor Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House roof.
Nostalgia for Reagan may comfort those who were happy when the Republicans were carrying the ball in the Super Bowl of politics, but it offers no help for the challenges of a politically multipolar, physically heating world.
