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It would be hard to overstate how powerfully Reagan’s anti-statist, anti-institutionalist, cowboy individualism shaped the world views of the white, 50-something conservatives and centrists I know. https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1326912615201845254
This graphic expresses it well. Can’t tell you how many times folks to my right said they were “socially liberal” but just voted R because of “fiscal responsibility” or some shit like that. Turns out, the “socially liberal” Republican was a dying breed, if not always a unicorn.
Another Reagan/Trump connection is that they both LOVED the accuracy-challenged right wing media of their day. https://twitter.com/sethcotlar/status/1270379263145807879
Reagan’s alliance with the Moral Majority (which we eventually learned was neither led by moral people, nor a majority) was instrumental in reviving up the culture war and placing it at the center of our political culture.
In the 90s, it became clear to conservative elites that divisive culture war issues should be the movement’s bread and butter messaging, not economics. https://twitter.com/sethcotlar/status/1158200316937904128
Modern conservatism was a fusion between libertarians and social conservatives. Libertarians held their noses (or secretly agreed with) the culture war BS that became more central to GOP messaging.
But as we've seen, culture war conservatism [minus] libertarian qualms about state power easily fades into right wing authoritarianism.
I think Reagan's smiley image tends to obscure the extent to which he could be a vicious culture warrior who encouraged conservatives to view their less conservative fellow citizens as existential threats to themselves and the nation. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1247220256554147841?s=20
Reagan told that story about Pat Boone in his 1983 "evil empire" speech which he delivered to the National Association of Evangelicals. Throughout the speech he says "people of good faith" might disagree with him, but that's not what most people in his audience heard.
That "people of good faith might disagree" line was meaningless rhetoric intended as a sop to centrists. The entire speech ratified the evangelicals' world view that they were engaged in a battle for the soul of America, and that non-conservatives were their spiritual enemy.
Anyway, trying to figure out how we get from a Reagan who dined out on fake stories about "welfare queens" and "strapping young bucks" and opened his 1980 campaign talking about "states rights" at the Neshoba County Fair to this is...well...it's not rocket science.
And this is why I think Obama got it entirely right when he said he wanted to be a president like Reagan in 2008. He wanted to shift the paradigm of our political culture. Unfortunately, that shift has yet to occur. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1295443440499449857?s=20
Part of the reason it hasn't occurred is because backlash politics is an incredibly powerful and enduring feature of American political culture, and the Republican Party has mastered it as a rhetorical style and a GOTV message for folks afraid of a whole host of boogeymen.
