Reagan Wasn’t the Conservative He’s Made Out to Be
The real aberration in the American conservative tradition is not Donald Trump, but the predecessor with whom he is often compared.
Turns out he was hiding some things under that hat.
Photographer: Historical/Corbis HistoricalFor those of us of a certain age and sensibility, Ronald Reagan is the quintessential American conservative. He not only vanquished the Evil Empire and restored business’s animal spirits. He rode a horse, wore a cowboy hat and, when his wife came to visit him in hospital after he survived a 1981 assassination attempt, quipped “honey, I forgot to duck.” By comparison, Donald Trump is an interloper as well as a Yahoo.
But does this view survive forensic analysis? In a recent column on Sam Tanenhaus’ new biography of William Buckley, my colleague, Toby Harshaw, makes it clear that Trumpism is deeply rooted in the American conservative tradition. And, as I made my own journey through Tanenhaus’ thousand pages, I was struck by a heretical thought: The real interloper in the conservative tradition was not Trump but Ronald Reagan (and, by implication, his great imitator, George W. Bush). Reagan was the ultimate double agent: Beneath his cowboy hat, he smuggled two ideas that were anathema to movement conservatives, neoliberalism and neoconservativism, into the heart of Republican policymaking.