The Enduring Relevance of Reaganism

By Dan McLaughlin

Thursday, August 28, 2025

 

Mark offered a response to the question posed by Michael: Why do we still care so much about Ronald Reagan and his ideas? Mark’s answer is that “Reagan is remembered so fondly by Republicans because he was the last unambiguously successful two-term Republican president.” I’d add a few more pieces to the puzzle.

 

First, we’re conservatives. Good ideas don’t become irrelevant just because they’re old. We still care about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, long after their voters died off, because they were right about many things and accomplished a lot for the country. “Reagan is for the Olds” should not be an insult.

 

Second, the scale of Reagan’s political success was immense. Michael notes that nobody in the Seventies was producing Herbert Hoover nostalgia, but the Democrats of that era were still awash in FDR nostalgia, because FDR shattered the ceiling for what was possible for a Democratic leader. Even today’s Democrats pay him periodic lip service, 80 years after his death. As I explained of Reagan’s success in 2015:

 

Reagan unquestionably (though not alone) shifted the nation further to the right than he found it, in some ways temporarily and in other more lasting ways. Victory in the Cold War was the obvious headline – as late as 1979, there were voices throughout the West arguing that we could never defeat the Soviets and that Communism represented a viable alternative model to the American system, whereas today even an open socialist like Bernie Sanders cites the increasingly more free-market Scandinavian model. Reagan revolutionized the politics of taxes – in 1980, the top federal income tax rate was 70%, and married couples making $30,000 a year paid a top rate of 37%; at $35,000 they hit the 43% bracket. Taxpayers over $200,000 in income paid, on average, a total effective tax rate over 40%. These would be unthinkable tax rates today, when we argue over top marginal rates in the 35-39.6% band. Other long-term policy wins that shifted the conversation included ending the Fairness Doctrine, nominating the first explicit originalist to the Supreme Court (Antonin Scalia), breaking the air-traffic controllers union, finishing the (started under Carter) project of airline and trucking deregulation, and starting the free-trade processes that would yield dividends into the 1990s (he promised a NAFTA-like agreement in his 1979 speech announcing his candidacy). And Reagan’s victories laid the groundwork for the welfare reforms of Newt Gingrich (presaged in some of Reagan’s own policies as California Governor) and the law-enforcement revolution spearheaded by his U.S. Attorney in New York, Rudy Giuliani.

 

Or look at the electorate. We talk today about a general electorate dominated by Democrats, because the exit polls showed a D+7 electorate in 2008, D+6 in 2012 (that is, for example, 38% Democrats and 32% Republicans in 2012), and how this gave Barack Obama an unbeatable edge. But the electorate in 1976 and 1980 was D+15, with only 22% of voters in 1976 identifying themselves as Republicans. Yes, many more of the Democrats in those days were fairly conservative-leaning, not just in the South but in the Midwest, but these were still not people you could walk up to and say “I’m a conservative Republican” and have their vote (a March 1979 poll had Reagan trailing Carter 52-38). Even the South had gone heavily Democrat in 1976, with Carter carrying all but one state (Virginia) below the Mason-Dixon Line. Reagan in 1980 carried 27% of Democrats to Carter’s 67, and 56% of independents to Carter’s 31. And Reagan’s success changed the electorate’s view of his party – the electorate was D+3 by 1984, D+2 by 1988.

 

Inheriting a country in which Republicans were distinctly the minority party and conservatives were distinctly their minority faction, Reagan won 44 and 49 states. His coattails helped Republicans in 1980 to gain twelve Senate seats, breaking a majority the Democrats had held continuously for 24 years, often with majorities of 60 or more Senators (they had 61 seats in 1977). Since 1824, only four presidents — Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, FDR, and Reagan — have served two full terms and then handed off the White House to a successor of their own party. It would be strange if Republicans didn’t consider Reagan a permanently monumental figure in the party’s history.

 

Michael is correct that the right’s political and media institutions (including National Review) came of age alongside Reagan’s movement and were intertwined with it, but that, too, is a symptom of the massive success of the Reagan era.

 

Third, it’s a bit of a leap to pin solely onto Reagan how the right went from “protectionism and foreign policy restraint in the 1920s to free trade and internationalism in the 1980s and 1990s.” If Reagan’s foreign policy was more hawkish and internationalist than his predecessors, it was not dramatically out of line with the basic orientation of Republican foreign policy under Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford, and which continued for decades after Reagan. If Reagan looms largest in that conversation, it’s both because he was the best at explaining its ideas and due to the conspicuous success of his policies in defeating the multi-generational menace of Soviet Communism. It is, moreover, a bit artificial (as I’ve observed before) to begin the tale with the post-World War I turn in foreign policy, when more assertive foreign-policy figures such as William Seward and Teddy Roosevelt have been in the GOP since the beginning. On trade, it’s true that Reagan pushed the party much further toward free trade, but that, too, was a turn that begins with the Eisenhower years, not with Reagan. Compared with Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford, what was newer under Reagan — or at least, newly recovered from the past — was the revival of Coolidge-era small-government and low-taxes Republicanism and Grant-era Christian social conservatism.

 

I suppose I should expect by now that any generational analysis will simply ignore the existence of my generation (Gen X, born between 1965-79), who came of age in the Reagan era. It’s not hard to see why the most directly Reagan-influenced generation of Republican politicians is Gen X, including Mike Johnson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Scott Walker, Nikki Haley, Glenn Youngkin, Ron DeSantis, Chip Roy, Steve Scalise, Paul Ryan, Tim Scott, Mike Lee, Joni Ernst, and Bobby Jindal. When Donald Trump (a textbook Baby Boomer, born 1946) hit the scene, it was easier for Boomer political figures who had lived through the Nixon years (such as Newt Gingrich) to accommodate themselves to his style of politics (marinated as it was in the culture-war assumptions of the late 1960s) than for those of us who had Reagan as a formative model. In that sense, Gen X now has both the Millennial generation that doesn’t remember Reagan and the Gen Z generation that knows only Trump, and that makes it harder to ensure that our patrimony of ideas doesn’t die off with us, but is shown to remain relevant to new settings and situations. But then, that’s always been the challenge for conservatives.