Tag: Ronald Reagan

Philadelphia Stories: From Reagan to Trump to the DNC

So Donald Trump Jr. went to the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi this week, where he said, vis-a-vis the Mississippi state flag, which is the only state flag that still invokes the Confederacy, “I believe in tradition.” (h/t Ellen Tremper) Those Neshoba County fairgrounds are just a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi. The place indelibly associated with the murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in 1964. So that tells you a lot about Donald Trump. Junior and Senior. But it also tells you a lot about the Republican Party. Thirty-six years ago, almost to the day, Ronald Reagan, then a candidate for the presidency, also went to the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. There, he said, “I believe in states’ rights.” That, of course, […]

Check Your Amnesia, Dude: On the Vox Generation of Punditry

Last night, Donald Trump shocked the world, or at least the pundit class, when the New York Times published a wide-ranging interview Trump had given the paper on the subject of foreign policy. Trump said some scary things: that he didn’t think, for example, that the US should necessarily come to the aid of a NATO country if it were attacked by Russia. But he also said some things that were true. Like this: When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger. And while the article makes a muchness of Trump’s refusal to pressure Turkey over its response to the failed coup, the fact is that Obama hasn’t […]

Historically, liberals and the Left have underestimated the Right. Today, they overestimate it.

I’m going to float a series of vast and quick historical generalizations in order to try and get at something that is distinctive about the present moment in US politics. Beginning in Europe in the 19th century, liberalism has been engaged in an on-again, off-again, two-front war: against the right and against the left. Against the right’s revanchism and the left’s radicalism, liberalism has held itself up as the original Third Way. It is the reasonable and moderate alternative to the extremes, offering men and women the promises and profits of a capitalist, vaguely democratic, modernity but without its revolutionary perils and reactionary mystique. Though it has on occasion entered into a more productive, albeit tension-filled, front with the left, liberalism has always been […]

Trump Talk

1. At last night’s debate, Trump said of Rubio, “And he referred to my hands—if they are small, something else must be small—I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee you.” Lest you think we’re tumbling down a new rabbit hole here, it’s important to remember that once upon a time, the king’s body and the body politic were one and the same. Trump’s reference is more pre-modern than post-modern. Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic book on the topic, The King’s Two Bodies, was subtitled “A Study in Medieval Political Theology.” In any event, I’d rather hear Trump’s opinions about his penis than his views on Muslims and Mexicans. 2. The rhetorical brutality of Trump is unprecedented. Never before have we seen a candidate so cruel.   […]

John Kasich, Meet Ronald Reagan

Republican Governor and GOP presidential candidate John Kasich: I’ve about had it with these people. We got one candidate that says we ought to abolish Medicaid and Medicare. You ever heard of anything so crazy as that? Telling our people in this country who are seniors, who are about to be seniors that we’re going to abolish Medicaid and Medicare? Former Republican Governor, GOP presidential candidate, and US President Ronald Reagan: One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine….Write those letters [opposing Medicare] now; call your friends and tell them to write them….And if you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days you and […]

AIDS in the Age of Reagan

In October 1982, when I was a sophomore in high school, this conversation transpired at a press briefing conducted by Larry Speakes, spokesman for Ronald Reagan. Journalist: Larry, does the President have any response to the announcement [from] the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases? Speakes: What’s AIDS? Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as the “gay plague.” [Laughter] No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the  President is aware of it? Speakes: I don’t have it. Do you? [Laughter] Update (November 10, midnight) A reader just […]

We’re Going To Tax Their Ass Off!

This past Sunday, I appeared on Up With Chris Hayes, where I spoke briefly about the rise of austerity politics in the Democratic Party (begin video at 2:13). My comments were sparked by Bruce Bartlett’s terrific piece “‘Starve the Beast’: Origins and Development of a Budgetary Metaphor” in the Summer 2007 issue of The Independent Review. Barlett is a longtime observer of the Republican Party, from without and within. He was a staffer for Ron Paul and Jack Kemp, as well as a policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official under George HW Bush.  Now he’s a critic of the GOP, writing sharp commentary at the New York Times and the Financial Times. He and I have argued about […]

Rick Perlstein Schools Mark Lilla

After discussing the forgotten lunacies of the conservative movement during its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s—including one Fred Schwarz, right-wing crackpot and author of You Can Trust the Communists: To be Communists—Rick Perlstein, who knows more about the American right than just about anyone, writes this: The notion that conservatism has taken a new, and nuttier, turn has influential adherents whose distortions derail our ability to understand and contain it. In a recent New York Review of Books review of Corey Robin’s ground-breaking book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, which traces continuities in right-wing thought all the back to the seventeenth century, the distinguished political theorist Mark Lilla pronounced that “most of the turmoil […]

My Response to Bruce Bartlett

Bruce Bartlett was a senior policy adviser in the Reagan White House and Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under George H.W. Bush. He’s worked with and around conservatives—from Jack Kemp and Gary Bauer to Ron Paul and the Cato Institute—for decades. In recent years, he’s become a major critic of the Republican Party and the right, joining the ranks of Andrew Sullivan, David Frum, and other conservative apostates. He is, to cite a t-shirt my three-year-old daughter likes to wear, “kind of a big deal.” So I was more than pleased when he decided to respond, in the comments section, to my most recent post on the utopianism of Sullivan’s brand of conservatism. Given Bartlett’s stature, and my hope […]