The Reagan Revolution

[Shagman]

14. another interpretation

Reagan was an actor, pure and simple. They fed him lines and he delivered them. As the anti-Nixon he could say anything and get away with it. "Trickle-down" economics has never worked, but he sold it. He made conservatives feel good about America, even when he started kicking away the props that held it up.

As Don Henley put it at the time:
The cowboy's name was Jingo, and he heard that there was trouble
So in a blaze of glory he rode out of the west
No one was ever certain what it was that he was sayin'
But they loved it when he told them they were better than the rest