The Reagan Revolution

[SheilaT]

18. For reasons I've never been able to comprehend,

Ronald Reagan has been treated like a saint almost since he took office in January 1981.

A lot of you are too young to remember, but context is ALWAYS important.

You need to look at the timeline. Nixon was elected in 1968, in no small part as a reaction to LBJ's war in Vietnam. He was actually a pretty popular president in his first term, and then was re-elected in 1972, in no small part because the Democrat running against him was George McGovern, personally a decent man, but politically a disaster. But the re-election also hinged on the entire Watergate break-in on June 17, 1972, which was entirely unnecessary, a complete overreach on the part of the Republicans. Worse, the break-in and the subsequent cover-up resulted ultimately in Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974. I'm inclined to say it's a given that a Democrat would be elected in 1976. The country was more than ready for a change.

Alas, the Democrat elected in 1976 was Jimmy Carter, a totally honest and decent man who, because of his honesty and decency was singularly unsuited to be President. Which is why Reagan won in 1980.

Reagan was "charismatic." He wasn't genuinely so, but he was sold as such. His background as an actor made him incredibly suited to playing the role of "President". He was also a man who genuinely could not distinguish between reality and fiction. He tended to tell stories of Hollywood movies as if they were real events. And the press corps NEVER once called him on that. Maybe they were still smarting from the relatively recent allegations of having given JFK a pass on his indiscretions. Maybe by then the press corps was mostly people who'd been co-opted by the powers that be, had learned that if they didn't play the game they wouldn't get to play at all. Maybe the press corps had begun to make too much money, had been too closely connected to power to be willing to challenge that power. I don't know, but it was right around 1980 that the press stopped asking the hard questions.

I was already an adult then. I was made crazy by what was happening. We didn't even have Fox news then, and already it was St. Ronald Reagan. To a very large extent critical thinking of any kind just stopped. No one bothered to fact-check Welfare Queens. If the President said it, then it must be true. But it wasn't.

Reaganomics, as it was called from the very beginning, was always seen as a fraud. But popular sentiment overrode reality. When Lane Kirkland, the President of the AFL-CIO stood with Reagan as he fired the Air Traffic Controllers, it was clear to anyone with half a brain that this was the death knell of unions. I have NEVER forgiven Kirkland's betrayal of organized labor, and I seem to be the only one who remembers.

Meanwhile, I constantly hear crap like, "Well, unions have gone too far." And this from people who treasure their 40 hour week, weekends off, paid vacations and holidays. The nearly complete lack of understanding of unions and the history of labor is completely appalling. But that's just one small part of how badly history is taught in this country.

So what we have today is Fox News and the Tea Party, two groups for whom facts are simply unimportant.