Was Reagan a Precursor to Trump? A New Documentary Says Yes

[applegrove]

Was Reagan a Precursor to Trump? A New Documentary Says Yes

“The Reagans,” a new Showtime docu-series, presents Ronald Reagan as an early practitioner of dog-whistle politics. But some historians and journalists disagree with that position.

By Adam Nagourney at the NY Times

Nov. 11, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/arts/television/the-reagans.html?action=click&module=Editors Picks&pgtype=Homepage

"SNIP.....

Was Ronald Reagan a kindhearted conservative who remade government and merits his standing as a beloved icon of the Republican Party? Or was he a glorified actor who won election with a coded racist appeal to white voters, setting the stage for the rise of President Trump?

That debate has long absorbed Reagan historians and biographers, particularly these days as Reagan’s legacy seems ever more gauzy when held up against these past four years of the just-defeated president.

And it is now being tackled in “The Reagans,” a four-part documentary on Ronald and Nancy Reagan premiering Sunday on Showtime. It is the work of Matt Tyrnauer, a documentarian whose past subjects have included Roy Cohn, the fashion designer Valentino and Studio 54.

Tyrnauer grew up in Los Angeles when Reagan was governor of California. As a boy being driven to school by his father, he sat in traffic as the motorcade taking the newly elected president from his home in the Pacific Palisades to a postelection news conference in Century City sped down Sunset Boulevard.

.....SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. Republicans will start squealing. They don't want St. Ronnie and their secret

sauce to be laid bare.

[BigmanPigman]

2. Yes, yes indeed!

Mr. Reality TV show and Mr. Hollywood are one and the same. So are their greedy, hate filled backers. Forty years of GOP greedy hypocrites.

[Brother Mythos]

10. Republican voters do love their actors.

And, that's because they actually believe all of that acting is the real thing. Go figure.

[RainCaster]

3. The GOP is all about racism and corruption

What else is there?

[Wash. state Desk Jet]

4. Oh yes for sure.

[Mike Nelson]

5. Hmm...

... in part... But GWB, George Wallace even more so... I think the strain gets closer with the "Tea Party" and the Palin appeal.

[LisaM]

6. Absolutely.

Trump is an outcome. I've often said it.

[andym]

7. Well Ronnie loved to talk about welfare queens driving Caddies (Cadillacs) --racism

on the one hand. Also, Ronnie was full of all kinds of misinformation, especially scientific, such as trees were the major source of pollution and his numerous right-wing extreme beliefs that the federal government was basically bad --the nine worst words in the English language--"I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Trump tried to build on these.
OTOH, he was affable and well-liked on both sides of the aisle, unlike Trump. He and Speaker Tip O'Neill got along famously.

[CharleyDog]

12. "Young bucks eating steaks"

all the racial stereotypes of the day to scare the rubes about Black ppl voting
also preaching "Gov-mint is the problem" and ushered in the start of America's decline of worker's rights, a living wage, and the promise of the American Dream.

[Nay]

20. Let's not forget his claim that ketchup was a vegetable, so it counted as one in kids' school

lunches.

[musette_sf]

8. Of course.

The bitter ex-Nixonians started cooking this shit up before RMN boarded the helicopter in August 1974.

[demosincebirth]

9. He was a union buster and a hypocrite

[JI7]

11. It goes back further but Reagan was part of the problem also

[Polybius]

28. Calvin Coolidge?

Perhaps it started with him.

[JI7]

29. Racism in general but Nixon's southern strategy in regards to the Republican party

[misanthrope]

13. Yes, take a pound of Reagan and add in

a cup of Sarah Palin, cook a few years and out pops some Trump.

[Solly Mack]

14. In many ways, yes. Cult of personality-wise, definitely. Reagan was movies. Trump, reality TV.

Feel good, cheer leading bullshit fed to the masses like it was oxygen.

Lies, bullshit, all a facade.

Conservatives have been building up to a Trump for longer but, yes, Reagan was their first truly successful demagogue of the modern age.

Reagan was forever confusing a movie with actual American history and actual fact, period. You could see a light switch on in his eyes when Reagan went to speak. His audience, and he played to it.

Horrible president.

[Nay]

22. Def true about the cult of personality -- remember after his terms that cult members

had a worshipful project in which they named buildings, places, airports, parks, etc., at least one place in every state, after Reagan so he'd never be forgotten.

[Solly Mack]

23. Oh, yeah. It was sickening.

[Nay]

30. I remember wanting to throw up in rage. nt

[Hermit-The-Prog]

15. Rotten Ronnie was rotten ...

Someday it will be crystal clear to all just what a terrible president Ronald Reagan was- by kpete

[Skittles]

16. Reagan made greed and idiocy fashionable

America has never truly recovered.

[no_hypocrisy]

17. Day One of his first presidential campaign: Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Reagan making a stump speech, supporting "states rights."

Significance: Philadelphia, MS is where the three civil rights workers.

Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner
Main article: Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner
In the mid-20th century, Mississippi was a battleground of the civil rights movement as, like other states of the South, it had long disfranchised blacks and subjected them to racial segregation and Jim Crow laws. Philadelphia in June 1964 was the scene of the murders of activists James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old Jewish anthropology student from New York City; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old Jewish CORE organizer and former social worker, also from New York. Their deaths demonstrated the risks that activists took to secure the constitutional rights of African Americans.

Ku Klux Klan members (including Cecil Price, a deputy sheriff of Neshoba County) released the three young men from jail, took them to an isolated spot, and killed them, then buried them in an earthen dam. It was some time after they disappeared before the bodies were discovered, as a result of an FBI investigation and national media attention.[6] The national outrage over their deaths helped procure support for Congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The murders and related conspiracy gave rise to the "Mississippi Burning" trial, United States v. Price.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia,_Mississippi

When Reagan spoke of states' rights, it was a loud dog whistle about Jim Crow and segregation and no voting for "Negoes."

[DeminPennswoods]

18. Nixon and the Southern Strategy

pre-date Reagan. But candidates offering nativism, xenophobia, racism and the like are as old as the country.

[VOX]

19. "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with." - Gov. Ronald Reagan, 1969

What the “kindhearted conservative” spoke aloud about the campus unrest at UC Berkeley. He was a raging, reactionary asshole as California governor.

11 years later, it was plain to those with a memory what kind of president he would make.

[lagomorph777]

21. Failure to punish Raygun for Iran Contra enabled the escalations of Bush Sr, Bush Jr, and Trump

[area51]

24. +1 n/t

[edhopper]

25. One difference

As much as I hated Reagan and saw him as a front man for the present day Robber Barons, he did understand government and his role as President. Unlike Trump, having been Governor he knew how to govern. I despised how he did it, but he was not a complete idiot who didn't understand the slightest bit about the Constitution or the function of the Government.

[Hortensis]

26. The GOP's self-degradation started with the nation shifting

more conservative (the mood of the times) and giving Republicans more power because we could no long act as a sufficient check on their more extreme tendencies. As the dominant party, the power tables were turned.

I watched it start with Reagan. The meanness and pivot from growing general prosperity to shrinking it. Mildly aggressive comments at gatherings, like "you're naive," became more common as they became emboldened. And then, as the party leadership became more extreme and ruthless toward the 1990s they turned to overtly hostile lies meant to deepen divisions and harden antagonistic opposition, progressing in this century to the current intense demonizing meant to incite hatred and violence.

So, I believe yes, since late 1970s/1980 a long, increasingly anti-democracy slide that hasn't hit bottom yet. But Reagan wasn't a cause, he was a manifestation of Americans in general tiring of the half-century-long liberal New Deal era and turning to the conservative Republican Party for new solutions.

Also during this period was at least a quadrupling of national wealth, which was channeled into the creation of new centimillionaire and billionaire classes and the creation of a giant new tool for mass manipulation, the internet.

[JHB]

27. I don't need a documentary to say "yes" to that

[jcgoldie]

31. The only difference...

Uncle Ronnie acted like a sweet old man instead of a raging narcissistic dick all the time and didn't perpetually say the quiet part out loud... but practically speaking... same guy.