The real significance of Reagan for the Republican Party

[starroute]

The Republican Party has always been first and foremost the party of the rich and of big business. This is a real problem for them when it comes to elections, especially on the national level. They have to find some way of convincing large numbers of Americans to vote for candidates who do not primarily have their interests at heart.

Their most consistent strategy has been to appeal to certain groups who consider themselves conservative in one way or another -- small businessmen, rural and small town voters, the religious right -- by playing to wedge issues and by convincing them that the Democrats are the party of everything they hate and fear.

But they have never had -- and never can have -- a genuinely popular constituency, because to do so they would have to speak to the real interests of the majority of Americans. And doing that would threaten the control and privileges of their wealthy masters.

Reagan's significance is that he was the one Republican politician who, if only briefly, seemed to offer the possibility of a genuinely popular Republican coalition. By convincing people that a rising tide lifts all boats, by destroying the unions while suggesting that workers no longer needed unions to succeed, by winning over a certain number of traditionally Democratic constituencies, by speaking effectively to Americans in terms of shared dreams, he made it seem that the Republican Party could become the sort of big tent that the Democrats had been ever since the New Deal.

It didn't last, of course, and it was all kind of a shuck even at the time. Reagan's true policies were far more hard-right and anti-democratic than most Americans bothered to notice. When he was succeeded by Bush I -- who couldn't even recognize a supermarket bar code reader -- the true elitism of the party became apparent again. With Bush II, they've given up even pretending to court popular support and are busy looting the country for their own profit.

But it seems that the Reagan myth is still very much alive. The essence of that myth is the claim that Reagan was a wildly popular president, that he was the true successor to FDR -- but with policies that encouraged people to stand on their own feet rather than depending on the government -- and that the Reagan legacy can be the basis for a permanent Republican majority.

All the idolatry of the moment is directed towards building up that myth. And when Bush II has been discredited and repudiated even by his fellow-Republicans, the Reagan myth will be the basis upon which the Republican Party attempts to reconsolidate itself. It is that myth -- and the core question of who really represents the interests of the majority of Americans -- that we have to address.