… The dissonance between the Republican Party’s pious exaltation of Reagan the man and its break with much of his policy record is established enough that last year the Amazon show “Alpha House” built an episode around it, in which a Reagan impersonator shows up at a Republican retreat, recites the president’s actual quotations and gets booed. But the starkness of the disconnect is especially hard to ignore when the Republican hopefuls are arrayed in the literal shadow of his legacy, as they were on Wednesday.
The debate was a reminder of not just the frayed state of Reaganism in the 21st-century party but also the lack of any big, new, unifying “ism” to take its place. CONT.
Jim Rutenberg, New York Times Magazine