For nearly 30 years, the Republican Party has increasingly resembled a religion, with Ronald Reagan is its deity. …
I learned that election returns show Americans don’t want what Reaganism’s high priests are preaching. More crucially, I learned that everything I thought I knew about Reagan was wrong—that Reaganism misrepresents Reagan’s own views.
Reagan’s conservatism actually fit squarely within Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal consensus, not the anti-New Deal conservatism that forms Reaganism’s heart.
Heresy! some readers will cry. How can a man who backed Barry Goldwater, who said that “libertarianism is the heart of conservatism,” and who told America that “government is not the solution to the problem, it is the problem” be a New Deal conservative? The answer is that while all those statements are true, they exist in the context of a much more pro-government world view than Reaganism admits. CONT.
Henry Olsen, Ethics and Public Policy Center