Foreign policy columnist and former Republican Max Boot has written a Reagan biography, and it’s insufferable, if the essay by Northwestern University professor Daniel Immerwahr for the September 16 New Yorker, "What if Ronald Reagan’s Presidency Never Really Ended?", is any indication.
The New Yorker is a “sophisticated” publication with a long, literary history, written for urban lefties by urban lefties, but the political articles aren’t always as knee-jerk liberal as one may expect (perhaps because they’re so lengthy that non-liberal facts have more of a chance to pop up).
But that’s not the case for this 4,000-word piece, about the re-education of Max Boot and how he lost faith in his formerly beloved Ronald Reagan. It sounds like every other hostile, condescending liberal journalistic cliché hurled at Reagan over the last half-century. The closest thing to a fresh angle is tying the 40th president to Donald Trump, in order to demonize two Republican presidents at once.
The rest was just old-fashioned liberal bias: That President Reagan was indifferent to civil rights and poor people, a dummy who lived in a fantasy world who ushered in a decade of greed and untrammeled laissez-faire while letting federal deficits go wild, and almost starting World War III with silly Star Wars projects.
The New Yorker identified Boot as a former “movement conservative,” editor of The Weekly Standard and adviser to Republican presidential campaigns before the scales fell from his eyes and he saw the true rot of the Republican Party, going back to…Dwight Eisenhower?
Trump’s election shook Boot’s world view. Was this what Republicanism was about? Had Boot been deluded the whole time? He wrote a book, “The Corrosion of Conservatism” (2018), about his breakup with the G.O.P. The #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, he could now admit, made good points….
Immerwahr called Boot's new book “Reagan: His Life and Legend” the “definitive biography” and not “a full-throated defense of Reagan.” If it was, it certainly wouldn’t be praised as definitive in The New Yorker.
At first, Boot thought Reagan’s “sunny spirit and soothing affect” made him “Trump’s opposite.” But could Trump actually be Reagan’s natural successor? Boot found “startling similarities” between the men, apparently.
Reagan’s easygoing manner, Boot acknowledges, concealed hard-to-stomach beliefs. Reagan viewed the New Deal, which he’d once supported, as “fascism.” He raised preposterous fears about the Soviet capture of Hollywood, and fed his fellow-actors’ names to the F.B.I. When Republican legislators largely voted for the landmark civil-rights laws of the nineteen-sixties, Reagan stood against them….
Left-wing historian Rick Perlstein is quoted calling the post-Hollywood Reagan “about as far right as a public figure could be” Perlstein had written his own fantasia on how the rise of a lying showman like Trump could have been foreseen by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, as if the electorate was simply enthralled by a glowing TV image, not electing and them massively re-electing a successful national leader.
Reagan was condemned for getting lost in fantasy.
The Presidency involves symbolic and executive functions. Like no President before him, Reagan specialized exclusively in the symbolic ones, to the point of getting lost in fantasy. He would recount, with tears, a conversation between two doomed airmen in a falling plane. Those men didn’t exist, but there was a similar scene in the 1944 film “Wing and a Prayer.”
Meanwhile, President Biden tells outlandish stories constantly. The lazy, liberal journalist characterizations and political backbiting continued.
His political career was defined by three great delusions: that Communists were close to seizing the United States, that cutting taxes would increase government revenues, and that satellite weapons (particle beams, lasers) could stop all nuclear missiles….
Immerwahr goes 0-3 with this line.
….The Reaganite values that most endure are the reactionary ones: his hostility toward civil rights, feminism, and the welfare state.
Seriously? Trump as president didn’t criticize or repeal any actual civil rights legislation, is against a national abortion ban, and will almost certainly never dare cut entitlement spending.
He dismissed the import of the mortifying scandal of Boot’s wife, Su Mi Terry, being indicted for being a secret foreign agent for South Korea (did Boot, who accused Trump of being a foreign asset in his Washington Post column, really not suspect there was an unregistered foreign asset in his own home?).
Immerwahr ignored the Reagan-inspired economic turnaround and infusion of optimism that resulted in his landslide reelection, and ignored books showing Reagan was not a creature of his handlers but had a sophisticated view of the world.
He concluded ponderously:
….Presidents had lied before, some egregiously. Reagan, however, fabricated an alternate reality. The country no longer expected truth from the world’s most powerful individual. It no longer expected comprehension, even. Reagan’s job was making myths. The problems came when people believed them.
