Why Are Conservatives Obsessed with Reagan? He Coincided with Ideological Party Takeover Like No Democratic President Did

Originally published in the Mischiefs of Faction blog.

By Jonathan M. Ladd

Jonathan Chait finds a great quote from conservative pundit Jennifer Rubin, who proclaims that Rand Paul's unbending opposition to war with Iran "definitively de-Reaganizes him." Why do conservatives spend so much time talking about Ronald Reagan? Why is it so important for Republican politicians (especially those running for president) to behave as Reagan supposedly would? I think the key to understanding this is in Hans Noel's new book. Noel shows that modern liberalism and conservatism were developed by pundits in the early to mid twentieth century and gradually took over the two parties.

The Reagan personality cult comes from the fact that the ideological take-over at the presidential level happened differently in the two parties. For Democrats, the party's successive presidents gradually adopted more aspects of modern liberalism's tenants. Truman was the first to endorse racial liberalism and the Kennedy/Johnson administration solidified and extended that embrace, while it wasn't until Clinton that a sitting Democratic president clearly endorsed abortion rights, and Clinton and Obama took successively more liberal positions on LGBT rights. But on the Republican side, there is a clear break at the presidential level pre and post Reagan. Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford all deviated from modern conservatism in major ways. All three acquiesced to a substantial welfare state and high taxes, while Ford was a strong supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment and moderate to liberal on abortion policy. Then all of a sudden, there is a Republican president in Reagan who fully embraces modern conservatism as constructed by William F. Buckley and other mid-century thinkers. Even Reagan himself had deviated prior to 1980 on abortion, but by the time he won the Republican nomination, he embraced the complete modern conservative issue bundle that included low taxes, social conservatism, and aggressive foreign policy. While there are still factional fights within the GOP after 1980, no Republican president (or presidential nominee) has seriously challenged that bundle.

George H.W. Bush is a nice illustration because prior to 1980 he was a pro-choice moderate Republican who opposed Reagan's low tax policy proposals. But when joining the ticket in 1980, he immediately became pro-life. In 1988, he made low taxes a centerpiece of his campaign. He was later vilified by some conservatives for signing one tax-raising bill in response to a deficit crises that was causing interest rates to balloon. The smallness of his heresy and the intensity of the reaction against it illustrate how different post-1980 Republican presidential politics was from what came before it. On the Democratic side, there is no similar sudden presidential-level embrace of modern ideology. Democratic presidents (and nominees) did embrace modern liberalism, but different candidates embraced different aspects of it at different times.

On top of this, people just find it easier to employ a "great man" view of history. So rather than think about what really happened---the mix of positions that we call modern conservatism gradually emerged from the debates and negotiations among mid-century thinkers---it is easier to just say that Reagan did it. It is of course wrong to claim that Reagan is the cause of the Republican party embracing modern conservatism. But it is correct that his election as president was a dramatic manifestation of that process, and thus has big symbolic value. Given that a substantial portion of the mass public doesn't think ideologically, and the widespread attractiveness of the "great man" interpretation of history, it makes some sense for conservative pundits and politicians to speak to the public by talking about Reagan, when they really mean to talk about modern conservatism.

What Rubin is really saying here is that Rand Paul is not a modern conservative. And that's true. An aggressive foreign policy (whether it is against Iran, Russia, or anyone else) has been an inseparable part of modern conservatism from Buckley through Reagan through George W. Bush and to the present day. Whether it is dovish views on foreign wars and the security state, having unreconstructed neo-Confederates write his campaign biography, or accusing his party's most recent vice president of starting a war for personal financial gain, Rand Paul holds several positions that, while part of right-wing thought broadly defined, have been for many decades excluded from conservatism's bundle of positions. Paul won't be the Republican presidential nominee in 2016 because he is not a conservative as that term is defined right now in this country. Rubin's de-Reaganization is just a shorthand way of saying that.