By today’s Trumpian standards he seems mild. Even Obama praised him. Along with Lincoln, Republicans trot Ronald Reagan out every time Democrats praise their greats: Obama, LBJ, Kennedy, FDR or Truman.
Republicans regularly rate him their greatest after Lincoln.
In reality, the “great communicator,“ as he was called, was an impenetrable facade of congeniality who was hostile to civil rights.
Despite his public congeniality, Reagan was quite hostile to civil rights. He had a history of it leading back to his testimonies for the House Un-American Activities Committee—-tasked with weeding out and blackballing suspected Communist sympathizers.
Ronald Reagan, prior to his political career, testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on October 23, 1947. At the time, Reagan was working as the president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). During his testimony, he expressed his concerns about communist influence within Hollywood and the entertainment industry.
Reagan named several individuals whom he believed to be members of the Communist Party or associated with communist activities. His testimony was notable for his strong anti-communist stance and his efforts to purge
suspected communist sympathizers from the industry.
While some praised Reagan’s actions, considering them a defense of American values and national security, others criticized his participation in the HUAC hearings as contributing to the climate of fear and blacklisting during the McCarthy era.
Reagan’s activities in front of the HUAC reflected his firm opposition to communism and foreshadowed his later political career, where he to advocate against his opponents, with coding language alluding to their un-Americaness.
This eventually led him to the governorship of California.
The Democratic presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson marked a significant turning point with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These landmark legislations caused a seismic shift within the Democratic Party. Subsequently, the Democrats experienced a loss of support from the Solid South in national presidential elections for the majority of the subsequent fifty years.
While some Democrats had already switched to the Republican Party prior to these acts, the number of defections increased significantly after Johnson's signing. This led to a period of profound reconfiguration within the political parties. However, the transformation did not occur instantly.
In the 1960s & early 1970s, white Southerners were still in the process of transitioning away from the Democratic Party (while newly enfranchised black Southerners voted & continued to vote Democratic). During the 1972 presidential primaries, former AL Governor George Wallace, known for his staunch support of segregation, ran as a Democrat, even as Richard Nixon employed a Southern strategy that appealed to the racism of Southern white voters.
Today the South is solidly Republican. In every presidential election since 1964 -- save the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 -- Dixie has been the heart of GOP presidential politics. The white Southern vote was key to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and President George W. Bush was elected in 2000 because he carried every Southern state.
Ronald Reagan was key to the South's transition to Republican politics. Goldwater got the ball rolling, but Reagan was at his side from the very beginning. During the 1964 campaign, Reagan gave speeches in support of Goldwater and spoke out for what he called individual rights -- (states' rights). Reagan also and portrayed any opposition as support for totalitarianism -- (communism).
Reagan expressed opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, referring to the latter as "humiliating to the South." During his 1966 gubernatorial campaign in California, he made a promise to repeal the Fair Housing Act, stating "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so."
@meshaiman well, they certainly have been advocating against civil rights for the last 50 or so years. There was a time when that was not the case. They are much more dysfunctional these days, though. Not a functioning party.
Reagan's extensive use of dog-whistle racism, which consisted of subtly coded messages, received insufficient media coverage at the time and has largely been disregarded in contemporary narratives. One group of people he continually harangued were people on public assistance, who he unilaterally relegated to “leech“ status.
While Governor of California, Reagan repeatedly targeted social service programs and “throwing the welfare bums out.”
In 1976, Reagan sought the GOP nomination against the incumbent Gerald Ford. Reagan's campaign was on the ropes until the primaries hit the Southern states, where he won his first key victory in NC. Throughout the South that spring and summer, Reagan portrayed himself as Goldwater's heir while criticizing Ford as a captive of Eastern establishment Republicans fixated on forced integration.
But when the former CA governor ran for President again in 1980, he began his campaign in Philadelphia, MS., where 3 civil rights workers were brutally killed by white supremacists. It was at that sore spot on the racial map that Reagan revived talk about states' rights & curbing the power of the federal government.
In front of a predominantly white audience numbering in the tens of thousands, Reagan proclaimed, "I believe in states' rights".
So much to be angry about where Reagan is concerned.
What angers me the most, as a child during his Presidency, living in a rural farm community, we were taught that he was the greatest world leader ever.
Much like right wing media has gaslit the MAGA folks, back then we too were gaslit. It wasn't until my college years that I fully understood the truth, and it still angers me that so many were fed lies for so long.
@Deglassco
Reagan was the beginning of the GOP’s loss of morals. It was the beginning of their perversion of everything; the constitution, religion, economics, faith in unions, truth, fair play, the slow march towards equality.
Reagan's rhetoric surrounding welfare programs and his portrayal of "welfare queens" perpetuated racial stereotypes.
To many it sounded like code for announcing himself as the candidate for white segregationists. Indeed, during his campaign for the Presidency, the Ku Klux Klan endorsed Reagan (after his Philadelphia MS speech). Reagan only repudiated the endorsement under pressure.
By the time Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1980, the Republican Party had firmly established its hold on white Southerners. He won.
After he defeated President Carter, a native Southerner, Reagan led an administration that seemed to cater to Southerners still angry over the passage of the Civil Rights Act after 16 years.
The Reagan team condemned busing for school integration, opposed affirmative action and even threatened to veto a proposed extension of the Voting Rights Act (the sequel to the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed a year later and focused on election participation).
Again, his emphasis on "states' rights" was seen as a veiled reference to opposing civil rights legislation and appealing to white voters who were resistant to desegregation efforts.
During his presidency, Ronald Reagan's justice department aligned itself with segregationists by offering support to Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist institution that sought federal funds despite practicing racial discrimination. In 1983, when the Supreme Court ruled against Bob Jones, Reagan responded by significantly weakening the Civil Rights Commission as an act of retaliation.
Critics argue that Ronald Reagan utilized the War on Drugs as a racially charged wedge issue, contributing to racial disparities within the criminal justice system. Reagan's administration implemented policies that disproportionately targeted minority communities, particularly African-Americans.
One notable aspect was the differential treatment between crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenses. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, signed into law by Reagan, established significantly harsher penalties for crack cocaine, which was more prevalent in low-income urban communities, predominantly impacting African-Americans.
The sentencing disparities resulted in disproportionate rates of incarceration for African-Americans, perpetuating racial inequalities within the criminal justice system. Critics argue that Reagan's administration, through its rhetoric and policies, perpetuated racial stereotypes and contributed to the stigmatization and criminalization of minority communities, further exacerbating existing racial divides.
In 1971, the day after the United Nations voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China, then–California Governor Ronald Reagan phoned President Richard Nixon at the White House and vented his frustration at the delegates who had sided against the United States.
Ronald Reagan’s use of racist dog whistles during his political campaigns was primarily through the use of coded language and symbolic gestures that appealed to racial biases and fears without explicitly mentioning race.
These tactics allowed Reagan to tap into racial resentments and gain support from white voters who harbored racial biases, effectively leveraging racist dog whistles to advance his political agenda.
@Deglassco
Thank you for this thread. Excellent, as are all of yours.
I followed every bit of this in real time, and you have laid it all out skillfully. I felt RR was a hate monger and a con artist from early on. His sweeping the country was appalling to me.
@dbc3 thank you for reading it. Yes, it was certainly a bad time for anyone nominally interested in civil rights, the environment, labor, unions, etc..
@northernlights@Deglassco I proudly voted against Reagan in my first Presidental Election, 1984. I had heard and seen way too much BS from that actor of a President and the posse of miserly. manipulative neocons he rode in with. This thread summed it up well. Most crappy trends in America we wrestle with today started with the giant backward movement that deposited this man in the White House.
I wonder if #Republicans and other people sympathetic to #racists are so focused on stopping #antiracist#allies from talking about race because they think they'll win if we all have to talk in code like #Reagan and others did?
My very outside-looking-in experience with #BlackMastodon makes me absolutely certain that racists will lose the #dogwhistle arms race. The amount of media that allies of all oppressed people could put out will inundate the sad, tired tropes the MAGA crowd have.
@Deglassco Birds of a (white) feather. Didn’t half of Reagan’s Cabinet and inner circle come from Nixon’s? The evils of John Foster Dulles and his colonialism carrying the racism outside of the US, as well as inside it? (Hope I’m not mangling my half-remembered history too badly.)
@aprilfollies Reagan and Nixon had similar ideological make up. John Foster Dulles served as a diplomat and secretary of state under Dwight Eisenhower.
@Deglassco Yes, I admit that my American Government professor in college tended to harp on Dulles as the ideological influence that infected much of 20th century political thought. He claimed it as the root of a philosophy handed down to politicians who would join later administrations. That one name got stuck in my head as a result… Thank you for taking time to answer!
@Deglassco It is interesting to watch the reformation of the Republican old guard. I'm old and remember the utter stupidity of Iran-Contra, Star Wars and Hollywood psychics. I remember The Patriot Act and yellow cake uranium.
These are not, and never will be, good guys but the bar is so low. Just being rational is fantastic.
@JoBlakely and yet it is very difficult to convince people that this was the case. Things may have been going good for some people but for a lot of people, the 80s were not great.
@JoBlakely My friend, I lived through his reign in my 20s. It was a gd nightmare if you weren't well off. #GenX have our pop anthem that takes me back to that era every time I hear it...
@Deglassco I attended a speech given by Jimmy Carter in Nashville in 1980, and representatives of the Ku Klux Klan (in white robes) picketed outside in support of Reagan. The KKK’s endorsement of Reagan created a minor controversy because Reagan did not immediately disavow it.
Another white dared to claim that banning discrimination against LGBTQ People would "force all manner of artists, speechwriters, and others whose services involve speech to speak what they do not believe on pain of penalty."
-Gorsuch
@Deglassco I think the roots of this actually go back to an individual named Strom Thurmond in 1948, who ran as a "Dixiecrat" against Truman and the Civil Rights Northerners in the Democrats. (Later, he became a Republican.) The same states that were the core of the 1948 southern resistance to Civil Rights became Goldwater's base in 1964. Then Reagan, and lastly President Trump in 2016/2020.
@Deglassco The part of history that gets glossed over here is the McGovernite takeover of the Democratic Party. The Democrats began to lose a lot of working class voters, for reasons having nothing to do with race, when elite liberal Hippie lawyers marched in and took the Democrats over. They, from then onward, emphasized controversial social issues over spreading the money around, (which FDR began.) Inevitably, large groups of D voters either left or passed on after decades of being ignored.
@Deglassco In some ways LBJ's progressive legislative success was a "black swan." Who could have imagined an old "blue dog" Texas Democratic President would shepherd thru so many of his "Great Society" bills thru Congress and go on to sign VRA, CRA, Medicare, and Medicaid? Mid 60's was a liminal time, with much turmoil and conflict, an ideal time for change. He worked faster than the racists and conservatives could respond as they scurried out of the Democratic party and regrouped in the GOP. He also burned all his political capital. Moral of story: embrace chaos, work fast, and use political capital in the service of a better future not in the service of one's career.
I thought his real turn in political philosophy came when he met Nancy, for some reason. Was that strong conservatism always there? Didn’t he switch parties 60 odd years back?
@enigma sadly, there was only so much space to list his destructiveness. Reagan was all about show. There wasn’t much depth there. He took advantage of the slow, destructive decline of the USSR. It just so happened that the Soviet Union collapsed under this guy’s watch. And true to his actor bona fides, he was ready with the perfect line. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!“
@Deglassco@blackmastodon@BlackMastodon Not only that, Reagan would not be welcome in today's Republican party. They may still lionize him, but he would not recognize them any more.
@Deglassco@blackmastodon@BlackMastodon A terrible guy for Latin America. Supported dictatorships, coup d'etat, massacres, death squads, paramilitary armies. The worst.
@Deglassco@blackmastodon@BlackMastodon I haven't been able to figure out if he was suffering from the dementia the whole time he was in office. He certainly did the oligarchy's bidding. Sometimes I think they told him he was filming a movie and he was cast in the role of president.
@Deglassco@blackmastodon@BlackMastodon Reagan’s redemption is total historical revisionism by many who did not actually live under his presidency. But he appeals to the current era because he was the first mass media President—a manufactured image meant to attract votes, but lacking all substance. Others would follow in his stead.
@JoeOriginal I don’t see him as having a redemption because he has never really lost popularity on the right. Even on the left, you see people like Obama and Biden, and Clinton praising his communication skills.
@Deglassco@blackmastodon@BlackMastodon If Reagan saw what they were doing, he’d have a heart attack and die again. That said, he’s got to own this. After all, he’s the one that lowered the threshold on mental health care.
@Deglassco@blackmastodon@BlackMastodon Reagan's eight years as president was a total disaster for the middle and working classes. He decertified the PATCO union which gave a green light for corporations to destroy collective bargaining. The S&L collapse was created by his deregulation policies. Millions of middle class people lost their life savings as a result. He tried to destroy the EPA with Rita Lavell. He tried to destroy the Interior Department with James Watt. And so much more...
@bpoortinga Agreed. He was incredibly destructive to labor unions, the environment, civil rights, etc. And yet, he still remains the patron saint of the Republican Party.
@Deglassco For someone who grew up with "the fascist gun in the West," first as governor and then as president, the rehabilitation of his death squad loving ass has been hard to watch,
@jobsboils well, the Democratic Party is still trying to re-capture the lost “Reagan Democrats.“ Not going to happen, but bless their hearts, they still keep at it (to the detriment of us all).
@Deglassco@blackmastodon@BlackMastodon He was the first Hollywood actor that they nominated. But in his case, Reagan had to actually do a significant role, like two-term governor of California. And what history also tends to ignore is that he was an ingrate about things where he received help from government and regulations (particularly, he was head of the Screen Actors Guild). And also a big crybaby. Huge. He was always griping about something.
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