How Reagan gave us Trump
The legacy of America's last great president led directly to the rise of the worst.
Ronald Reagan was deeply controversial in life, but since his death a consensus has emerged even among his detractors that he was a great president, perhaps America’s last great president for the time being.
The question of greatness is a difficult one, all the more so in regard to a president of the United States, who will inevitably be seen through the lens of political sympathy and ideology, making a discordant series of assessments inevitable.
Nonetheless, a consensus can perhaps be reached if one considers a) the extent to which a president succeeds in implementing his agenda, whatever one thinks of it, and b) the overall influence of that agenda on the United States and its history.
Judged on this basis, even the most fervent detractor must admit that Reagan was a great president. His agenda of liberalization of the US economy, a hawkish stance on foreign policy, and a restorationist view of American society was, for the most part, successfully implemented.
Furthermore, this success shifted America in a decisively conservative direction and effectively gave birth to modern conservatism as a viable and mainstream political movement. William F. Buckley, Jr. was once seen as an appealing kook. In the person of Reagan, Buckley’s ideology claimed the commanding heights of American politics.
The enormity of Reagan’s success can only be grasped from a long-term historical perspective. It is often forgotten today that, for the better part of 50 years, from Franklin Roosevelt’s election to the collapse of Jimmy Carter, America was more or less a social democracy. Roosevelt’s New Deal brought the idea of positive government action into the socioeconomic and political mainstream, and built the modern American welfare state, further compounded by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, which sought to finish the work Roosevelt began.
Even under relatively conservative leaders like Dwight Eisenhower, the New Deal continued to lie at the heart of the American consensus, and its few challengers were seen as at best outdated and at worst deranged extremists.
Certainly, this consensus was showing diminishing returns before the rise of Reagan, especially after Johnson’s overspending, the ruinous costs of the Vietnam War, inflation, and the oil crisis sent the American economy reeling for a decade. In many ways, American social democracy died of events and overreach.
Nonetheless, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Carter all sought to deal with these problems from within the paradigm of the New Deal. Whatever policies they pursued, all of them attempted to work with the existing consensus, not to change it. They neither sought nor wanted a paradigm shift.
Reagan, in contrast, quite deliberately set about smashing the social democratic consensus, advocating for the superiority of the private sector and the benefits of the unfettered free market. He summed up his philosophy in his inaugural address: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
This was, in many ways, an understandable sentiment. It was clear by then that the social democratic model was, to a great extent, not working. One of the basic principles of social democracy is heavy government involvement in the economy, and thus, in a crisis of social democracy, it could be reasonably argued that a tilt in the opposite direction might do some good.
Moreover, after over a decade of political and economic upheaval, including a disastrous lost war, America was enervated and exhausted. It needed, above all, a shot in the arm, a dose of adrenaline that would wake up its dormant tectonic powers. Unleashing the enormous energies that the free market undoubtedly possesses was a reasonable course of action under such circumstances.
It is only fair to say that, to a considerable extent, it worked. Indeed, without Reagan and his economic shock treatment, America’s ultimate triumph in the Cold War—coming, ironically, just after Reagan left office—might not have been possible. The massive economic expansion that followed lasted until the financial crisis of 2008 and, in many ways, continues today.
All of this being said, however, it is difficult not to conclude that, judged on the man’s own terms, Reagan was ultimately a failure. This is because everything he did was not simply in the name of free market liberalism or American patriotism. Although he fostered a revolution, Reagan was not a revolutionary. His convictions were restorationist, if not somewhat reactionary in nature. He wanted to use the free market and renewed national pride as tools, not ends in themselves.
Reagan’s ultimate vision, as he himself said, was a “shining city on a hill.” That is, a return to America as he understood it and believed it once had been: An upstanding, morally virtuous society rooted in liberty and serving the purposes of a just God.
If this was Reagan’s goal, then it is clear that he did not accomplish it. In a sense, this was inevitable, as it was a deliberately vague vision, and to a great extent a fantasy. The US has always been a devilishly complex society, and the kind of puritan ideal Reagan described never existed in anything like the form he wished to restore. This was a nation, after all, that 120 years before Reagan’s presidency had witnessed the slaughter of 600,000 men because it could not solve an elementary contradiction in its idea of liberty.
Nonetheless, a great many Americans believed and still believe in something like Reagan’s ideal, and there is the possibility that a vague equivalent of it might have been constructed in a different context. What made such a project impossible, however, was Reagan himself. That is to say, the tools Reagan employed in pursuit of his dream made that dream unattainable, a paradox he and his supporters then and now never recognized.
The essence of this paradox lay in the nature and the implications of the free-market ideology that Reagan successfully implemented. Markets are good for a great many things, but they are not good at fostering moral virtue. Markets exist for a single reason: To make money. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. It is the only thing markets are supposed to do. This is why the more reasonable free-marketeers have always recognized that countervailing forces are necessary in order to temper market excesses.
It was this necessity that neither Reagan nor his followers would recognize. In this, they were building upon the convictions of market ideologists like Milton Friedman and, at the extreme, Ayn Rand, who held that morality or the greater social good were irrelevant to the market. By its simple existence, the market fosters the freedom of the individual. What the individual then did with that freedom was deemed, for the most part, to be nobody’s business but his own.
Moreover, ideologues like Rand—and it would be a grave mistake to underestimate her influence—held that to bring countervailing forces to bear was not simply counterproductive and economically undesirable, but an actual moral evil. The good, in other words, is whatever the market deems to be good, which means, in effect, that the good is whatever makes money.
It is very likely that if someone had told Reagan, “The good is whatever makes money,” he would have recoiled from the idea. But he would, and did, also recoil from any implication that the market ought to be at least somewhat restrained for the benefit of society. He stuck to his market liberalism without compromise throughout his presidency, and there is no indication that he ever questioned or regretted that decision.
As a result, Reagan succeeded in building a society of immense dynamism and wealth. This was, no doubt, a major accomplishment. But since he could not countenance the possibility of collateral damage and inherent contradiction, he unleashed all the pathologies of the market along with it: Massive inequality, the hollowing out of the industrial base and the middle and working classes, unfettered globalization with all its discontents, the ballooning of extremely profitable forms of legal vice like gambling and pornography, a hyper-materialism that dominates all aspects of society, and above all a culture of avarice in which, to steal a line, greed is considered the ultimate good.
There is no doubt that this was not what Reagan wanted. He did not envision a society that is massively wealthy but whose massive wealth is inaccessible to the vast majority of its citizens. He certainly did not want the market-driven rise of industries like pornography and gambling. He admired the virtues of the working and lower-middle classes and likely never imagined that unfettered markets and globalization would destroy their livelihoods. He believed in the basic principles of Christianity, and the Randian apotheosis of materialism, selfishness, and acquisition as the ultimate moral ideals would likely have repulsed him. Nonetheless, this is what he built, and what he—and America—got.
Such an outcome cannot be viewed as anything other than a tragedy. As the British philosopher John Gray has noted of Margaret Thatcher, the free-market values Reagan promoted ended up superseding and suppressing all his other values, many of which were likely more precious to him. As in all tragedies, it was Reagan’s pursuit of virtue, not his own selfish ends, that ended up destroying his dream, though he did not quite live to see it.
The butcher’s bill for Reagan’s tragedy did not begin to come due for some time after his death. Certainly, the economic collapse of 2008 put at least one nail in the coffin of the free market consensus, but no one was capable of coming up with any better ideas, so the consensus was amended around the margins rather than fundamentally changed, something that has proved mightily irritating to the likes of the easily irritated Bernie Sanders.
But the true cost of Reagan’s tragedy proved to be political rather than economic. Put simply, it was Reagan and his contradictions that paved the way for the rise of Donald Trump.
It easy enough to see Trump as sui generis, a sudden, inexplicable eruption of the satanic forces in American culture and society—and many still see him as such. Others have given up on trying to “figure him out” and simply await the day when he either dies or is so incapacitated that he ceases to be a serious political force.
In fact, Trump’s rise was entirely foreseeable. Once the Reagan revolution entered its decadent phase, and became not simply an ideology but conventional wisdom, its complexities worn down by time and success and its foot soldiers grown lazy in its defense, a figure like Trump was inevitable. If he had not existed, the absolute capitalism that Reagan unleashed would have created him or someone like him.
This is because Trump personifies the darkest recesses of Reaganite capitalism: A kind of mad, monstrous rush toward wealth at whatever cost to conduct or ethics. For Trump, being rich is an existential necessity. He cannot countenance any higher morality than that. To him, anything that makes money, including essentially defrauding his creditors, refusing to pay his taxes, and cutting a swath through throngs of innocent renters unceremoniously evicted, among many other transgressions of elementary morality, is not only justifiable but also admirable. The good is whatever makes money.
Money, in America, is power—perhaps the only real source of power—and thus an entrance into the political realm is the natural corollary of it. Trump’s secret, however, whose terrible logic explains everything, is that he adapted the moral imperative of market absolutism to politics: The good is whatever makes you powerful. Beyond that lies nothing.
This is also the source of Trump’s essential inhumanity. Unleashed capitalism has a certain view of humankind. It separates human beings into a dualistic vision composed of “winners” and “losers,” and nothing in between. The winners and the losers, it is held as a catechism and dogma, deserve whatever they get, and the former are to be admired and the latter rightfully scorned. Winners are good people, losers are bad people, and the worst thing in the world to be, a consignment to the ninth circle, is a loser.
It should be obvious to the non-ideologue that this is a monstrous view of the world. It does not only divide humanity but rejects humanity. It makes such basic human impulses as compassion and altruism into violations of the natural law and raises “winning,” i.e. financial success, into an indication of ultimate moral virtue. The rich are a blessed class, the non-rich are a damned class, and never the twain shall meet. This is the word of God. It is how the world is made. At best, the paradigm holds that there is no point in resisting this natural order. At worst, it views violation of the order as heretical, blasphemous, or—as Rand succinctly put it—“evil.”
This moral paradigm, created by Reaganomics in a fit of absence of mind, was always going to find its culmination in a figure who would seek not just financial but also political power. It created a hierarchy within a hierarchy, a pecking order among the barons of commerce in which, at a certain point, the acquisition of wealth would show diminishing returns in terms of status. Eventually, money would not be enough to outdo one’s fellow billionaires. Something else would have to be found, an even greater height to scale, and its summit could only be the presidency.
The goal, then, is to become the ultimate “winner.” To gain not just great wealth but the adoration and acclamation of the people, of the entire nation. Once one is president, the powers of the billionaire pale into insignificance. You have your finger on the nuclear button, the literal power to destroy the world, something the likes of Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos could only dream of in their darkest moments. To have one’s finger on that button is to “win” once and for all, never to be outdone by anyone.
Trump was perfectly suited to such an endeavor because he, more than any other figure of his time, believed in the catechism. Other billionaires at least cloak their mercenary endeavors in some kind of moral hypocrisy. Trump has no such compunctions. He is a man of absolute faith in the mysteries of money, in its capacity to bring one closer to God, and what morality he has is the morality of money, of the market, of the rectitude of selfishness and inhumanity.
It was this, more than anything else, that gave Trump his immense power as a politician, because it justified doing literally anything to achieve political success. This is not, as is widely believed, because Trump is incapable of shame. He is very capable of shame, but it is not the shame with which most of us are familiar. It is shame on his own terms, on the terms set by the reification of money and success, and with it the absolute dichotomy between the “winner” and the “loser.” He does not know shame and does not feel shame as the rest of us do, because the only shame he recognizes is to lose.
In this sense, Trump is the ultimate product of the Reagan revolution in its decadent phase. There were a great many things that mattered to Reagan more than money, not least among them his belief in America’s extraordinary capacities for renewal and renaissance. But the means by which he sought to induce renewal and renaissance was to, as he put it, “turn the bull loose.” Thus, he inadvertently created the conditions in which a man could rise who would literally be a bull. Not simply a bull, but a bull in the proverbial china shop, and that china shop was America itself and its institutions, which Reagan held sacred but his ideological descendants did not.
If there is a way out of Trump, then, it would seem to be for America to finally emerge from the Reagan legacy. Reagan was, in many ways, good for his time. America needed the shot of adrenaline he gave it. But America now needs something else if it is to survive the remains of his revolution.
Unfortunately, what that something might be is unclear. It is very unlikely that the social democratic consensus can be resurrected. Those currently advocating a “new New Deal,” such as AOC and Bernie Sanders, are at best wretched nostalgists—people who have learned nothing from the 20th century. The rest of the non-conservative establishment is still trapped in the uncomfortable peace it made with Reaganism and cannot see a way out. Worse still, there are very few original thinkers on the American political scene, which is rarely forgiving of original thinking in any case.
Nonetheless, much the same was said of Reagan’s ultimately successful efforts on behalf of his own brand of national resurrection. When he took office, he was the shock of the new. A hollow and dying consensus had trapped almost all of his contemporaries in a paradigm they could not escape, and he managed, for better or worse, to forge a new paradigm and eventually transform it into a new consensus.
Where such a paradigm shift might come from today is an open question, but there is no doubt that one is necessary. If it is not found, then the bull will remain loose, and whether he returns to office or not, he will undoubtedly do everything in his power to shatter the democracy that Reagan himself held sacred. If America is to be protected from Trump, the decadent revolution that produced him must, at long last, be sent to the ash heap of history. New ideas are here required.