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It’s Morning Again in America

Flying into Los Angeles, a glide-like descent that takes you from the desert over the mountains to the outer suburbs dotted with kidney-shaped swimming pools and finally to the rim of the Pacific Ocean, always brings on a near-narcotic surge of nostalgia. For this was the flight path I followed over 30 years ago, as I fulfilled a boyhood dream to visit the United States.

America had always fired my imagination, as a place and as an idea, so it was hardly love at first sight. My infatuation had started long before with cop shows, westerns, superhero comic strips and movies – Batman, West Side Story, Starsky & Hutch, Grease. Gotham exerted more of a pull than London. Washington was of more interest than Westminster. My 16-year-old self could quote more presidents than prime ministers. Like so many wide-eyed new arrivals, like so many of my British compatriots, I felt an instant sense of belonging, a fealty borne of familiarity.

Eighties America lived up to its billing. From the multi-lane freeways to the cavernous fridges; from drive-in movie theatres to drive-through burger joints; from pizza slices that required origami folds to consume to steaks the size of frisbees. Coming from a country where too many people were reconciled to their fate from too early an age, the animating energy of the American dream was seductive and unshackling. Upward mobility was not a given amongst my schoolmates. Also striking was the absence of resentment: the belief success was something to emulate not envy. The glimpse of a passing Cadillac aroused wholly different feelings than the sight in my homeland of a Rolls-Royce.

From the moment I passed through the arrivals hall at LAX, under the winsome smile of the country’s movie-star president, I loved the bigness, the brashness and the boldness of this land of plenty. The smog-piercing skyscrapers of downtown LA seemed double the height of anything I had seen before. Tomorrowland at Disneyland back then really did seem like a portal into the future. Mega-churches came not with flying buttresses but with stadium-style seating, giant illuminated crosses on their roofs and, as at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, 10,000 panes of reflective glass shaped like a four-pointed Star of Bethlehem and giant doors that opened up for car-borne worshippers.

The family hosting me, who had emigrated from Britain at the end of the ’60s, had a spacious house in the nearby suburb of Fountain Valley, a flat, largely featureless conurbation set amidst the urban sprawl of Orange County. Their home had a garage that could accommodate three cars, sofas that turned corners, an open-plan kitchen that looked out over a poolside terrace, and an array of household items I had never before seen: an ice-maker, telephone answer machine and super-sized television with a super-sized number of channels. These included MTV, whose looping stream of music videos vied with the endless hum of air-conditioning units straining to refrigerate the Southern Californian heat.

My father’s best man, an engineer in the aeronautics industry who rode to work every day along the freeway on his motorbike – even his commute exemplified the rugged individualism of his adopted country – had clearly prospered. Now I became the beneficiary of his family’s Californian dream. On arrival, I toasted my good fortune with a tall glass of luminous yellow soda with the nutritious-sounding name of Mountain Dew and took a dip in the pool. America really did seem to be a land of infinite choice and possibility.

It was 1984. Los Angeles was hosting the Olympics, and I arrived in the country just in time to watch the opening ceremony. In this festival of Americana, a marching band blasted out Broadway show tunes and the rousing martial anthems of John Philip Sousa. An African-American gospel choir, swaying from side to side in billowing fuchsia robes, sang ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. In a gambolling portrayal of manifest destiny, a troupe of ballet dancers dressed as wranglers, ropers and cowgirls pushed westward to the strains of ‘Hoedown’ from Aaron Copland’s Rodeo. Eighty-four pianists at 84 grand pianos answered the siren call of the soaring clarinet to thump out Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’. A pilot even rocketed into the stadium with a jetpack affixed to his back, the cue for a Disney-style mascot called Sam the Eagle to shuffle awkwardly onto the running track dressed in a red, white and blue Yankee Doodle Dandy outfit. For the host nation, the games of the XXIII Olympiad were a modern-day gold rush. In the absence of the Soviet Union, boycotting in retaliation for America’s refusal to compete in the Moscow Games four years earlier, US athletes dominated the medals table as never before. McDonald’s had a ‘When the US wins, you win’ scratch-card promotion, planned before Eastern bloc countries announced they were staying away, offering Big Macs, French fries and regular Cokes if Americans won gold, silver or bronze in the event concealed under those grey metallic strips. So for weeks I feasted on free fast food, the calorific accompaniment to chants of ‘USA! USA!’

This was the summertime of American resurgence. After the long national nightmare of Vietnam, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis, the United States demonstrated its capacity for renewal. 1984, far from being the dystopian hell presaged by George Orwell, was a time of optimism and contentment. Uncle Sam seemed happy again in his own skin – even the plastic feathers of that opening ceremony mascot. ‘Born in the USA’, Bruce Springsteen’s protest song about Rust Belt decline, which topped the charts that summer, was repurposed as a hymn of national self-love.

For millions, truly it was morning again in America, the slogan of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign and the title of the most successful campaign ad in political history. Filmed in California, this Rockwellian montage showed a paperboy hurling a newspaper onto a perfectly manicured front lawn, a family drawing up outside their new white clapboard home in a wood-panelled station wagon, and a wedding ceremony officiated by an elderly pastor cupping in his hands an open Bible, who looked like he had stepped from the set of a Frank Capra movie. It ended with a patriotic tableau of Americans peering skyward, as the Stars and Stripes were unfurled, the only time people of colour featured in the minute-long film.

‘Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history,’ claimed the caramel commentary. ‘Under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better.’ The sentimentalism, it was said, reduced members of Reagan’s Secret Service detail to tears.¹

Prouder, stronger and better. After emerging from its deepest recession since the Great Depression, the country had witnessed a stunning economic turnaround. Reagan had also staged a dramatic political comeback, for even after an attempt on his life 70 days into his presidency, which boosted his popularity following a troubled start, there were stretches when he looked like becoming a one-term president.

‘The stench of failure hangs over Ronald Reagan’s White House,’ declared The New York Times in the aftermath of the Republicans’ dismal showing in the 1982 congressional midterms, when his approval rating slumped to 35 per cent.²

Seemingly the Democrats also had a potential candidate with the star power, personal narrative and name recognition to beat him: the former astronaut Senator John Glenn of Ohio.

By the start of 1984, however, as he announced his bid for re-election, Reagan could boast, ‘America is back and standing tall.’ No longer was there double-digit unemployment. Inflation had been tamed. Taxes were lower. Business confidence was high. The ‘Reagan recession’ was a thing of the past. The Olympics generated a red, white and blue wave that swept across the country. Chants of ‘USA! USA!’ became the sound-bed for Reagan’s rallies, along with the country singer Lee Greenwood’s anthem ‘God Bless the USA’ and Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’, which Republicans shamelessly appropriated.

On Election Day, this patriotic surge completely overwhelmed his Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale. Reagan won 58.8 per cent of the popular vote and 49 out of 50 states. Even though the Democrats had, for the first time, included a woman on a major party ticket, the New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, Reagan managed to win 58 per cent of the female vote – an early indication women would not necessarily favour a fellow female.³

Even in one-time Democratic strongholds, Reagan was triumphant. Back in 1960, Macomb County, just north of Detroit, handed John F. Kennedy his biggest victory in any suburban county. In 1984, its heavily unionised electorate went two to one to Reagan and thus became the spiritual home of the ‘Reagan Democrat’.⁴ Had it not been for 3,761 votes in Minnesota, Mondale’s home state, Reagan would have become the first presidential candidate to complete an Electoral College state sweep.⁵ This ideological election traumatised Democrats, inflicting psychological scars that have never fully healed, not least because Reagan’s anti-government populism severed the umbilical link between the party and the working class.

The United States could hardly be described as politically harmonious. With the Democrats keeping their three-decade stranglehold on the House of Representatives, there was the usual divided government. But the president’s campaign poster from four years earlier had proven prophetic: ‘America: Reagan Country’.

The re-elected president brought his cheerfulness to his second inaugural, which was held inside the Capitol Rotunda because of the arctic temperatures outside.

‘My fellow citizens, our nation is poised for greatness,’ he declared. ‘Let history say of us, “These were golden years when the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, when America reached for her best.’’’

The country was in the ascendant again. Not so paranoid as it was in the 1950s, not so restive as it was in the 1960s and nowhere near as demoralised as it had been in the 1970s.

Underpinning the Olympic celebrations was a commonality of spirit and purpose. From Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ to a polyglot team of US athletes bedecked with medals. From that pilot who buzzed the LA Memorial Coliseum in his space-age jetpack to those McDonald’s customers who left with free Big Macs. There was reason for rejoicing. The present was golden. The future was something to welcome, not fear. America felt like America again. The United States seemingly had a president around whom the states could unite. When Reagan claimed ‘today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow will be better than today,’ most Americans believed him.

It was only years later, when the souvenir Olympic editions of the Los Angeles Times I shipped back to Britain had started to fray and yellow, that I realised Ronald Reagan was in actual fact one of the founding fathers of America’s modern-day polarisation.

Had it been a screen test, he probably would have flunked it. Absent was the usual poise that was a hallmark of his appearances on the General Electric Theater, his weekly Sunday-night CBS television show in the ’50s. Lacking was his usual jaunty rhythm. Galloping through sentences and failing to pause between them, he seemed uncharacteristically nervous. Agitated even.

The setting, a Los Angeles television studio dressed to resemble a political convention hall, right down to the red, white and blue bunting draped from the speaker’s podium, added to his awkwardness. The audience, in which some women, as well as men, wore cowboy hats, was strangely passive, as if it was made up of extras yet to receive stage direction. Camera cutaways showed one man in a chequered shirt, looking distracted and bored. Others were expressionless. Not even Ronald Reagan’s first attacks on big government, high taxation and intellectual elites lifted them. The actor had been speaking for almost ten minutes before receiving his first smattering of applause, which came after a sideswipe at President Lyndon Johnson. Thereafter, the partisan audience became more responsive to Reagan’s attacks on Washington. ‘When the government tells you you’re depressed, lie down and be depressed’ got a ripple of laughter. ‘A government bureau is the nearest thing we’ll ever see to eternal life on earth’ got those cowboy hats bobbing up and down. Now that Reagan had hit his stride, the audience behaved more like fans outside a movie premiere, cheering what essentially became his presidential manifesto. A political star was born.

Airing just a week before the 1964 presidential election, this infomercial paid for by the Barry Goldwater campaign came too late to rescue the Arizonian senator from electoral annihilation. In the retelling of Goldwater’s defeat, however, it was nonetheless rendered glorious. It came to be known simply as ‘The Speech’. Over the 26 minutes it took to deliver, Reagan demonstrated how it was possible in the television age to become an overnight sensation, and create a political brand with a single, well-received performance. ‘The Speech’ thus became the crucible moment in his conservative canonisation. Afterwards, a group of rich, right-wing Californians urged him to run for the governorship, a summons that altered the course of modern-day conservatism and set the Grand Old Party on the path it travels to this day. As the waspish columnist George Will famously observed, Goldwater lost 44 states but won the future. In 1980, Ronald Reagan became the belated victor.

The Lazarus-like tale of how right-wing Republicans turned the most humiliating defeat in the party’s history into a takeover of the conservative movement doubles as the foundation story for the polarised state of modern-day US politics. Everything changed, of course, with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the landmark legislation that dismantled southern segregation and reshaped America’s political landscape. Lyndon Johnson reportedly predicted, as he added his signature to the legislation, that the Democrats had kissed goodbye to the south for a generation.

It ended up being a permanent divorce rather than a trial separation. The Solid Democratic South, the old slave states of the Confederacy that hated the party of Abraham Lincoln, became reliably Republican in presidential elections, an astonishing historical inversion.

Even though a higher proportion of Republican senators voted for the Civil Rights Act than Democratic senators, Goldwater and Reagan had both been firmly opposed. So from the ruins of the 1964 landslide came the southern strategy, which exploited white unease about black advance to turn Democratic voters Republican, the basis of the GOP’s domination of presidential politics for the next two decades. The Republican Party became the home of white voters anxious about the pace of racial reform. It won five of the next six presidential elections largely as a result.

As part of this dramatic realignment, dyed-in-the-wool segrega­tionists, such as Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who in 1957 had launched a 24-hour solo filibuster in an attempt to block a civil rights act, defected from the Democrats to the Republicans, a switch that forever altered the character of both parties. Before then, the schisms in post-war politics were primarily within the parties, rather than between them: white supremacists versus non-south progressives in the Democratic Party, internationalists against isolationists in the Republican. Now there was a stark divide between Democrats and Republicans.

At the start of the decade the political theorist Daniel Bell published The End of Ideology, a set of essays arguing that, in the absence of a philosophical battle between left and right, elections would focus on managerialism, a candidate’s expertise rather than ideas. Now it became more ideologically charged.⁶ Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act and its companion reform the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the parties became more uniform and antagonistic towards each other, even though there remained considerable overlap between liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.

Just as the 1964 Civil Rights Act transformed the political geography of America, so the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act had the unintended consequence of radically altering the country’s demographics. Signed by Lyndon Johnson with the Statue of Liberty as his epic backdrop, the act ended national origin quotas that favoured white immigrants from northern Europe, and for the first time accepted all nationalities on a more equal basis.

At the start of the 1960s, 87 per cent of immigrants came from Europe. Fifty years later, 90 per cent came from other corners of the globe. The browning of America would take decades, but LBJ had set the country on course to have a non-white majority population by the middle of the 21st century. Ultimately, these three landmark acts had an overlapping effect: to make white Americans fear their dominant position in society was under threat from people of colour.

The repercussions of the Vietnam War, yet another splintering event, also reverberated for decades afterwards. The sight each night on the evening news of so many young American conscripts being killed had an especially radicalising effect on the left. Conversely, the sight each night on the evening news of so many young American protesters burning the US flag had a reactionary effect on the right. Blue-collar Americans especially became more suspicious not just of anti-war protesters but also of feminist activists, black agitators and liberal-minded journalists who gave them sympathetic coverage.

By the end of the ’60s, then, the battle-lines in presidential elections came to be more unambiguously drawn. Ahead of the 1960 contest, the liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr felt it necessary to dash off a quick campaign book, Kennedy or Nixon? Does It Make Any Difference?, outlining points of divergence between the two candidates, which to many voters were not immediately obvious.

In 1964, true to Goldwater’s promise to offer ‘a choice not an echo’, the differences were blatant, as they have been in most elections since. Goldwater, a hawk-faced former army pilot who buzzed his own convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in a rented light plane, signalled the change with one electrifying line from his acceptance speech: ‘Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.’

What made the rise of the New Right all the more noteworthy was the likelihood in the early ’60s that the GOP would become the party of Rockefeller, rather than the party of Reagan. When the Republican National Committee conducted a post-mortem of its defeat in 1960, it blamed Nixon for being too stridently conservative. It looked, then, as if the moderate Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, another billionaire who wanted to swap his residence on Fifth Avenue for the White House, would become the party’s standard-bearer. Liberal Republicans seemed poised to beat Goldwater Republicans. Yet the scandal surrounding Rockefeller’s messy divorce from his wife, Mary, and remarriage to his one-time secretary, ‘Happy’, altered that trajectory.

The cumulative effect of Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act and, less momentously, Rockefeller filing his divorce papers in 1962 was to shift the Republican Party’s centre of gravity. Over the coming years, it moved from Wall Street to the Sunbelt, the region stretching from Florida through the other Old Confederate states to Southern California; from East Coast Episcopalians and Presbyterians to ‘Bible Belt’ evangelicals and Pentecostals; from golf clubs, chambers of commerce and Connecticut commuter trains to gun ranges, NASCAR racetracks and eventually mega-churches.

For Reagan to emerge as the frontman for Goldwaterism and the genial face of Sunbelt radicalism required considerable political shapeshifting. As a young man, he had idolised Franklin Delano Roosevelt, describing himself as a ‘haemophiliac liberal’. Also he was a union leader, the president of the Screen Actors Guild. In 1952, though, he voted Republican for the first time, having failed to persuade General Dwight D. Eisenhower to run as a Democrat, and did so again in the 1956 presidential election, when the former Supreme Allied Commander trounced the liberal darling Adlai Stevenson for a second time.

As the ’50s progressed, and Reagan’s role as a spokesman for the American conglomerate General Electric deepened, his conservatism became more pronounced. On flights between speaking appearances, he consumed GE’s in-house pamphlets trumpeting American free enterprise. He also railed against what he saw as the moral superiority and intellectual condescension of liberal elitists. Though in 1960 he remained a registered Democrat, he voted for Richard Nixon over his fellow Irish-American Jack Kennedy. ‘Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx,’ Reagan wrote to Nixon.⁷ Finally, aged 51, he registered as a Republican.

After the 1964 election, Reagan blamed Goldwater’s defeat on moderate Republican traitors rather than the radical right. Other conservatives felt the same. ‘Far from admitting that Goldwater-style conservatism spells disaster at the polls,’ wrote the influential columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who had started to take a close interest in Reagan, ‘the conservatives now contend all they need is a candidate to package the doctrine in a more appetizing fashion.’

That candidate, conservatives thought, was Reagan. As Evans and Novak pointed out, he brought together ‘Barry Goldwater’s doctrine with John F. Kennedy’s technique’.⁸

When Reagan announced his bid for the California governorship in 1966 with a 30-minute infomercial in which he mounted his usual broadsides against the growth of ‘big brother, paternalistic government’, the Democratic incumbent, ‘Pat’ Brown, could scarcely believe his luck. Thinking he was guaranteed a third term in Sacramento, he mocked Reagan as a B-list actor who was on set making movies such as Bedtime for Bonzo while he was in the Governor’s Mansion tackling the state’s problems (a forerunner of the jibe aimed by Hillary Clinton at Donald Trump that he was appearing on Celebrity Apprentice while she was in the basement Situation Room complex on the night of the Osama bin Laden raid).⁹

Reagan, however, benefited from the lawlessness unleashed during the Watts riot in 1965, when 34 people lost their lives and 4,000 members of the National Guard had to be deployed on the streets of Los Angeles, and from anti-war unrest on California’s campuses. ‘They chant like Tarzan, look like Jane and smell like Cheetah,’ was a go-to line for Reagan when confronted by ‘hippie’ protesters.

Because he had been cast as the good guy in so many films, the Democrats found it hard to portray him as a right-wing extremist. Reagan won by almost a million votes, a portent of victories to come. After the 1984 landslide, Pat Brown opined, ‘We Democrats in California made the same mistake [in 1966] the whole Democratic party made a dozen years later: we mightily underrated him as a politician, as a leader.’¹⁰ The same would be said of Donald Trump.

Two years after entering the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento, Reagan made a half-hearted bid for the Republican presidential nomination. In the aftermath of Robert Kennedy’s assassination in Los Angeles in 1968 during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, however, even amiable right-wingers were regarded as too divisive.

Political friends therefore urged him to be patient. ‘Young man, you’ll be president some day,’ Strom Thurmond prophesied during a campaign swing through Dixie. ‘But not this year.’¹¹ Not yet ready for Reagan, the party opted for the relative moderate, Richard Nixon, who ran for the presidency making shrill calls to restore law and order on the campuses and in the inner cities, but who governed as a centrist.

By the time Reagan launched his second bid for the White House in 1975, an audacious attempt to oust the incumbent president Gerald Ford, politics had changed in his favour. Nixon’s reliance during the 1968 campaign on consultants, pollsters and Mad Men-style marketeers accelerated its professionalisation. Politics became more of an exercise in marketing and branding, with Nixon packaging himself as a cipher for what he called the ‘Silent Majority’.

As part of this image makeover, the GOP set about shedding its staid image as the party of Wall Street and projecting more Main Street appeal. Messaging became sharper and more disciplined. Hard-nosed political operatives came to the fore, such as the young Roger Ailes, the future head of Fox News, who believed the political future belonged to candidates who could perform on television and who relished cultural conflict.

In that poisoned vein, Ailes packed Nixon’s town hall meetings with anti-war activists, knowing they would barrage his candidate with hostile questions. Not only did it make for riveting television, it framed the election as a choice between law and order and counter-cultural chaos. This was verdant terrain for Reagan, and a winning formula for conservative politics and right-wing broadcasting for decades to come.¹²

Nixon chose Spiro Agnew as his running mate, a pugilistic populist who referred to anti-war protesters as ‘pigs’, boasted he did not need to visit black ghettoes because ‘if you have seen one city slum, you’ve seen them all’ and later on maligned the media as ‘the nattering nabobs of negativity’ – a fancy forerunner of ‘the fake news media.’ As the 1968 campaign got more ugly, the Governor of Maryland seemed in a race to the bottom with the former Governor of Alabama George Wallace, an avowed white supremacist running as a third-party candidate, to see who could cause most offence. Both were practitioners of what the historian Dan Carter labelled ‘the politics of rage’.

The rise in the early 1970s of the modern-day primary system, with its series of state contests starting in Iowa and New Hampshire, meant presentational skills and showmanship became more of a prerequisite. No longer were nominations negotiated in smoke-filled rooms – Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee in 1968, had not contested a single primary. Instead, they were decided increasingly on television.

The Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation was another boon for Reagan, for it made his anti-Washington rhetoric all the more resonant. Outsiders, such as the little-known Governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter, suddenly became viable. The newly invigorated primary process, where voters in Iowa and New Hampshire became almost as influential as party bosses, gave them the opportunity to mount insurgent bids for the presidency.

All the time the conservative movement was becoming more godly, doctrinaire and less tolerant of opposing values and ideas, an anti-pluralistic impulse that made it more narrowly partisan. Nixon’s courtship of America’s most prominent preacher, Billy Graham, brought about a closer collaboration between the GOP and the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination.

The backlash against bra-burning feminists and the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment brought to the fore unbending activists such as Phyllis Schlafly, who was as proud to be called a ‘housewife’ as ‘the first lady of the conservative movement’. After the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling in 1973, which gave women the right to choose whether they wanted to terminate their pregnancies without excessive government restriction, abortion became a wedge issue, making the GOP the natural home for pro-lifers. Battle-lines were sketched out that have shaped US politics ever since.

Even though Jimmy Carter was a bona-fide born-again Christian and the most openly spiritual president of the twentieth century, his party increasingly rejected social and religious dogmatism: those slick-talking TV evangelicals such as Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, who railed against pro-choicers, communists, homosexuals and the permissiveness of post-’60s America. Conservative evangelicals, who had been politically dormant in the post-war years, saw how church leaders had lent such moral and institutional support to the civil rights movement and sought to mobilise in favour of right-wing causes. Even though Reagan rarely went to church, he enthusiastically aligned himself with the Religious Right.

Reagan formally announced his candidacy in November 1975 with a bold defence of Goldwaterism. ‘The only thing wrong in 1964 was that the voters of this country were still in something of a New Deal syndrome,’ he argued, referring to the Great Depression reforms of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. ‘They still believed that federal help was free and that federal programs did solve problems. Now the change has come, and the people no longer have to be convinced that the federal government is too big, too costly and hasn’t really solved any problems.’¹³

While the Washington press corps continued to view him as a lightweight – ‘The Candidate from Disneyland: Ronald Duck for President,’ sneered Harper’s – the Ford White House took him more seriously, especially after Reagan won the Texas primary. ‘We are in real danger of being out-organized by a small number of highly motivated right-wing nuts,’ warned an internal memo.¹⁴ Sure enough, Reagan ended up running Ford close, receiving the backing of 1,070 delegates compared to the president’s 1,187. However, he could not quite overcome an incumbent president with the backing of the party establishment.

Had it not been for a miscommunication between Ford and Reagan staffers, the former governor might have ended up on the Republican ticket, which could have wrecked his chance of ever becoming president. As it was, the Republican Senator Bob Dole became the vice-presidential nominee after Nelson Rockefeller, Ford’s deputy, agreed to step down in recognition of the growing strength of the Republican right. Rockefeller Republicanism had lost its talisman. Ford’s subsequent defeat to Jimmy Carter dealt an even more terminal blow to middle-of-the-road Republicanism.

Between the elections of 1976 and 1980, the modern-day conser­vative movement came into being and took on the form we recognise today. In 1979, the Reverend Jerry Falwell Sr founded the Moral Majority, the organisational home of the Religious Right. The National Rifle Association, following a 1977 coup that ousted its moderate leadership dubbed the ‘Revolt at Cincinnati’, became more hard-line and partisan. Whereas in the ’60s it had supported common-sense gun controls, such as bans on purchasing firearms via mail order and carrying loaded weapons in public, following the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, now it fiercely resisted any encroachment on the right to bear arms. In 1980, Reagan became the first presidential candidate to be endorsed by the NRA. Like abortion, gun control became an angry new fault line in American politics.

Right-wing think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, became more ideologically influential, even as the GOP became more overtly anti-intellectual. The most significant was the Federalist Society, founded in 1982, which promoted checks on government power, the protection of individual liberty and an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, which maintained the only way to understand the meaning of this eighteenth-century text was to discern the framers’ original intent.

In the rightward shift of the US judiciary, the Federalist Society became the driving force. Almost all of Reagan’s judicial appointees were members, foremost amongst them Antonin Scalia, his second appointee to the Supreme Court. This new reading of the Constitution, which rejected liberal ideas about acting in the spirit of the founding fathers, the basis of judicial activism during the civil rights era, became as central to New Right thinking as supply-side economics.

A relaxation of campaign finance laws in the late 1970s, which allowed for the infusion of ‘soft money’ to fund parties rather than specific candidates, also fuelled the rise of political action committees, which made politics more combative. The National Conservative Political Action Committee, founded in the mid-’70s by a dandyish dirty trickster, Roger Stone, who later had a tattoo of Richard Nixon inked between his shoulder blades, was one of the more aggressive. In 1980, it played a major role in unseating four of the six liberal Democratic senators it targeted, including the Democrats’ former presidential nominee George McGovern and the highly respected Indiana senator Birch Bayh, who was beaten by a 33-year-old baby boomer called Dan Quayle. For the first time since the 1950s, the Republicans won back control of the Senate. Time magazine’s Joe Klein later claimed it marked the start of the modern-day political war.¹⁵

That year, Reagan became the standard-bearer for this motley crew of conservatives and the spokesman for a movement he had personally done so much to create. In the primaries, he easily overcame the establishment favourite, George H. W. Bush, and was crowned the nominee at the GOP convention in Detroit. Afterwards, he launched his general election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, close to where three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, had been murdered by white supremacists in 1964, with a dog-whistle call for ‘states rights’. It was rhetorical shorthand, conservative trigger words of widely understood meaning, for allowing the south to take care of race relations without interference from Washington.

This kick-off event at the Neshoba County Fair, days after Reagan had received and rejected the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan, was a sign both of how the party’s centre of gravity had shifted southward and of how aggrieved white voters had become its target demographic.

Gerald Ford was pessimistic about Reagan’s chances. ‘A very conservative Republican can’t win a national election,’ he reckoned.¹⁶ Yet in a country reeling from high unemployment and soaring inflation, led by a president who rarely flashed his toothy smile any more, Reagan won the election by asking a brilliantly simplistic question, which he posed in the sole presidential debate: ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’

Voters in 44 states said no, and handed Reagan 489 of the 538 Electoral College votes, a record number for a non-incumbent presidential candidate. Thus started a political era that would soon come to bear his name.

The galvanising speech. The parlaying of celebrity. The admon­ishment of the Washington establishment. The takeover of the party. The enunciation of a few gut beliefs. The skill at tapping into white anxieties. The use of race to mobilise the base. The unapologetic patriotism. The improbably close relationship with the Religious Right. The disbelief and mocking tone of Washington reporters. Though Ronald Reagan took 16 years to achieve what Donald Trump managed in a little over 16 months, America’s first movie-star president laid the path for America’s first reality-TV-star president. In 1980, Reagan even rolled out the slogan that Trump refined and repurposed decades later: ‘Let’s Make America Great Again.’

Ronald Reagan not only restored faith in America: admirers claim he also made the presidency great again. Unlike Jack Kennedy, whose time in office was tragically cut short, he was not cowed by Congress or hobbled by a schism within his party. Unlike Lyndon Johnson, he was not overwhelmed by war or haunted by the phantom presence of his predecessor. Unlike Richard Nixon, he was not a crook. Unlike Gerald Ford, he was not an accidental – and accident-prone – stand-in. Unlike Jimmy Carter, he was not a pious killjoy. When Reagan left office in January 1989, wistfully peering down as his helicopter banked over ‘our little bungalow’, as he described the White House to his adoring wife, Nancy, he became the first president since Dwight D. Eisenhower to complete two terms.¹⁷ After four failed or truncated presidencies finally came a success.

Whereas his predecessor had gone from room to room in the White House switching off lights to save energy, Reagan and his image-makers wheeled in the movie-set kliegs. Alert to the theatrical requirements of the office, he applied the presentational skills he learned as a film star to the presidency. His success lay in amalgamating these two jobs. When the journalist David Brinkley asked in a valedictory interview whether he had learned anything from his career as an actor that had helped him as president, Reagan delivered a telling response: ‘There have been times in this office when I’ve wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.’ He was the great communicator long before arriving in Washington.¹⁸

In his first inaugural, various Reaganite traits came together: his cheerleader optimism; his confidence behind a podium; his ability to encapsulate a governing philosophy in bumper-sticker slogans; his relish for the grandest of stages, even if he didn’t insist, as Washington lore has it, that the inauguration ceremony be moved for the first time from the east side of the US Capitol to the west, so he could peer out towards California.¹⁹

From this magnificent pulpit, the new president outlined the Reaganite holy trinity of limited government, lower taxation and a strong military. ‘Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,’ he famously stated, setting the tone for the next eight years and framing the political debate for the next three decades. From the moment he took the oath of office, he looked and sounded ideally suited to perform what his finest biographer, Lou Cannon, called ‘the role of a lifetime’.

By embracing some of the monarchical trappings of the presidency, the former actor dressed the White House as a more epic set. Presidents Ford and Carter, as part of the post-Watergate clean-up, had sought to curb the excesses of Nixon’s imperial presidency, with small but symbolic acts such as dropping the playing of ‘Hail to the Chief’ when they entered the room. Not only did Reagan restore the presidential anthem, but he also summoned back the US Army Herald Trumpets, a ceremonial brass ensemble which sometimes dressed in breeches banished during the Carter and Ford years. The look, however, was more Tinseltown pizazz than eighteenth-century pomp.

Carter, showing the traits of a good neighbour rather than a strong leader, had suburbanised the White House by wearing Mr Rogers-style cardigans in the Oval Office and turning off all those lights. Reagan restored it to being a stately home and the focal point of national attention. Never did he step foot in the Oval Office without first donning a jacket and tie. Visitors to the White House left with gifts of cufflinks embossed with the presidential seal, trinkets that were part of the new paraphernalia of power.²⁰ His intention always was to refurbish this battered institution.

In the process, Reagan reinvented the modern presidency. He provided the model for the presidential commemorative speech – the oration he delivered on the 40th anniversary of D-Day atop the cliff overlooking Omaha and Utah beaches. ‘These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc,’ he said, paying tribute to the old men before him who had clambered up the cliffs under a hail of enemy fire. ‘These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. And these are the heroes who helped end a war.’ Also, he perfected the ‘nation-in-mourning’ Oval Office address, his speech after the Challenger disaster in 1986 providing the stencil his successors would follow.

‘We will never forget them,’ he said of the seven space-shuttle astronauts killed 73 seconds after lift-off, ‘nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God”.’

He invented the contemporary State of the Union address, with its ‘heroes in the balcony’ and appropriation of stirring personal narratives that belonged to others. ‘We don’t have to turn to our history books for heroes,’ he said in his 1982 State of the Union, as he introduced the first of these human props – a freed POW from Vietnam and a fearless federal worker, Lenny Skutnik, who dived into the freezing waters of the Potomac to rescue a flight attendant after an Air Florida Boeing 737 crashed shortly after take-off from what later became Ronald Reagan National Airport.

Working like location scouts, his White House advance team regularly came up with telegenic settings for set-piece speeches – none more so than the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin in 1987. Reagan’s immortal line, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’, would not have conveyed such moral force had it not been delivered in front of the concrete monolith that symbolised Soviet oppression. Thereafter, every presidency aspired to these made-for-television moments.

In contrast to his predecessor, Reagan understood the inspirational power of speech. Serving as Jimmy Carter’s speechwriter was not unlike being Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s tap-dancing teacher, joked James Fallows, the journalist who occupied that role. In the Reagan team, Peggy Noonan, his most poetic wordsmith, and Michael Deaver, who helped choreograph many of the memorable set-pieces, were more central to Reagan’s success than all but a few members of his Cabinet. This was a presidency of images as much as ideas.

Even when Reagan had poor material to work with, he instinctively knew how to squeeze the best out of every lifeless word. A case in point came during that opening ceremony in Los Angeles, when he was restricted to delivering 16 perfunctory words: ‘I declare open the Games of Los Angeles celebrating the 23rd Olympiad of the modern era’. Reagan felt the obvious applause line, ‘I declare open,’ was buried at the beginning, so he switched it to the end. Reporters in the White House press pool, who had been handed copies of the script he was supposed to read out, ridiculed him for fluffing his lines.

‘The press having a copy of the lines as written are gleefully tagging me with senility & inability to learn my lines,’ Reagan penned in his diary that night.²¹ Ever the showman, however, Reagan knew precisely what he was doing. When they came from his lips, even banalities sounded polished.

His pep talk to the US Olympic team hours before the opening ceremony was also classic Reagan. Invoking George Gipp, the Notre Dame football legend he played in the movies, he implored the athletes, ‘Go for it! For yourselves, for your families, for your country. And, you can forgive me if I’m a little presumptuous, do it for the Gipper.’²²

It demonstrated not only the patriotic optimism that voters found so attractive but also his habit of purloining lines from films. ‘Go ahead – make my day,’ he warned, Clint Eastwood-style, when Congress threatened to raise taxes. ‘The evil empire,’ his label for the Soviet Union, sounded like it had been plucked from the opening scroll on the Star Wars movies that referred to ‘the evil Galactic Empire’.²³

During a sound-test for a speech to the nation in 1985 on the release of 39 Americans held in Beirut, picked up and later broadcast by the major networks, Reagan joked, ‘Boy, I saw Rambo last night. I know what to do the next time this happens.’²⁴

Reagan looked to the movies for policy inspiration as well. The Matthew Broderick film War Games was the spur for the ‘Star Wars’ defence initiative. And Reagan was so obsessed with the imminence of an alien invasion that he proposed to Gorbachev at the Geneva summit in 1985 that the United States and the Soviet Union join forces to repel any extra-terrestrial threat, an idea inspired by the 1951 science-fiction movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.²⁵ Colin Powell, Reagan’s National Security Advisor, would roll his eyes when his boss talked about ‘the little green men’.

In the jumble of Reagan’s mind, the extra-terrestrial mingled with the astrological as well. The most startling revelation of his White House Chief of Staff Don Regan’s memoir, For the Record, was that a San Francisco astrologer was sometimes responsible for the president’s diary and schedule changes – part of what the journalist Hendrik Hertzberg memorably described as ‘government of, by, and for the stars’.²⁶

When we talk of how much Donald Trump is influenced by what he watches on television, it is worth recalling how much Reagan was influenced by the 363 films he saw in the White House movie theatre and screenings at Camp David, the president’s country retreat.

Just as Reagan understood the sway of a well-performed speech, so he also grasped the power of a well-timed joke. As with some of his most memorable lines, many of his best zingers originated in Hollywood.²⁷

‘All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia,’ he quipped in the recovery room after surgery on his gunshot wounds following the attempt on his life in 1981, paraphrasing a W. C. Fields punchline. ‘Honey, I forgot to duck,’ his one-liner to Nancy as he was wheeled into the operating theatre at the George Washington University Hospital, and ‘Please tell me you’re Republicans,’ his joke to the team of surgeons, sounded like wisecracks from Bob Hope.

Fittingly, his 1984 re-election was sealed with a gag, when he neutralised the age issue raised by his doddery performance in the first televised debate with a zinger he remembered from a stage show in Las Vegas. ‘I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.’

Mondale, his 56-year-old opponent, joined the audience in laughter, knowing his chance of becoming president had just evaporated.

Reagan was by no means the first occupant of the White House to smudge the lines between politics and entertainment, but he was unquestionably the most adept at bringing these two worlds together. Whereas Jack Kennedy embraced high culture to lend his administration more élan – hosting Pablo Casals for a cello recital and also a state dinner in honour of 49 Nobel laureates – Reagan deliberately was more middlebrow.

He launched his presidency with an All-Star Inaugural Gala featuring Jimmy Stewart, Ethel Merman and Bob Hope, which prompted the MC, Johnny Carson, to deadpan, ‘This is the first administration to have a premiere.’²⁸

Ever alert to stars with box-office appeal, the Reagans awarded Michael Jackson, the ‘King of Pop’, with a presidential commendation after the singer allowed the White House to use ‘Beat It’ in a drink-driving campaign – Jackson turned up in shades, a shimmering blue uniform, with a gold sash and epaulettes, looking like the potentate of a small tropical island. They also made sure John Travolta, the star of Saturday Night Fever and Grease, was on hand to dance with Princess Diana during a royal visit in 1985 – with a determined nudge from Nancy.

Maybe the zenith came in the first year of his second term, when Ron and Nancy featured on the front cover of Vanity Fair, the newly revived glossy which has done more than any other publication to glamorise politics and ordain the marriage between celebrity and power. Photographed on their way to a state dinner, dressed in black tie and evening wear, the portrait showed them in a heel-kicking pose that evoked Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

The Reagans understood ‘the pitfalls of wooden productions’, wrote the conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr in an essay that accompanied the photo spread, and had created ‘their own version of Camelot’. Norman Mailer, grasping the president’s mass-market appeal, put it better. Reagan ‘saw that the President of the United States was the leading soap opera figure in the great American drama, and he had better possess star value’.²⁹

Thus Reagan established the intricately choreographed presidency of the modern era: with evocative scripting, polished production values, a filmic eye for dramatic photo opportunities and a variety-show-like mix of spectacle, entertainment and gags.

The problem was that Reagan created a flawed blueprint, and showed that a president could achieve historical greatness without even mastering some of the basics of the job. When Americans saw him on television, he performed the role with aplomb. Behind the scenes, however, in many of the back-office aspects of the presidency, he fell pitifully short.

He was intellectually incurious, often comically ill informed and overly reliant on the cue cards he read from in meetings, without which he was often reduced to incoherence or silence. Gerald Ford, in his 1979 memoir, A Time to Heal, described him as ‘one of the few political leaders I have ever met whose public speeches revealed more than his private conversations’. Ford also identified Reagan’s ‘penchant for offering simplistic solutions to hideously complex problems’.³⁰

When Reagan met Carter during the transition, he declined the offer of a writing pad to take notes. ‘He displayed utterly no interest,’ recalled one of Carter’s aides.³¹ Often the president neglected to do his homework. When James Baker, his first chief of staff, chided him for failing to go through his briefing book on the eve of an important economic summit, Reagan gave the exquisite response, ‘Well, Jim, The Sound of Music was on last night.’³² Even short position papers went unread: hence his nickname ‘The Great Delegator’.

On fundamental matters of foreign affairs and national security, he was often clueless. He did not understand, just as Donald Trump failed to do 30 years later, the concept of the Pentagon’s nuclear triad, which simply meant warheads could be delivered by submarines and strategic bombers, as well as land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. He mixed up Afghanistan and Pakistan. During the 1980 campaign, when asked by NBC’s Tom Brokaw about the then French president Giscard d’Estaing, Reagan evidently had no idea who he was.³³ During the Iran-Contra scandal, when senior administration officials facilitated the sale of weapons to Iran, circumventing an arms embargo, and then used the proceeds to illegally fund the right-wing rebel group the Contras in Nicaragua, his defence was that he didn’t know what was going on. This sounded eminently believable, though it was more a case of plausible ineptitude than plausible deniability. Reagan was also something of a part-time president. He arrived at the office late, left early and spent large amounts of time at his ranch in the mountains above Santa Barbara in California – Rancho del Cielo, the ‘heavenly ranch’, the First Couple called it. ‘It’s true, hard work never killed anybody,’ he used to joke, ‘but, I figure, why take the chance?’

Reagan so often confused reality with fiction that he pursued a post-truth presidency. His truth twisting began with his inaugural address, when he invoked the memory of Martin Treptow, a soldier on the Western Front during World War I who was killed under heavy artillery fire as he ferried messages between two US battalions.

Peering out across the Potomac towards Arlington National Cemetery, ‘with its row on row of simple white markers bearing crosses or Stars of David’, Reagan described how ‘under one such marker’ lay Treptow. Upon his dead body was found a diary, and in it a handwritten pledge: ‘America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.’

Here was a mission statement for these troubled times, but when Reagan’s speechwriters spent a day at Arlington National Cemetery trying to locate Treptow’s grave, they could not find it. Treptow, as reporters quickly uncovered, had been interred more than a thousand miles away, in Bloomer, Wisconsin.³⁴ The words ‘under one such marker’ were deliberately ambiguous. Nonetheless, they felt like the work of a screenwriter stretching a real-life story to breaking point, an unwelcome import from Hollywood.³⁵

Throughout his presidency, Reagan traded in these kinds of falsehood. In a meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, he claimed to have filmed the liberation of the concentration camps, even though he never stepped foot outside the United States for the duration of World War II.

At a presidential Medal of Honor event, he told the story of a B-17 bomber that went down over Europe after coming under enemy fire, whose commander ordered the evacuation of the plane but stayed gripping the hand of a young soldier as it nose-dived towards the ground. Reagan quoted the commander’s reassuring last words, ‘Never mind, son, we’ll ride it down together.’ Yet this was a scene not from the pages of history but from the World War II movie A Wing and a Prayer.

When pressed by reporters, the then White House spokesman Larry Speakes, who later admitted to making up quotes from the president, offered a superlative definition of post-truth politics: ‘If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.’³⁶ Harmless sentimentality was how administration officials, such as Pat Buchanan, the White House communications director, tried to explain away these mistruths. ‘For Ronald Reagan, the world of legend and myth is a real world. He visits it regularly, and he’s a happy man there.’³⁷

These falsehoods, however, could also be malevolent. Take Reagan’s demonisation during the 1980 campaign of a ‘Chicago welfare queen’, who had supposedly fraudulently accumulated $150,000 in payments with her 80 aliases, 30 different addresses and 12 social security cards. In actuality, the woman in question had just two aliases. Her haul of deceitful claims amounted to $8,000.³⁸ Reagan paid little political price for this blurring of fact and fiction. If anything, it helped him camouflage the contradictions of his presidency. Thus he proselytised about tax cuts while at the same time increasing the tax burden. He portrayed himself as a deficit hawk while overseeing the ballooning of the federal budget. This divorcee who rarely attended church was beloved of the Religious Right. Reagan’s acting skills, his proficiency in taking on different guises, surely helped make him a Janus-like president.

Indeed, one of the paradoxes of Reagan’s split-screen life is how a B-movie actor came across as such an authentic president. It also helped during the crises of his presidency, not least the Iran-Contra affair during the second term. ‘He walks away from more political car crashes than anyone,’ noted John Sears, who managed his 1976 presidential campaign.³⁹

So a leader who elevated the stature of the presidency also ended up dumbing it down, producing an inadequate prototype in the process: one which cast the president primarily as a frontman and cheerleader, but not a full participant in his own administration. The Reagan-inspired emphasis on star power devalued expertise. Name recognition became key. Likeability trounced know-how. Presidential debates increasingly came down to who could deliver Reagan-style one-liners – the jokes or putdowns that would be rerun endlessly on the news in the days afterwards. Elections increasingly felt like auditions for the role of leading man. Presidents came to be judged on presentation: the ability to deliver State of the Union addresses or to articulate and emote the thoughts of the nation in times of grief and sorrow. Into this charisma trap fell Mike Dukakis, Bob Dole, Al Gore, John Kerry and Mitt Romney, all of them losing candidates eminently qualified to perform the practical tasks of the presidency. Nor is it a coincidence that the only one-term president for thirty-plus years, George H. W. Bush, was a poor communicator who mutilated the English language, even though he was one of the better chief executives. Reagan changed the qualities and qualifications that the American people looked for in their president, and not for the better. A chief beneficiary was Donald Trump, who would also come to play the role of his lifetime.

That ice-maker, telephone answer machine and jumbo television. Shopping trips to mega-malls in Orange County, such as South Coast Plaza, which had become America’s new Main Street. Breakfasts at the International House of Pancakes. The all-you-can-eat salad bar at Sizzler, with its bewildering array of dressings. Family suppers at Benihana, where a knife-wielding chef would serve up teppanyaki at polished wood tables.

Rampant across America was the same consumerism, the same great affluence, I witnessed during that first summer in Southern California. Reaganism promoted an individualistic sense of happi­ness and contentment built on conspicuous consumption, instant gratification and the celebration of wealth. The very term Reaganism spoke of the selfish individualism of the age, and was starkly different in tone from the communal coinage of the Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy or Johnson years – the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society.

If the 1970s were, as the novelist Tom Wolfe suggested, the ‘Me Decade’, the 1980s might be called the ‘Mine Decade’, given the accumulation of possessions and wealth. Madonna’s anthem ‘Material Girl’, which came out in 1984, the year of Reagan’s re-election, captured the national mood. Relationships were not primarily romantic, it suggested, but transactional, where the boy with the dollars was always ‘Mister Right’.

The end of the worst recession since the Great Depression brought on a buying binge. In the last six years of the Reagan presidency, as Lou Cannon noted, Americans purchased 105 million colour televisions, 62 million microwave ovens, 57 million washers and dryers, 46 million refrigerators and freezers, 31 million cordless phones and 30 million telephone answering machines.⁴⁰ Between 1982 and 1986, imports of luxury cars doubled.⁴¹ In this ‘I-consume-therefore-I-am’ culture, ostentation was no longer frowned upon.

Even the LA Olympics became a showcase for capitalism, from the commodification of the Sam the Eagle mascot to the corporate ubiquity of US giants such as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. The head of the organising committee, Peter Ueberroth, was determined the games should turn a profit and to showcase that America could put on a better Games than the communists in Moscow or the socialistic French Canadians in Montreal, who had almost driven their city into bankruptcy.

Spurred by the money motive, there was a boom in demand for MBAs and law degrees. Talking openly about salaries – ideally six-figure salaries – became more socially acceptable. Millionaires proliferated. At the beginning of the ’80s, 4,414 tax returns filed with the IRS listed adjusted gross earnings of more than a million dollars. By 1987, there were 34,944 such returns.⁴² The millionaires even had their own television show, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which debuted in 1984. Its over-the-top presenter, Robin Leach, became the godfather of reality shows such as Keeping up with the Kardashians.

‘Yuppies’ made their entrance, a surprisingly large proportion of them hippies from the ’60s who transferred their social libertarianism into the commercial and political worlds, turning liberals into Reaganites. The ‘Masters of the Universe’ so brilliantly satirised by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities and Oliver Stone in the movie Wall Street, both of which came out in 1987, also made their debut. ‘Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,’ proclaimed the corporate raider Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, in the film’s era-defining monologue: ‘Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through.’

The dialogue was based on a commencement speech delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, one of the country’s most liberal campuses, by the stock trader Ivan Boesky, in which he told the graduating class, ‘Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.’

Boesky was sentenced to three years in prison for insider trading a week after Wall Street premiered in movie theatres. Yet Oliver Stone was alarmed to discover that many of those who saw the film were inspired afterwards to pursue careers in banking and finance. Thus, a parody intended to skewer the excesses of Reaganism inadvertently ended up glorifying them.⁴³ ‘Greed is good’ became the unofficial dictum of the decade. Few remember the liberal counterblast, ‘Greed is not enough.’

It was not just Madonna and Sherman McCoy, the antihero from The Bonfire of the Vanities. Popular culture more broadly came to reflect this materialist moment. I came from a country where soap operas, such as Coronation Street and EastEnders, focused on the working class and the grittiness of everyday life. By contrast, the primetime soap-opera hit of the 1980s in America was Dallas, which focused on a wealthy Texas oil family.

Dynasty, with its catfights and caviar, even more perfectly captured the zeitgeist. The story of the Carringtons of Colorado debuted the month Reagan was sworn in as president and aired its finale months after he left office. Its spin-off, The Colbys, starred Charlton Heston, a Democrat and civil rights activist in the 1960s who had become a prominent supporter of Reagan and a leading gun advocate by the 1980s.

Falcon Crest, a primetime soap opera about the feuding factions of the Gioberti and Channing families, starred the president’s first wife, Jane Wyman. Its creator, Earl Hamner, was better known for producing The Waltons, a drama of simpler pleasures and more homely parables set in rural Virginia during the Great Depression. The last ‘Goodnight John-Boy’ came in June 1981, just as the Reagan era was cranking into gear.

The sitcom of the decade, The Cosby Show, featured the Huxtables, an upwardly mobile African-American family who lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. Though it challenged stereotypes and gave the black middle class more visibility in the media, it also created a falsely self-congratulatory sense of racial progress and shied away from confronting white viewers with the inconvenient realities of life for African-Americans who had not been able to climb the economic ladder.

Just as Bill Cosby emerged as America’s dad, Michael J. Fox, playing the character Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties, became Reaganism’s son. Keaton – the offspring of hippie parents who’d served in the Peace Corps and graduated from Berkeley – read the Wall Street Journal, kept a framed photograph of Richard Nixon on his nightstand and was a passionate advocate of supply-side economics. Set in the heartland city of Columbus, Ohio, this culture-clash show, which aired from 1982 to 1989, was Reagan’s favourite sitcom.

Michael J. Fox parlayed his success in Family Ties into a starring role in Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future, a film in which Reagan’s improbable political ascent became a running gag. When Marty McFly travelled back to the 1950s, the Hill Valley movie theatre was showing Cattle Queen of Montana, the names of its stars, Ronald Reagan and Barbara Stanwyck, up in lights on the marquee. When McFly informed ‘Doc’ Brown that the actor had made it to the White House, the crazy-haired scientist scoffed, ‘Yeah, and Jerry Lewis is vice-president.’ However, when Doc discovered Marty’s JVC camcorder, the penny dropped. ‘No wonder your president has to be an actor,’ he said. ‘He’s gotta look good on television.’

Reagan loved Back to the Future, partly because it reminded him of Frank Capra’s films, and told aides after a viewing at Camp David it was the kind of movie the big studios should make more of.⁴⁴ The title of the film, with its mix of nostalgia and modernity, described his presidential mission. He even gave it a nod in his 1986 State of the Union address, and purloined a script line from a scene where Doc Brown gripped the steering wheel of the stainless steel DeLorean and accelerated into the next century: ‘As they said in the film Back to the Future, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.’’’ It showed the extent to which Washington and Hollywood were now on a feedback loop.

Box-office blockbusters mirrored Reaganite tropes. Top Gun reflected the militaristic patriotism of the era, and led to a 500 per cent increase in the number of young men who applied to become navy aviators. The Rocky movies, which started out as a gritty blue-collar drama, became ever more bombastic and nationalistic, and used Cold War tensions to reinvigorate the franchise. Rocky IV opened with a shot of two giant boxing gloves, one emblazoned with Old Glory, the other with the hammer and sickle of the Soviet flag. The movie, promoted with a poster showing Rocky draped in the flag and wearing stars-and-stripes shorts, was the highest-grossing film in the series.

Broadcasting changed as well, with the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, a rule which had come into effect in 1949 and been amended in the late 1950s, mandating broadcasters to air ‘honest, equitable and balanced programming’ to offer ‘varying opinions on the paramount issues facing the American people’.

When the Federal Communications Commission voted to abolish it in 1987, some within the Reagan administration feared it would lead to a liberal onslaught. The polar opposite was true. Almost a year to the day later, Rush Limbaugh launched his nationally syndicated show, ushering in the boom in right-wing talkback radio. By 1992, there were 900 talk radio stations, almost a four-fold increase from 1987.⁴⁵ Attempts by Democrats in Congress to bring back the Fairness Doctrine were repeatedly met with the threat of vetoes by Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

The ’80s witnessed the privatisation of American life. Home computers and games consoles kept people inside – in 1982, Time temporarily ditched its ‘Man of the Year’ award in favour of a ‘Machine of the Year’, the computer. So, too, did the proliferation of cable news channels, which had the additional effect of fragmenting audiences and eroding the power of the three main TV networks that had done so much to shape public consciousness.

VCRs meant people could watch movies from their sofas. They could also work out. The transformation of Jane Fonda from the Vietnam War protester ‘Hanoi Jane’ to millionaire fitness guru, selling workout videos, spoke of the reordering of national priorities.

The rise of the TV evangelists meant worshippers did not even have to leave home to go to church or make a credit card donation. Religion became more individualistic, with the emphasis on personal salvation rather than social justice. From his opulent Crystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller preached the gospel of prosperity and self-esteem, a Reaganite theology. Challenging Jesus’s injunction that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, Schuller himself built a money-spinning ecclesiastical empire. Christianity had become more closely linked to consumerism.

The profit motive became not only the driving force for US companies but their singular obsession, as the economist Milton Friedman’s ‘agency theory’ about maximising shareholder returns and minimising civic responsibility became boardroom gospel. ‘There is one and only one social responsibility of business,’ he had written in a seminal column for The New York Times in 1970, ‘to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.’ By the 1980s, Friedman’s apostles ran some of America’s leading corporations.

Jack Welch, who took over at General Electric in the same year Reagan entered the White House, became the most prominent advocate of maximising shareholder value. Later, Welch boasted callously about killing off American jobs. ‘Ideally, you’d have every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy,’ he said in 1998. GE also became masters of tax avoidance. In 2010, it made $5.1 billion in profits but managed to exploit loopholes so that it paid zero in federal tax.⁴⁶

Corporate responsibility was cast aside. US companies had lost their public purpose. Swashbuckling corporate titans topped the bestseller lists. The most popular hardback non-fiction book in 1984 and 1985 was the memoir of the auto-industry king Lee Iacocca, Iacocca: An Autobiography. As Chrysler battled with Japanese carmakers, Iacocca became the frontman for his company, and tried to appeal to the patriotism of American consumers with the slogan ‘Let’s make American mean something again.’

Iacocca’s chief rival as America’s celebrity CEO was Donald Trump, whose 1987 book The Art of the Deal topped the New York Times bestseller list for 13 weeks and sold more than a million copies in hardback alone. Trump was not only a creature of the ’80s, who dined at the 21 Club and partied at Studio 54, but also a creation of them. In real life, no one better personified the ego-driven, hyper-individualism of the Reagan era or the rapacious appetite for acquisitions.

Trump’s decade began with the reopening of The Commodore Hotel on East 42nd Street between the Chrysler Building and Grand Central Station, which built his reputation as a dealmaker extraordinaire. In an architectural form of power dressing, Trump encased the building in mirror glass, much to the consternation of conservationists. Nonetheless, it became a landmark demonstration of his business acumen. Trump, who was not yet 30, became the first commercial developer in New York to receive a tax abatement from the city government in a project his property tycoon father Fred likened to ‘fighting for a seat on the Titanic’.⁴⁷ The Trump myth was born.

A string of headline-grabbing acquisitions followed. Of the New Jersey Generals in 1983, a franchise of the short-lived United States Football League. Of Trump Plaza, the flashy hotel and casino on the boardwalk in Atlantic City that came to host the world heavyweight boxing match between Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks, a bout Trump described as ‘one of the great events of the ’80s’, even though it lasted just 91 seconds.⁴⁸ Of the classy Plaza Hotel overlooking Central Park, which was run by his first wife, Ivana, for ‘one dollar plus all the dresses she can buy’. Of the Trump Shuttle in 1989, which operated hourly flights between New York, Washington and Boston, in jetliners with gold-plated taps in the bathrooms and his name inscribed in red letters on the fuselage.

If Trump was the living embodiment of the winner-takes-all ethos of the decade, Trump Tower, which opened in 1983, became its totem. The million-dollar fountain in the atrium, fashioned from peach rose and pink Breccia Pernice marble tiles, spoke of the showiness. The doormen dressed as palace guards, wearing scarlet tunics and white pith helmets in the summer and black bearskin hats in the winter, spoke of the vogue for status symbols. The jackhammering of the Art Deco sculptures that had ornamented the building on Fifth Avenue, bulldozed to make way for the skyscraper, spoke of the civic vandalism and disdain.

A tenant list handed to reporters that included Sophia Loren, Johnny Carson and Steven Spielberg spoke of the glorification of celebrity. The black-tied pianist playing in the lobby on a pink piano was a nod towards Liberace and the showmanship of the era, whether in Vegas or Washington. The shipping of $75,000 worth of palm trees from Florida for the foyer, which were then chain-sawed because Trump did not like the look, spoke of the wastefulness. The tower’s concrete frame, constructed using materials supplied by mob-run firms, spoke of the shady business practices. The eponymous skyscraper, with the tycoon’s name rendered in bronze capital letters above the door, spoke of the narcissism and fantastical self-belief.

No other building more accurately depicted the ’80s than this bastion of decadence, which is perhaps why, on my first trip to New York in the late ’80s, I visited Trump Tower before I went up the Empire State. To this day, its atrium feels like a kitschy time capsule.

A fixture already in New York, Trump became a nationwide celebrity in the ’80s. His first appearance on 60 Minutes came in 1985, in which he complained to the anchor Mike Wallace about his treatment in the press: ‘I believe they make me out to be something more sinister than I really am.’

Fortune magazine put him on its cover in 1986, describing him as a ‘high-roller’.⁴⁹ Trump also made his debut in January 1989 on the front cover of Time. ‘Flaunting it is his game, and Trump is the name,’ read the headline, alongside a portrait of Trump brandishing an ace of spades and wearing his trademark red silk tie. Inside, Time called him a ‘Flashy Symbol of an Acquisitive Age’, and published various Trumpian pearls of wisdom: ‘I love to have enemies. I fight my enemies. I love beating my enemies to the ground.’⁵⁰

So central was Trump to the cultural zeitgeist that a character was based on him in the sequel to Back to the Future: the casino owner, Biff Tannen, who made a political run as a Republican with the slogan ‘America’s greatest living folk hero’.⁵¹

His renovation in the mid-’80s of the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park, which was portrayed as the triumph of free enterprise over government inefficiency, fuelled his fame. When City Hall was in charge, the six-year project was a $12 million cost blowout. After Trump intervened, skaters took to the ice within four months for under $1 million. The New York Times sang his praises, calling the completed ice rink ‘one of the boldest feats of civic bravado tried in New York in recent years’. How the tycoon must have loved the headline: ‘New York Hopes to Learn from Ice Rink Trump Fixed.’⁵²

What was striking about the early press coverage of Trump was the starry-eyed fascination and laudatory tone. In ‘The Empire and Ego of Donald Trump’ in 1983, The New York Times described him as ‘a brash Adonis from the outer boroughs bent on placing his imprint on the golden rock’ of Manhattan, whose name ‘has in the last few years become an internationally recognized symbol of New York City as mecca for the world’s super-rich’.⁵³

In a profile published the following year under the headline ‘The Expanding Empire of Donald Trump’, The New York Times pronounced: ‘Donald J. Trump is the man of the hour.’ ‘Spending a day with Donald Trump is like driving a Ferrari without the windshield,’ noted the reporter William Geist, who spoke of Trump’s genius for negotiation and skill at selling super-rich apartments in Trump Tower during a difficult phase for Manhattan real estate.

‘You sell them a fantasy,’ said Trump, who was described by one of his admirers as ‘the Michael Jackson of real estate’. Four years later, following his acquisition of The Plaza, a follow-up profile in the Times further embroidered the master dealmaker narrative: ‘What Trump wants, Trump gets.’⁵⁴

What made this favourable press all the more remarkable was that Trump did not employ a public relations firm. He generated all of this publicity himself, though sometimes under the guise of ‘John Barron’, a pseudonym he often used when briefing reporters over the telephone in a barely disguised voice.⁵⁵ The media willingly, and often gullibly, helped create and fuel the Trumpian myth. In a reworking of Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum about not being talked about, Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal: ‘Good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.’⁵⁶

Some of the early coverage seemed to will the property tycoon to fix his gaze on the country’s most prized political real estate.

‘Would you like to be president of the United States?’ asked the celebrity reporter Rona Barrett in 1980, evidently the first time he was asked on screen whether he harboured presidential ambitions.

‘I really don’t believe I would, Rona,’ he replied, coyly. ‘Why wouldn’t you dedicate yourself to public service?’ she asked, having suggested he could ‘make America perfect’. ‘Because I think it’s a very mean life.’

In that first New York Times profile, the writer admitted how far-fetched was the notion of a Trump presidency, but entertained the possibility nonetheless. ‘The idea that he would ever be allowed to go into a room alone and negotiate for the United States, seems the naïve musing of an optimistic, deluded young man who has never lost at anything he has tried,’ he wrote. ‘But he believes that through years of making his views known and through supporting candidates who share his views, it could someday happen.’⁵⁷

The BBC’s legendary chronicler of American life, Alistair Cooke, also predicted great things of ‘the young, bouncy blond tycoon whose aspirations to take over hotels, casinos, airlines, resorts, cities – why not the country? – appear to be boundless’.⁵⁸

As the ’80s progressed, and Trump’s celebrity ballooned, he became more overtly political. In September 1987, he forked out almost $100,000 for a full-page ad in The New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe to publish an open letter to the American people headlined: ‘There’s Nothing Wrong with America’s Foreign Defence Policy That a Little Backbone Can’t Cure.’

Outlining themes he would return to almost 30 years later, he explained ‘why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves’ and how ‘Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States’ for decades.

‘Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?’ he asked. ‘The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.’

The letter had apparently been the idea of Roger Stone, that Forrest Gump of the right who served now as his unofficial political advisor. In conclusion, Trump noted, ‘Let’s not let our great country be laughed at any more.’ At the end, he added his signature written with a thick black pen in handwriting that looked like a seismograph during a medium-sized quake.⁵⁹

The attention the letter received showed once more Trump’s gift for self-publicity and his ease at securing column inches, usually without paying a dime. The editorial board of The New York Times even published a ‘Dear Donald Trump’ riposte. The thrust of his argument about burden-sharing was valid, it acknowledged, but claimed it was the price of US global leadership.

‘The terms of friendship may often be maddening,’ it noted, ‘but Americans surely like having those friends.’⁶⁰

The following month his hometown broadsheet published a news report under the headline ‘Trump Hints of Dreams Beyond Building’, which spoke of a possible presidential run. ‘I love what I do,’ he opined. ‘I’ve built the best private company in the world at a very early age.’ That said, ‘I believe that if I did run for president, I’d win.’⁶¹

Amidst this swirl of presidential speculation, Trump descended on New Hampshire in October 1987, aboard his French-made helicopter, for his first political campaign speech. Dressed in a dark blue suit and a red silk tie, he addressed the Rotary Club of Portsmouth at the invitation of a local businessman who had formed a ‘Draft Trump’ committee.

‘We are being ripped off and decimated by foreign nationals who are supposedly our allies,’ he said, repeating what was now becoming a familiar refrain. ‘The Japanese, when they negotiate with us, they have long faces. But when the negotiations are over, it is my belief – I’ve never seen this – they laugh like hell.’ Substitute China for Japan, and he was basically previewing the script for his 2016 run.⁶²

Given that The Art of the Deal was about to hit bookstores, Trump’s flirtation with presidential politics was clearly a naked marketing ploy. Yet this brief, aborted foray demonstrated the strength of his convictions on trade and freeloading allies, and also indicated he was unafraid to take on the political establishment.

Somewhat surprisingly for a tycoon who came to be regarded as the embodiment of Reaganism, The Art of the Deal took a swipe at the president, who was now more vulnerable following the Iran-Contra affair. Reagan has been ‘so smooth, so effective a performer’, the book noted, but ‘only now, seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile’.

Above all, the presidential speculation demonstrated how easy it would be to mount a more serious bid. In this media-saturated age, Trump was a ratings gift. Invited onto The Oprah Winfrey Show the following year, he vented once more about America being taken for a ride by its trading partners and allies.

‘We’re really making other people live like kings,’ he complained, ‘and we’re not.’

Then he fielded from Oprah what now felt like the obligatory question about the presidency.

‘Probably not,’ he answered, when asked if he would ever run. ‘But I do get tired of seeing the country ripped off.’

As for his prospects? With trademark immodesty, he claimed he ‘would have a hell of a chance of winning’.

An appearance on another daytime talk show, Donahue, drew praise from an unexpected quarter. ‘I did not see the program,’ wrote Richard Nixon, ‘but Mrs Nixon told me that you were great on the Donahue show. As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics, and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!’⁶³

Certainly, Trump had started to take himself seriously as a political entity. In 1988, as the Reagan years drew to a close, he suggested to Lee Atwater, George H. W. Bush’s campaign chief, that he should join the Republican ticket as the vice-presidential nominee. Bush considered the idea ‘strange and unbelievable’.⁶⁴

However, no longer did the prospect of a Trump run seem so ludicrous. By the late ’80s, Reagan had normalised the idea that a show-business personality could become president, and the billionaire clearly believed he had the self-promotional prowess that had become so elemental to the presidential skill set.

‘I play to people’s fantasies,’ he wrote in The Art of the Deal. ‘People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration.’⁶⁵

Inside the rotunda of the US Capitol, the site of Reagan’s weather-hit second inaugural, tens of thousands queued to file past his flag-draped casket, which rested on a catafalque constructed in 1865 to display Abraham Lincoln’s coffin. On the morning of his funeral, the New York Stock Exchange ceased trading, giving some of Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe the day off. At his boyhood home in Dixon, Illinois, mourners left packets of jelly beans, his beloved candy, at the foot of a life-sized statue.

The public and political reaction to Ronald Reagan’s death in June 2004 demonstrated how widely accepted was his claim to presidential greatness. Tributes honoured a leader who, in the clichéd retelling, had looked the Soviet Union in the eye and refused to blink; a president who had rescued America from economic ruin; an optimist who had rallied the country after years of malaise.

Much like the response to the passing nine years later of his ideological soulmate, Margaret Thatcher, criticisms were softened, old antagonisms set aside. Longstanding opponents acknowledged America needed the shock therapy of the Reagan revolution. No longer was Reagan a joke. Nor was Reaganism a term of derision. In the red-and-blue America of the new millennium, his legacy transcended politics.

From leading Democrats, eulogies came gushing in. Bill Clinton said his predecessor ‘personified the indomitable optimism of the American people’. Ted Kennedy observed ‘his infectious optimism gave us all the feeling that it really was “morning in America’’’. Senator John Kerry, the party’s presidential nominee that year, added his voice to the Democratic chorus of praise. Failing to pay homage would have offended Reagan Democrats the party was still trying to wrench back. ‘He was our oldest president,’ said Kerry, ‘but he made America young again.’⁶⁶

Ten years earlier, following the announcement from his Bel-Air retirement home he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, the country had conducted a dress rehearsal for Reagan’s death. Even in his infirm state, the Gipper executed the most graceful of exits, penning a handwritten letter to the American people that was pitch-perfect Reagan. ‘I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life,’ he wrote in a scrawl that revealed the ravages of his disease. ‘I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.’

Thereafter, it seemed cruel to question his legacy, or reassess his record, not least since the great communicator had lost the capacity to answer back. His incapacitation offered inoculation against disparagement. His presidency came to be encased in amber.

Long before his retreat from public life, Reagan hero-worship had reached the level of deification within the conservative movement. Only Abraham Lincoln had been a more consequential Republican president, decreed The Heritage Foundation. The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, set up in the late ’90s by the conservative ideologue Grover Norquist, succeeded in renaming National Airport, and continued to press for a park, statue or road to be named after him in every one of America’s 3,140 counties. The Reaganite anthem, ‘God Bless the USA’, came to be played at every GOP convention. It was as if he was not just great but supernatural. A quadrennial ritual of the Republican primary season became the battle to claim his mantle. Ahead of the 2000 election, George W. Bush described himself as a Reagan Republican, even though it meant besmirching his father. Ahead of the 2010 midterm congressional elections, the RNC proposed that prospective candidates had to sign up to a ‘Reagan Resolution’, agreeing to at least eight out of ten conservative principles, in order to receive help from the party.⁶⁷ During the 2016 campaign, the second Republican debate was held at his presidential library, during which his name was mentioned, worshipfully, no fewer than 45 times. ‘So how Reaganesque exactly are these Republicans?’ intoned the moderator, CNN’s Jake Tapper, as if it was the all-important litmus test.⁶⁸ To this day, Republican primary voters will tolerate many transgressions, but not the cardinal sin of desecrating Reagan’s memory – perhaps it should be called the 12th commandment, an addendum to Reagan’s 11th commandment, decreeing that Republicans should not speak ill of any fellow Republican.

Donald Trump liked to claim he had almost been anointed by Reagan in the Blue Room of the White House in 1987, and popularised a meme featuring what the then president was supposed to have told aides after shaking the tycoon’s hand, ‘For the life of me, and I’ll never know how to explain it, I felt like the one shaking hands with the president.’ However, there is no record of Reagan ever having uttered these words, and this is almost certainly a made-up quote.

In all personality cults, followers can be blind to the flaws of their idols. This has been especially true of the misty romanticism enshrouding Reagan. Modern-day Republicans continue to regard him as a leader of unbending beliefs, overlooking the pragmatism central to his political success. They recall, for instance, that he reduced taxes in his first and last year as president, but forget that he raised them in the other six.

His landmark 1982 Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which slashed rates on the wealthiest Americans from 70 per cent to 50 per cent, was followed in 1982 and 1984 by what was cumulatively the largest tax hike in peacetime history.⁶⁹ Nor do Reagan’s disciples place his tax cuts in a proper historical or economic context. When he entered the White House, the highest rate of personal income tax was 70 per cent. When he left that ‘little bungalow’, it was 28 per cent.⁷⁰ Slashing such punitive tax rates in the early ’80s was justifiable. Continuing to cut them when they were already low compared to other western countries has proven fiscally reckless. Republicans have come to see tax cuts as the remedy for every economic ill, regardless of the impact on the country’s finances. As well as accumulating more debt, they have always disproportionately favoured the rich, exacerbating the problem of income inequality.

Reagan is often remembered as a fiscal conservative, but he ran up more debt than any of his predecessors. It tripled during his time in office. For all his anti-government rhetoric, the number of federal employees actually grew during his eight years in office. Again, this was partly due to the Pentagon build-up, but he reneged on his promise to shut down the Departments of Education and Energy, and actually ended up adding another Cabinet-level agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Reagan repeatedly committed Reaganite apostasy. Never did he vigorously seek a constitutional ban on abortion, offering only tepid support to the religious right’s efforts to push through the ‘Human Life Amendment’. Anti-abortion rallies he addressed by phone over a public address system rather than in person. By appointing Sandra Day O’Connor as the country’s first female Supreme Court Justice, a jurist who believed in a woman’s right to choose, he safeguarded Roe v. Wade for a quarter of a century.

On immigration, Reagan was a moderate. Believing their arrival offered proof that America was a city on a hill, he welcomed the ‘millions of immigrants from every corner of the earth’. In 1986, he signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act granting amnesty to more than a million illegal immigrants. A follow-up executive order legalised the status of children whose parents had been granted amnesty. This to Reagan made moral and political sense. ‘Hispanics are conservatives,’ he was fond of saying. ‘They just don’t know it.’

In foreign affairs, it was not chiefly his militarism that brought the Soviet Union to heel, but rather his willingness to negotiate arms reductions agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev. After decrying the détente advocated by Nixon and Ford, he ended up embracing it. His ambition to rid the world of atomic weapons, every single warhead, placed him in the same camp as the peaceniks of the nuclear-freeze movement.

Though remembered as a strongman, Reagan’s response to the 1983 bombing of the marine barracks in Lebanon, an attack in which 241 US service personnel were murdered, was to quietly pull out US forces, rather than mount retaliatory strikes. ‘Phased redeployment’, Reagan called it, the sort of defeatist euphemism Republicans would have pounced upon had it come from the lips of Jimmy Carter.

As bodies were still being pulled from the wreckage, he then ordered the invasion of Grenada, a military adventure in a tiny chain of islands in the Caribbean that seemed like a deliberate attempt to deflect from the carnage in the Middle East. Thus the great communicator became the great distractor. The only time Reagan took military action in retaliation for a terror attack came when, in response to the 1986 bombing of a discotheque in West Berlin that killed two Americans, he ordered air strikes against Libya.⁷¹ Another inconvenient truth for contemporary Republicans was Reagan’s bipartisanship, a word Grover Norquist, the driving force behind the Reagan Project, has likened to date rape. Reagan regularly clashed with his fellow Irish-American, the Democratic House Speaker, Tip O’Neill, who castigated the president as a ‘cheerleader for selfishness’. Often at the end of the day, however, they shared a tumbler of Irish whiskey and started to cut deals.

‘Tip, you and I are political enemies only until six o’clock,’ Reagan would joke. ‘It’s four o’clock now. Can we pretend it’s six o’clock?’⁷²

Reagan’s bipartisanship was born of necessity. For the entirety of his presidency, he confronted a Democrat-controlled House. Yet both Reagan and O’Neill understood the founding fathers had hard-wired compromise into their design for government, and that Washington was unworkable without give-and-take.⁷³

Reagan was also respectful of his opponents. In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in 1980, he quoted Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and reminded supporters he had once been a ‘New Deal Democrat’.⁷⁴ His respect for New Deal reforms extended to creating a bipartisan commission to save Social Security, FDR’s greatest achievement. ‘Reagan Democrats’ supported him not only because of his cultural conservatism, but also because he preserved so much of the New Deal.

Often forgotten as well is the criticism Reagan faced from conservative contemporaries, especially before his personal popu­larity gave him a protective shield. Were he on the political scene today, he would probably be dubbed a RINO, a Republican in name only – or, more appositely, a Reaganite in name only. Reagan would find it hard to sign up to the Reagan Resolution.

Even his popularity has been inflated. His average Gallup job-approval rating over his eight years in office was 52.8 per cent. That put him behind Kennedy (70.1 per cent), Eisenhower (65 per cent), George H. W. Bush (60.9 per cent), Lyndon Johnson (55.1 per cent) and Bill Clinton (55.1 per cent). At the height of the Iran-Contra scandal, polls suggested a third of Americans thought he should resign.⁷⁵ Yet Republicans have created a fabulist figurine, a paragon faithful to the truth-twisting of his presidency but not the man himself. Arthur M. Schlesinger called Reagan ‘the president as master illusionist’. To this day, Republicans remain spellbound.⁷⁶

Reagan altered the Democratic Party almost as much as he transformed the Republicans. Bill Clinton launched his 1992 campaign with a stinging rebuke of Reaganism: ‘The 1980s ushered in a gilded age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.’ However, the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, of which the Governor of Arkansas became a leading light, came into existence to meet the philosophical and electoral challenge posed by a Republican president who in 1980 and 1984 won almost a third of white Democrats.⁷⁷ Clintonism became a progressive response to Reaganism, which recognised how much he had altered the terms of political debate and changed American minds about the relationship between citizens and the government.

Much of the DLC’s thinking was predicated on Reagan’s critique of the post-’60s Democrats: that the party had left him, not that he had left the party. As a result, Clinton’s political philosophy was shaped by the belief that the only way to contend with Reaganism was to ape it. His Third Way was a synthesis of New Deal government intervention and the regulatory retrenchment of the Reagan years, a balancing of the rights agenda of the ’60s with the values agenda of the ’70s.

When Clinton spoke, as a candidate, of ending welfare as we know it, he was essentially endorsing Reagan’s contention in 1988 that ‘the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won’. Following the Republican Revolution led by the conservative firebrand Newt Gingrich in 1994, Clinton ended up almost ventriloquising Reagan. ‘The era of big government is over,’ he declared in his 1996 State of the Union address, in what sounded more like a capitulation than accommodation.

Earlier on in the Clinton presidency, Reagan complained that the New Democrat had stolen his ‘conservative overcoat’. At his 83rd birthday gala in Washington, he joked to a crowd of cheering Republicans, “Watching the State of the Union address the other night, I’m reminded of the old adage that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Only in this case, it’s not flattery, but grand larceny.”⁷⁸ Just as Eisenhower had normalised Rooseveltism, so Clinton regularised Reaganism.

More surprising was how enthusiastically Barack Obama partici­pated in the veneration of the most conservative president of the post-war years. Campaigning for the presidency in 2008, the then senator made no secret of his admiration. ‘I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way Bill Clinton did not,’ he told the Reno Gazette-Journal in March 2008 during an interview which gained traction in the national press. ‘He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.’⁷⁹ Later, in 2010, when he convened a White House symposium of presidential historians to glean lessons from his predecessors, he was intrigued most by what Reagan could teach him. That Christmas, aides let it be known the president’s vacation reading in Hawaii was Lou Cannon’s President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, the superlative biography.

Afterwards, he happily put his name to a personal tribute published in Time. ‘Reagan recognized the American people’s hunger for accountability and change,’ the 44th president wrote admiringly of the 40th. In a 2011 cover story, Time even went as far as to describe Reagan as Obama’s ‘role model’.⁸⁰ After all, he yearned to be a transformational president who renewed America’s faith in itself and revived a moribund economy.

By praising their Republican predecessor so unreservedly, both Obama and Clinton contributed to the ideological shift rightwards, the process through which Roosevelt’s America became Reagan’s America. But were they right to concede so much to a president with so many negative entries in the historical ledger?

His trickle-down economics brought about a massive redistribution of wealth upwards. As Obama could have learned from Lou Cannon, ‘By 1989, the richest two-fifths of families had the highest share of national income (67.8 per cent) and the poorest two-fifths the lowest share (15.4 per cent) in the 40 years since the Census Bureau had been compiling such statistics.’ One out of five children lived in poverty, a disproportionate number of them African-American.⁸¹ In the mid-1970s, bosses earned 35 times as much as their workers. By the end of the ’80s, as Milton Friedman’s ideas took hold and the phrase ‘greed is good’ gained wider coinage, they were raking in 120 times as much.⁸²

The tax giveaway of 1981 not only further inflated the deficit balloon but also helped create the 1980s real-estate bubble. In an ever more decadent society, pleasure and consumption edged out innovation and industry, the drivers of America’s post-war growth. The market was king.

Reagan ignored the AIDS epidemic, opposed a national holiday for the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr and was a flat earther on climate change who once claimed trees emitted more pollution than cars. Admirers recall his appearance in front of the Brandenburg Gate, but not his highly controversial visit in 1985 to the Bitburg cemetery in West Germany where members of the Nazi SS were buried. They forget how long it took him to disavow the extreme right John Birch Society when he was running for the governorship of California, just as they overlook his decision to launch his 1980 campaign in Mississippi with that rallying cry for states’ rights. In 2019, a tape emerged of a phone conversation with President Nixon in which Reagan described African delegates at the United Nations as ‘monkeys’ who were ‘still uncomfortable wearing shoes’, but it was quickly dismissed as an aberration rather than a moment that revealed his true self.⁸³

Democrats who have reached the White House have all made major ideological concessions to Reagan. His scapegoating of government is a case in point. For much of the past 30 years Democrats have so often let one of his favourite one-liners go unchallenged, the old chestnut about the most frightening words in the English language being ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’.

In the absence of a counter-narrative, the perception of government changed. Prior to the Reagan era, government was seen as a force for good: the saviour of capitalism and rescuer of the poor after the Great Depression, the defender of democracy during World War II, the architect of nation-building infrastructure in the ’50s, the helping hand when Americans fell sick or lost their jobs.

Afterwards, it has been harder to make a positive case for the government. Rare are the occasions when Bill Clinton or Barack Obama mounted a forceful defence, even though the Reagan years abound with egregious examples of lax regulation, whether it was the defanging of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division or the Food and Drug Administration. Financial deregulation contributed to the Savings and Loans crisis in the late ’80s and early ’90s, a forerunner of the 2008 crash when more than a thousand ‘thrift’ associations failed, partly because they were allowed to sell more exotic products such as high-risk securities and junk bonds. Under Reagan, regulatory reform invariably meant regulatory relaxation.

For the past 30 years, strident critics of government have outgunned its timid defenders. Small wonder Hillary Clinton was confronted during the 2016 campaign by protesters brandishing placards reading: ‘Get your government hands off my Medicare.’ Some of those most dependent on government had been encouraged to hate the government, which had corroded the social compact between Washington and the people that had been a feature of American life since the New Deal. As the political scientists Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril have correctly pointed out, Americans have become ‘operational liberals’ who benefit from government support but ‘ideological conservatives’ who resent government intervention.

For Bill Clinton, the end of the era of big government translated into the light-touch regulatory framework of the ’90s, a deregulation binge that contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown. For Barack Obama, it meant a Wall Street-friendly stimulus package that left untouched the Masters of the Universe whose recklessness brought capitalism to the point of collapse.

Somewhat perversely, many of the most biting criticisms of Reagan came not from his Democratic successors but from his vice-president. No one has ever bettered the phrase ‘voodoo economics’ that Bush came up with during the 1980 fight for the Republican nomination to describe the self-contradictions of Reaganomics, which claimed it was possible simultaneously to slash taxes and balance the books. George H. W. Bush’s kinder, gentler America was meant as a course correction for the materialism and selfishness of the Reagan years.

So, just as Democrats underestimated Reagan at the time, they have overestimated him in retrospect. Likewise, Republicans have put him on such a lofty pedestal they have succumbed to historical altitude sickness in assessing his record. In the national memory, Reaganism has come to be equated emotionally with that glorious Olympian summertime, and politically by his ‘Morning in America’ landslide victory afterwards. For both Republicans and Democrats, 1984 has ended up having an imprisoning effect. Contemporary US politics would benefit from a more sober-minded appraisal of the Reagan years, stripped of the soft-heartedness and devoid of the rose-tinted remembrances: a realistic evaluation of his presidency, rather than a Hollywood-style romance where there can never be anything other than a happy ending.