There’s a fight ongoing on the right about the legacy of Ronald Reagan and — improbably enough — the legacy of Richard Nixon. The short of it is that the ascendant factions on the right seem to look at Reagan with disdain while idolizing Nixon.
Ostensibly some of this hostility toward Reagan is on policy grounds — objecting to his support, at various times in his career, for immigration amnesty, free trade, and abortion — and surely much of it can be traced to a sort of negative polarization against establishment conservatives who cite Reagan against Trump-era nationalists.
Of course this misses the forest for the trees. No, Reagan wasn’t perfect policy-wise, but his victory was seen at the time as a clear repudiation of go-along-to-get-along northeastern Republicanism, on one hand, and seemingly unprincipled Nixonianism, on the other. He also had to deal with a strongly Democratic House for all of his presidency and a Democratic Senate for some of it. And, at the end of the day, he successfully focused on beating international communism, which was an existential threat to America and its way of life.
It’s also a little puzzling when you compare Reagan to Nixon on matters of policy. I’m generally a Nixon fan, myself, and tend to offer his policy pragmatism considerable grace, but if one is going to consider the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a form of regime change a la Christoper Caldwell (as many on the New Right do), then maybe spare some ire for president who consistently favored and expanded that regime going back at least to his time as vice president?
When it comes to policy, political context always matters. Take Nixon and Reagan on judicial selection, for example. Nixon deserves tremendous credit for making that a core political issue for the presidency, deploying it as part of his populist strategy to turn white-ethnic northern Democrats in 1968. The problem, of course, was that there wasn’t a coherent alternative to judicial liberalism, so, while many of his picks were sound on law and order or race issues, they could get wrapped around the axle and, say, author Roe v. Wade. (Although even there, the Republican lawyer for the Mayo Clinic shines through Justice Blackmun’s absurd reasoning.) The existing context of the legal profession just didn’t allow Nixon to make good on his promises as much as one would have liked.
Fast forward to the Reagan years and the rise of originalism, Ed Meese, and the Federalist Society, and suddenly you have a Republican administration cooking with gas on judges. Again, the policy outcomes depended on the political context.
In the end, though, this dispute isn’t about policy. It’s about vibes. Why do young conservative activists dislike Reagan and like Nixon? Because Reagan was a sunny optimist and Nixon was a put-upon schemer. Reagan didn’t like dirty jokes; Nixon reveled in his ethnic slurs. Reagan projected the image of a man rising above his critics; Nixon knifed his enemies one more time to make sure they were dead. Reagan was a Hollywood insider; Nixon was persistently hounded by the coastal elites who looked down on him.
It’s interesting that the historical dispute is bubbling up now, because in many ways Donald Trump is a mix of the two. Anathema though it may be to his detractors, the guy has real charisma. He’s a showman who has it in him to guide — if not command — the culture. He’s actually funny and the motto to “Make America Great Again,” in its way, does depend on an optimistic vision for the future. At the same time, he shares Nixon’s abiding resentment and hostility with his coastal “betters.” He’s highly pragmatic on questions of policy. He doesn’t let slights from enemies go unanswered (at times to his detriment). Perhaps, then, it makes sense to question whether it’s his Reaganite or Nixonian attributes that have allowed Trump to dominate our politics for a decade?
It’s also hard to escape the parallel between Reagan and Nixon and Trump’s likely successors. Will the GOP embrace Marco Rubio and charismatic optimism, or JD Vance and populist resentment?
When you think about it, we’re as far away from Reagan when he first ran for president as he was, at the time, to the William Howard Taft administration. So any such historical policy debates are of limited practical use. Why should we expect Reagan’s views on immigration to apply today any more than Reagan should have expected the stewardship of the Philippines to apply to him?
Which is why, in the end, it’s really about vibes. Do we want a GOP that defends the shining city on a hill while proclaiming it “morning in America”? Or do we want one that says, “Never forget, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”
That’s the actual debate, not the particulars of Ronald Reagan’s record.