“Zombie Reaganism” has been something of a catchphrase among members of the New Right in recent years, a disparaging reference to the traditional Republican agenda of low taxes, deregulation, and a strong national defense. GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is the latest to decry a conservative movement supposedly caught in the age of Reagan. In a post on X (formerly Twitter) in response to a news article about former vice president Mike Pence’s Wednesday speech — in which Pence extolled the virtues of fusionist conservatism and warned against the dangers of populism — Ramaswamy once again invoked the idea that “old-school Republicans” are stuck in a “bygone era.”
“It’s almost as if candidates like Mike Pence just stepped out of their Deloreans & awoke from deep slumber to realize the world and what voters care about isn’t what it was 40 years ago,” Ramaswamy wrote.
What’s interesting here — aside from the Back to the Future reference that I have to give him credit for — is that many of the same problems we currently face are quite similar to the ones with which Ronald Reagan had to contend when he successfully ran for president in 1980. In the decade before Reagan became president and morning dawned in America once again, the United States dealt with many events that mirror our current moment. A description of a disastrous withdrawal from a protracted conflict on the other side of the world could refer to the Vietnam War or our two-decade-long engagement in Afghanistan. Though the energy crisis the U.S. faced in the 1970s was certainly worse than the vicissitudes in gas prices over the past couple of years, the issue has been in the news lately to a far greater extent than it had since the gas lines in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. Back then, the Soviets invaded a neighboring country and found themselves battling a resistance armed with American weaponry. Today, Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia has encountered much of the same in its invasion of Ukraine. Similarly, on the topic of foreign policy, Reagan pledged to defeat an enemy intent on expanding its sphere of influence across the globe. Though Russia does not any longer have designs on world domination, Xi Jinping’s China certainly does.
The most obvious similarity between today’s America and the country whose White House Reagan moved into in January 1981, though, is inflation. In fact, in June of last year, prices of goods and services within the U.S. jumped to their highest levels since — you guessed it — 1982. Though the country was not experiencing the seemingly inevitable economic growth it is now, inflation and the economy were by far the most salient issues in the 1980 election, and they surely will be top of mind for voters in the upcoming cycle.
It’s clear Ramaswamy wants to differentiate himself from the field and capture the hearts and minds of the hyper-online populist segment of the Republican electorate. But he’ll likely find that niche is much smaller than he expects. And in using the Reagan Revolution as a cudgel against Pence, he’s inadvertently made the case that we are once again at a time for choosing. As Peter Allen once sang, Everything Old Is New Again, and the GOP — and the country, for that matter — could use a healthy dose of Reaganite optimism.