Presidents of the Imagination

Speaking of presidents of the imagination, one of the benign outcomes of a Trump presidency might be to move Republicans once and for all to put the image of Ronald Reagan they’ve built up in their minds behind them. Reagan cut taxes and built up the military to scare the heck out of the Soviets, his approach to fighting communism. That was about it.

He didn’t eliminate any federal departments. He didn’t cut the size of government. He pulled our troops out of Lebanon with their tails between their legs. The economy grew in the 80s through a combination of Reagan’s cheerleading, cultivating Keynes’s “animal spirits”, and garden variety Keynesian fiscal stimulus conjoined with consistent Fed policy. What he did accomplish was reinstilling a sense of confidence in Republicans after Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, and the slow growth of the 1970s.

As James Taranto wrote in his Wall Street Journal column last week:

During the campaign, some Nevertrump conservatives had an annoying tendency to use “Reagan”—meaning what they imagined the 40th president would think and do today—as a rhetorical device to portray Trump’s supporters as apostates from conservatism.

Some are still at it. One of them is Evan McMullin, the former CIA officer and congressional aide who ran as a “true conservative” independent, receiving 0.4% of the nationwide popular vote and topping 20% in his native Utah. In response to the Moore report, he tweeted: “For conservatives who didn’t see this coming, it should be a wake up call. Trump is going to expand the size of the Federal Government.”

Then again, so did Reagan—or, to be precise, so did Congress during his presidency, usually with Reagan’s assent.

The problem with not knowing history is that you’re doomed to repeat your imagined accounts of it over and over again until you believe that what you say happened actually happened.