Overall, what Reagan accomplished was to win over a majority of white men to the revisionist view of the Constitution that was first developed by Thomas Jefferson. Some of the "intellectuals" of Reaganism, such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, even espoused the false notion that Jefferson's "strict construction" revisionism was the "original intent" of the Framers when the true "original intent" was the pragmatic nationalism of the Federalists.
One of the Worst: George W. Bush
After the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the United States got a bit of a respite on its steep path of decline with the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992. But Clinton only put a mild brake on the process and, in some ways, let the careening bandwagon of deregulation go even faster.
Still, Clinton did reverse some of the Reagan-Bush tax cuts and brought a touch of sanity back to the nation's fiscal order by balancing the budget and putting the nation on a course toward paying off the federal debt.
Then came the Election of 2000, which Clinton's Vice President Al Gore won both in terms of the national popular vote and what should have been the deciding state of Florida. But George W. Bush came out on top, thanks to the machinations of his brother Jeb's state administration in Florida and his father's cronies on the U.S. Supreme Court who blocked a full recount which would have shown Gore winning by a narrow margin. [For details, see Neck Deep.]
Instead, the lightly qualified George W. Bush became the 43rd President. Bush moved rapidly to resume Ronald Reagan's strategy of slashing the taxes of the rich and freeing businesses from as many regulations as possible.
Bush continued those budget-busting policies even after he missed the warning signs that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda extremists, who had turned their wrath on the United States, were planning the devastating 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. As Bush morphed into a "war president," he attacked Afghanistan and then Iraq without raising taxes. He simply added another trillion or so dollars to the federal debt.
Between the extravagance of waging two wars on a credit card and the excitement of freeing up Wall Street to sell securitized subprime loans as AAA-rated stock, the Bush administration was rolling pell-mell down a steep incline toward global catastrophe. The instability was made worse by the growing separation of the United States into a shockingly unequal society, a small group of have-a-lots on one side and a vast multitude of the near-poor on the other.
By September 2008, a Wall Street crash pushed the nation to the precipice of another Great Depression. Though the Bush administration moved to bail out the too-big-to-fail banks with trillions of dollars, the crisis forced the layoffs of millions of Americans and the foreclosures of millions of homes. The process of hollowing out the Great American Middle Class, which had been scraping steadily along for three decades, accelerated.
Many middle- and working-class Americans found themselves facing the abyss. But the right-wing propaganda machine, which Ronald Reagan and his supporters had built, continued churning out excuses for what happened, shifting the blame away for right-wing policies and out-of-control capitalism to meddling "liberals" and "guv-mint" interference.
When Bush finally left office on Jan. 20, 2009, he left behind not only an economy in shambles but a legacy of ill-considered wars, an unparalleled surveillance state, and a shocking record of torture and other war crimes. But few lessons were learned.
Bush's successor, Democrat Barack Obama, volunteered to "look forward, not backward." And the right-wing media reframed recent events as showing that what America needed was a weaker federal government and more "states' rights." In other words, the prevailing narrative is one that Thomas Jefferson and other Anti-Federalist slaveholders would have appreciated.
Looking back at the actual wisdom of the Framers -- and the presidents who recognized the true message of the Constitution -- the real answer to America's current difficulties would seem to be another era of an activist federal government -- reviving the battered middle class, raising taxes on the rich to address income inequality, putting the unemployed to work rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, and tightening regulations on Wall Street and other out-of-control businesses.
But the Right and much of the mainstream media insist that we gaze back at the Founding era through a distorted prism that rearranges the heroes and villains in ways designed to confuse, not to inform.
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