Dear God, I knew he was the worst already, but it seems every new thing I learn only makes it even worse.
I knew he was the proto-trump, but this is perhaps the Trumpiest thing I’ve heard yet.
I had a history professor in college that once said in a lecture that it is impossible for someone who lived through something to view it historically because of perception and bias. I think of him every time I see something like this because it makes me wish I could live long enough to read historical analyses of stuff like Reagan’s presidency. Hopefully history will be able to truthfully describe what he did to our country.
I wasn’t there for it, he’s a real piece of shit though and I don’t get why people liked him other than him telling them to live like there’s no tomorrow and completely separate investment from material value.
The mid to late 70s were pretty dismal. Stagflation, crazy interest rates, the gas crisis, etc. I was in middle school in 1980 so I didn’t have a lot of life experience at the time but I remember how his speeches made people feel hopeful for the first time in a long while.
It’s also very easy to look back and “realize” how bad he was/is.
But at the time, like you said, things weren’t so clear, and Reagan won like 90% of the electoral vote, it was a massive landslide. Carter only won like 6 states.
I was there and I can tell you two things with absolute truth:
- He was a real piece of shit President from the start, no one except the GOP base was fooled, same as today
- In the absence of “her emails” or a russian-backed influence and money campaign, the GOP literally asked Iran to hold the hostages from the American embassy until the election was over to hurt Carter. “Nightline” ran every night saying how much Carter sucked. And it did hurt his election tremendously. If that didn’t tell you what you needed to know, then the next several decades’ worth of slide-into-abject-fascism was not going to be noticed either. (And, as we can plainly see, it wasn’t)
Hey, thanks for your post. I’m not from the US and the bit about the hostages was unknown to me.
Sounds like a parallel to what was going on with the military help for Ukraine just now…
Also as I ubderstand it a lot of the issues with the Reagan administration could be dismissed as just general “things going wrong” and we only saw how bad he was after a lot of shit leaked post presidency.
But I am working off my understanding im 24 Reagan may as well have been dead for my entire lifetime, hell he may have been he died in 2004 but I doubt there was much left of his mind.
