Did Ronald Reagan 'Make America Great Again'?

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Before he won the White House, and despite his two terms as governor of California, Reagan had been seen by many as something of a joke – an old Hollywood has-been, the “candidate from Disneyland”. By 1984, though, he was presiding over American politics with apparently effortless ease, and was on course for an overwhelming victory.

Looking back now, 40 years on, the aspect of the old actor’s last campaign that’s most striking is just how optimistic it was – a far cry from the tenor of US politics today. So had Reagan made America great again? Or was the spectacle not quite what it seemed?

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Economic recovery

For much of Reagan’s first term, the economy had been in serious trouble. In 1979, inflation had reached 11 per cent, and attempts to drive it down with high interest rates fuelled a recession. By the end of 1982, unemployment was at well over 10 per cent.

But by 1984, helped by falling oil prices, the economy was growing at 7.2 per cent annually. Reagan had delivered big income-tax cuts. More and more Americans were acquiring credit cards, the better to buy increasingly affordable personal computers, video recorders and cable TV. As antitrust regulation was relaxed, mergers and acquisitions took off, and Wall Street boomed.

America’s newly buoyant mood was showcased to the world that summer when the Olympic Games came to Los Angeles. Whereas many previous host cities had found that the experience cost them dear, LA brought in private finance – and generated close to a quarter of a billion dollars in profits. American athletes won gold medals galore, too, helped by a Soviet bloc boycott.

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In the cinemas, it was the summer of Ghostbusters – one of many teen-orientated movies that depicted the US as an endless playground, a place where nothing could really go wrong, no matter how much of a mess you made.

Addressing his country’s athletes on 28 July, President Reagan rejoiced at the “outpouring of unity and positivity” produced by the Olympics – and, by extension, his time in office. At the Republican National Convention in Dallas a few weeks later, Reagan geed up the crowd by asking them to name a country that had brought down inflation, unemployment and interest rates, prompting chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

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This upbeat story of a US born again was encapsulated in the most famous of Reagan’s campaign ads. While the voiceover lauds the recovering economy, a montage of happy, sunlit Americans presents a vision of a country free from conflict and worry.

A smiling family carries a rolled-up carpet past roses and a picket fence into their new home. A paperboy pedals past a smiling businessman on his way to work. A smiling couple marries in front of smiling relatives.

Originally called Prouder, Stronger, Better, this ad became famous as Morning Again in America – a vision of the nation that Reagan had purportedly restored to greatness. If his pitch to voters was a “new beginning”, it took the form of a comforting return to the past. It evoked the folk memory of small-town US – like those in which the president himself had grown up.

This creative strategy combined Reagan’s capacity to convince himself – and many fellow Americans – that everything was fine with a very particular slant on US history. Writing in 1986, the journalist Garry Wills argued that the power of Reagan’s entreaty was based on the fact that Americans “can- not live with our real past” and so preferred a “substitute.”

In Hollywood, this yearning for a golden yesterday tended to focus on the supposedly placid, hopeful world of the 1950s, epitomised in films such as Back to the Future.

But why was there such imaginative effort to evoke this happy version of the past? To me, watching this as a British schoolkid, it seemed bizarre. It was only later, when I found out what had happened to America in the decades between the 1950s and the 1980s, that this intense yearning for a stable past made sense. It was an effort to escape the agonies of the 1960s and 1970s.

Decades of turmoil

At the time of Reagan’s campaign, the US was haunted by memories of economic turmoil, of lethal urban unrest, of the Watergate scandal – and, most of all, of the misery, humiliation and loss it had brought upon itself in Vietnam. No wonder so many people embraced the idea of busting ghosts. Reagan provided an account of the past that allowed Americans to chase away the old spectres and recover a sense of national pride.

One symbol of this was his pointed drive to honour Vietnam veterans. As the historian Christian Appy observed, the US had sent its soldiers home not together but alone, to be met by “no national homecoming ceremonies”. Worse, they were often cast in the media as crazy or “drug-addled and violent”. It was only during Reagan’s presidency that ‘welcome home’ parades for veterans were staged. Appy also notes, however, that this involved other forms of myth-making.

Reagan was among those who promoted the claim – for which there was never solid evidence – that hundreds of missing US soldiers were alive and being held captive in south-east Asia. He also believed that previous administrations had not only left behind brave Americans, but had thwarted victory by refusing to allow the military to use the necessary force.

America’s need to recover the confidence it had felt in the 1950s was not only about internal healing. As the Cold War re-intensified after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was an urgent push to boost its standing on the world stage. In Reagan’s first term, after years of post-Vietnam retrenchment, US military spending leapt by a third, and medium-range cruise and Pershing II missiles were installed in western Europe.

In Europe itself, this triggered consternation: if a Third World War broke out, would the US try to keep its homeland intact by sacrificing its allies on the other side of the Atlantic? In Britain, peace camps and other protests sprang up, echoing the nuclear disarmament marches of the 1950s.

In March 1983, Reagan delivered his so-called ‘Star Wars’ speech, calling for the development of a nuclear shield in space – a proposal that triggered yet more nightmares. And in August 1984, he announced that he had signed legislation outlawing Russia, and that bombing would begin “in five minutes”.

Here again, all was not quite as it seemed. Reagan was not the gung-ho maniac he appeared to be to many Europeans. The bombing announcement was an off-record joke with the sound engineers recording his weekly radio address, which was later leaked to the press.

His argument, as set out in his ‘Star Wars’ speech, was that the point of military strength was to keep the peace; it was weakness that invited aggression. In fact, as noted by his most recent biographer, Max Boot, Reagan had a horror of nuclear Armageddon. Early in his first term as president, he had watched a war game – and had seen the US vanish as the map “turned red to simulate the impact of Soviet nuclear strikes”.

In January 1984, ahead of a global television address on the need for peace, he admitted that he had to reassure people that “I don’t plan to blow up the world”. Behind the scenes throughout that year, he quietly pursued talks with the Soviet Union.

His efforts were frustrated in part by the USSR’s habit of picking geriatric leaders who died within months, but in 1985 the much younger Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Slowly, the full radicalism of Reagan’s ambitions for peace began to become clear: he wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons altogether.

Wooing the Christian right

In another respect, too, Reagan’s hard-line rhetoric masked pragmatic reality. He wooed the support of the evangelical Christian right, which had begun a concerted push to organise itself in the late 1970s in the form of Jerry Falwell’s ‘Moral Majority’ movement. Reagan was more than happy to invoke God sincerely enough in speeches, but he was far less personally pious than his devout predecessor, Jimmy Carter.

And when he had the opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court Justice, he chose Sandra Day O’Connor – not exactly the ultra-conservative the religious right had in mind. As a moderate, she did not adhere to their hard-line opposition to abortion.

Falwell was invited to give the benediction after Reagan’s renomination at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, but he and his comrades got relatively little in return for their support. Abortion remained legal.

It was in his sunny insistence that the economy had been transformed for the better that Reagan’s storytelling genius – and the realities it obscured – was most potent. For many Americans, from the most wealthy to ordinary, well-educated couples with good jobs in rising sectors such as tech and finance, life really did get better in the 1980s. However, as Max Boot notes, “the top 1 per cent of families saw their income grow by 75 per cent while the bottom 90 per cent saw their income grow by just 7 per cent”.

Taxes fell for the top 20 per cent but rose for the bottom 20 per cent, while welfare spending was cut. As old industries such as car-making and steel production increasingly fell prey to global competition and new technologies, the long hollowing out of the broader middle class took hold. The national debt – already close to $1tn in 1980 – almost tripled, and more US debt became foreign-owned, along with many of its companies. These absentee owners led corporate restructuring that impacted thousands of jobs.

At the same time, the removal of restrictions on local ‘savings and loans’ – the equivalent of British building societies – unleashed a torrent of banking failures that eventually cost the federal government $132bn. As early as July 1984, Reagan was noting in his diary the threatened collapse of “a giant Savings & Loan” back home in California.

And in the heartland, far from the cities and all too easily ignored, America’s over-extended small farmers were sinking into debt-fuelled crisis under the pressure of high interest rates. More and more family farms were being driven into foreclosure, a situation encapsulated in one of the movies Reagan enjoyed least in 1984.

The quietly heart-rending Country stars Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard as an Iowa couple trying to keep their family farm alive – only for them to be slowly broken by the federal government’s insistence that farming was not a way of life but a business just like any other. Watching it at Camp David, Reagan damned the movie as “blatant propaganda” – yet in the years to come, the farm crisis grew worse and worse.

Willing suspension of disbelief

All of this was storing up much trouble for the future. And yet, for the time being at least, Reagan’s optimistic message worked.

In 1984, with the backing of millions of working-class ex-Democrats, he achieved a spectacular landslide. Washington, DC aside, he won every state except Minnesota. And to the extent that his campaign was itself “blatant propaganda”, it would be unfair to suggest that he was trying to fool his fellow Americans – he was merely telling them what they wanted to hear.

Perhaps the old actor and his audience were engaged in something closer to what happens during a movie. The story he span – everything is okay – was one that, after years of turmoil, many Americans needed, at least for a while. Reagan’s audience seems to have been engaged in a willing suspension of disbelief, which – like a movie happy ending – had a stabilising, cheering effect that was real.

Eventually, however, the audience would have to leave the cinema. That moment came very soon after the Reagan project’s climactic, Hollywood-ending victory – the end of the Cold War.

In the cold light of the 1990s, the loss of its arch-enemy did not set the seal on American greatness; rather, it plunged the US into new agonies. The legacy of Reagan’s immense deficit spending had to be dealt with. In a disorientating new world, many Americans sought new enemies – and found them among their fellow countrymen.