First Debate: Establishment Reaganism vs. Insurgent Trumpism
Why Republicans Still Admire Ronald Reagan
It’s not hard to understand why so many Republicans admire Ronald Reagan. “The Great Communicator” sparked a conservative revival that fractured the remnants of the left-wing New Deal coalition. As president, he helped end the Soviet Union, winning the Cold War.
Forty-three years after the Reagan Revolution, and eight years after former President Donald J. Trump changed the game again, none of the Republicans who convened for the first presidential primary debate on Aug. 23 repudiated President Reagan. Even President Trump cited a move by President Reagan as precedent for his decision to skip the debate.
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Neither Fox News nor the Republican National Committee, cohosts of the media-heavy event, seem to have lost any love for the icon of 1980s America.
Moderator Brett Baier’s final question to the candidates referenced President Reagan’s frequent declaration that the United States is a “shining city on a hill”–an image from the Book of Matthew, first used to evoke American exceptionalism during Puritan times.
The use of a quotation from President Reagan rather than, say, President Trump could signal the GOP’s hopes of achieving a little distance from their last and now embattled standard-bearer.
‘Morning in America’ or ‘American Carnage’?
In one memorable exchange, Mr. Ramaswamy referenced President Reagan’s “Morning in America” 1984 reelection ad in order to criticize Vice President Pence. The former vice president had challenged his opponent’s frequent “national identity crisis” rhetoric, arguing that Americans are “not looking for a new national identity.”
“The American people are the most faith-filled, freedom-loving, idealistic, hard-working people the world has ever known. We just need government as good as our people,” Vice President Pence said.
“It is not ‘Morning in America.’ We live in a dark moment, and we have to confront the fact that we’re in an internal, sort of cold cultural civil war,” Mr. Ramaswamy retorted.
That back-and-forth reflected a deeper conflict between residual Reaganism and Trumpism; Mr. Ramaswamy and, to a lesser extent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis served as proxies for the latter in Milwaukee, with Mr. DeSantis also not shying away from dark rhetoric.
“‘Morning in America’ conjures optimism and a 525 electoral college vote consensus. Conversely, Trump’s ‘American carnage’ makes them wince because it demands a reckoning with American decline and confirms that we are slogging through a divisive and profoundly dark time,” Mr. Wold told The Epoch Times, referring to the much-discussed “American carnage” line in Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration speech.
Mr. Ingrassia said that, aside from Mr. Ramaswamy, “the other candidates appeared pigheadedly stuck in the 1980s, particularly Mike Pence, who seems congenitally incapable of coming to terms with the present crisis.”
“Mike Pence saying that we’re coming upon another Reagan-esque era is just totally wrong,” said Angela McArdle, chair of the Libertarian National Committee, in an interview with The Epoch Times.
“I would love to see a return to the optimism and excitement of the ’80s and economic prosperity. I don’t think we’re there,” she said.
Foreign Policy a Big Differentiator
While Mr. Ramaswamy’s Trump-like rhetoric set him apart from some others at the debate, it was on foreign policy that his departure from Reaganism, if not all of President Reagan’s actual policies, became most apparent.
Responding to Mr. Ramaswamy’s opposition to continued support for Ukraine, a view in line with President Trump’s stance, Mr. Pence declared that “the Reagan Doctrine made it clear—we said, if you’re willing to fight the communists on your soil, we’ll give you the means to fight them.”
“Vice President Pence, I have a newsflash: the USSR does not exist anymore,” Mr. Ramaswamy shot back.
Mr. Ramaswamy also sparred with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley regarding America’s place in the world.
“You have no foreign policy experience,” said Ms. Haley, who served as United Nations ambassador under President Trump.
She said Mr. Ramaswamy “wants to hand Ukraine to Russia,” “wants to let China eat Taiwan,” and “wants to go and stop funding Israel.”
“It’s not that Israel needs America, America needs Israel,” she said.
Mr. Ramaswamy said he’d work with Israel to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
“You know what I love about Israel? I love their border policies. I love their tough-on-crime policies. I love that they have a national identity and an Iron Dome to protect their homeland,” he told the former Trump administration official.
Libertarian Ms. McArdle said Israel “is a country that seems to be doing just fine.”
“I don’t know why they need foreign aid,” she added.
She also questioned why the United States might have a stake in the current Ukraine conflict. Advocates of continued intervention say it threatens European allies and implicates other key American interests.
“To the extent that we do have any interest over there, it’s probably something along the lines of covering up some embarrassing gaffes that happened there over the last 10 years,” Ms. McArdle added, noting the Bidens’ Burisma connections, alleged money laundering, and an alleged biological weapons programs run by the United States.
“The Maidan Revolution and regime change—I think we’re going to find the United States’ fingerprints all over a lot of it,” she added.
She contrasted Mr. Ramaswamy with the more hawkish Vice President Pence and Ms. Haley: “These guys seem like they’re running for global dictator, not President of the United States.”
“Vivek stood out most of all on foreign policy: a zero-tolerance stance on further aiding the Ukraine, which is but the latest installment in the Globalist American Empire’s ‘perpetual wars for perpetual peace’ credo that it has been marching along to ever since the advent of the national security state and creation of the modern intelligence agencies in the late 1940s,” Mr. Ingrassia said.
Mr. Ingrassia claimed that Vice President Pence imagines “the world can be bi-partitioned between a United States that stands for good and a communist Russia that embodies evil.”
“The fact that Pence—and several others on the stage, like Nikki Haley—retains this infantilized worldview is extraordinarily dangerous, and it is the reason why, in large part, the Washington establishment has driven this country closer to World War III—or, at the very least, nuclear warfare—than any time since the start of the Cold War,” he added.
In contrast to Vice President Pence and his other rivals, Mr. Ramaswamy has sought to link himself with a GOP president from California that Republicans seem less eager to embrace, particularly now—Richard Nixon.
He outlined his foreign policy vision during a recent speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. He said President Nixon’s diplomacy with China to break up its relationship with the USSR is a model for his own proposed outreach to Russia to sever its alliance with China.
President Nixon resigned with the threat of criminal prosecution hanging over his head. When his former vice president, Gerald Ford, ascended to the Oval Office, he granted President Nixon “a full, free, and absolute pardon” for any offenses he may have committed as president. President Nixon was neither impeached nor found guilty of any crimes.
In Milwaukee, Mr. Ramaswamy called upon his competitors to ”make a commitment that on day one, you would pardon Donald Trump.”
“That’s the difference between you and me. I’ve actually given pardons,” Vice President Pence responded, saying that “it usually follows a finding of guilt and contrition by the individual that’s been convicted.”
“If I’m president of the United States, we’ll give fair consideration to any pardon request,” President Trump’s former vice president continued before meandering back down to less challenging terrain–another Reagan reference.
“I put my left hand on Ronald Reagan’s Bible, I raised my right hand, and I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he said.
‘Zombie Reaganism’ in Milwaukee
The spectacle of Republicans, even after President Trump, “wabbling back” to the winning formulas of decades past even has a name: “zombie Reaganism.”
While conservative writers such as Rod Dreher have frequently invoked the term in recent years, it may have first gained popularity through a satirical video from The Onion in 2009, “Zombie Reagan Raised from Grave to Lead GOP.”
“A regurgitation of Reaganism is no better than any number of the 80s cover bands that frequent dive bars: it satisfies a certain nostalgic yearning, but there’s something static about the sound and pathetically artificial about the presentation,” Mr. Wold said.
“Today’s candidates need to offer policies for today’s challenges. Part of doing that is accepting the mistakes of the Reagan Revolution in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.,” he added.
Among President Reagan’s “mistakes,” he cited the amnesty bill for several million immigrants he signed in 1986. He also characterized President Reagan’s choice of Sandra Day O’Connor as Supreme Court Justice—the first female to wear the robe—as reflective of his “emphasis on identity politics” in crucial appointments.
“2016 should have been the death knell for the Reagan school, which enjoyed a nearly four-decade reign over the conservative movement. However, as we have seen in last night’s debate, this is an ideology that won’t go down easily,” Mr. Ingrassia said.
While many on the right, particularly in its younger ranks, have come to oppose “zombie Reaganism,” the idea has no shortage of adherents on the left.
Unsurprisingly, their characterizations of President Reagan are uncharitable.
In 2009, for example, education professor Henry R. Giroux wrote that the “zombie doctrine
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