Boot on Reagan

 Boot was born in the Soviet Union; his family immigrated to California when he was a young child. Boot is well-known for his advocacy of neoconservative foreign policy ideas—he backed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq enthusiastically—but the rise of Donald Trump has made him bemoan “the corrosion of conservatism” (the title of a 2018 book) and question the politics to which he had committed his life.

Reagan: His Life and Legend is the product of that internal debate. At its heart is the question of whether Reagan is responsible for the rise of Trumpism. Were there similarities between Reagan and Trump that Boot missed earlier? Did one pave the way for the other? Boot seems intent on showing that he is not presuming sympathy toward his former political hero, promising to offer a “fair-minded” account of Reagan, drawing on declassified documents and almost 100 interviews with Reagan associates to write a biography that is neither “a hagiography or a hit job.”

Given this research, though, it’s remarkable how closely Boot manages to repeat what has become the common wisdom on Reagan’s relation to MAGA and Trump. The greatest surprise, he suggests, is Reagan’s “pragmatism”: His “strongly held principles” were tempered by a “keen sense of realpolitik.” Boot reaffirms the general conclusion that Reagan was very different from Trump in both policy and style. The fortieth president was a “consummate gentleman who never indulged in name-calling or acerbic put-downs,” an instinctive democrat who would “never have dreamed” of instigating an insurrection to stay in office. Perhaps, he concedes, Reagan bent the truth to his own wishes in ways that mirror Trump’s pathological lies. But the differences matter more.

It is true that Trump and Reagan are very different. But their contrast cannot be explained primarily in terms of character, and the gap between the two men reflects the broader transformation of American conservatism and American society in the years since the 1980s. Reagan cannot be understood outside of the framework of Cold War conservatism. To an extent unusual in electoral politics, Reagan was a social movement leader, his ideas about the state, social movements, labor unions, and democracy itself shaped by his involvement in the right-wing mobilization that swelled in the aftermath of World War II. As midcentury conservatives confronted the challenge of labor unions and the New Deal state, they had to put forward a populist case for free markets in terms that presented them—not big government—as the way to provide prosperity for all. They labored to distance themselves from the nativist and antisemitic preoccupations of earlier generations in a play for respectability and to pursue a role in mainstream politics, even as they continued to cultivate this base of support when it suited them to do so.

One of the things that distinguishes Trump from Reagan is that, today, the right can be far more open in its antagonism toward democratic politics—and it no longer needs to insist that the market can offer wealth and abundance to the whole of society. While Trump may not have emerged out of a political movement as Reagan did, he has helped to call into being one focused on nationalism and a conspiratorial politics in ways quite different from the midcentury right. But this is not a temperamental difference between Trump and Reagan as individuals: Trump’s politics point to the larger transformation of American society, brought about by the changes unleashed by 1980s America.

-Kim Phillips Fein in The New Republic