To celebrate Reagan’s birthday, I shall speak ill of the dead

Because despite all the media gush, he was a dreadful president.
Admittedly, he did a few amazing things, but for the most part, I think we’re worse off as a country because Reagan was in the White House.
First, the good stuff:
•Reagan pushed through a massive simplification of the tax code in the middle of his run. True, it’s been recomplicated since, but he deserves credit for it nonetheless.
•Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War. Much as I disagree with most of his foreign policy (see further on), no question that was a landmark accomplishment. Doubly more impressive since a)he came from the kind of religious background that saw Russia as bringing on the end times with an attack on Israel (as detailed in the excellent study of American apocalyptic faith, When Time Shall Be No More). b)his own party derided him as an appeaser for not realizing Gorbachev’s liberalization campaign was just a dirty Commie trick.
•And it should be remembered that Reagan, in keeping with the times, treated terrorism as a crime that our judicial system could handle, signed a treaty banning torture. Coupled with his willingness to negotiate with the USSR (and possibly Iran—the book Confronting Iran makes an argument that in the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan really was trying to negotiate with Iranian moderates), I don’t think there’s a chance in hell Reagan would be elected today, no matter how the Republicans claim to revere him.
(I’m sure they’d love to have a candidate as popular as Reagan was, but it’s worth remembering that his popularity late in his term was lower, IIRC, than Clinton’s post-Monica. Reagan was a hell of a politician, but he wasn’t as Teflon as he’s portrayed).
Now, the bad stuff:
•Reagan raised taxes on the poor and cut them on the rich; his Social Security tax hikes actually left people on the bottom of the income ladder (which at the time, included me) worse off. Of course, at the time that was touted as a way to keep Social Security solvent; in fairness to Reagan, he had no way of knowing that Republicans would then wipe out the government surplus, then start demanding Social Security benefits be cut (coupled with tax cuts for the rich, this amounts to taking money from the working poor and giving it to millionaires).
•Reagan would support the vilest governments on Earth so long as they weren’t Communist. Saddam Hussein. Manuel Noriega. Apartheid South Africa. El Salvador, which was butchering nuns and priests for helping the poor at the same time Reagan informed Congress how great the human rights situation was. Nicaragua. The Philippines (Ferdinand Marcos was hardly the worst of the worst, but it’s shameful that we were supporting a man whose entire country wanted him gone). Guatemala.
•Reagan foisted supply-side economics, the bullshit belief that cutting taxes on the rich would benefit everyone, upon the country. The theory is nonsense—remember, W.’s rationale for cutting taxes on the rich was that it would cut the government surplus, not that it would bring in more money—but it seems to have been accepted in Washington as economic law, despite Reagan leaving what was, at the time, a record deficit.
•Reagan saddled us with the multibillion dollar waste of a Star Wars anti-missile program, thereby contributing to that record deficit.
•Reagan had the most corrupt administration in history, based on the number of cases filed against them. If you want an inside look, When the Pentagon Was For Sale gave a detailed account of the millions of dollars of fraud stemming from the Reagan defense department. I don’t believe it came anywhere near close to some of the accounts I’ve read of fraud in Iraq—as usual, W. manages to make Reagan look good.
•Reagan got a free pass on lies—like having witnessed the liberation of the death camps during WW II—that would have generated outraged mockery from the press if Clinton or Obama had said them (admittedly, this is more the fault of the press corps than the man himself).
•Like so many Republicans, he played what’s known as the Southern Strategy. His first appearance as the Republican nominee was Philadelphia, Miss., the town where three civil-rights workers were murdered back in the sixties. The decision was reportedly made after he was informed such a symbolic appearance would win the hearts of segregationists throughout the South. And then there were his endless anecdotes about welfare queens driving Cadillacs …
•With the government receiving multiple requests for AIDS research, Reagan’s administration kept telling Congress that the funding was perfectly adequate, there were no outstanding projects, so nobody needed more money.
•Reagan directed the CIA to lie to Congress about the existence of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program; he was concerned that if Congress cut off aid for Pakistan, it would kill support for the Muslim rebels fighting the USSR in Afghanistan.
And then there’s Reagan’s rhetoric, which probably did as much damage as all the above. Not that it’s objectionable in the same way—the president has the absolute right to use the bully pulpit however he chooses—but his antigovernment rhetoric reshaped the political landscape for the worse.
“The power to tax is the power to destroy” and “Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.” are the quotes he’s best known for in this line. And because of his image as the ultimately popular, beloved president, nobody in Washington has really wanted to challenge them since.
As the blogger Digby has pointed out several times, there’s almost nobody in Washington willing to make the case that sometimes the power to tax, or even to raise taxes, is necessary to improve things, or even to sustain what we have. Or to argue that sometimes government is the solution (heck, even Republicans assume government is a great solution when it involves the military, the police or prisons, all of which are parts of government).
As a result, anyone trying to accomplish anything—health care solutions, regulation, environmental improvement—is working in an environment where saying “government can do good things with this” seems close to an oxymoron.
As someone who believes government does have a role to play other than cutting taxes and using deregulation to unleash the alleged magic power of the free market, I don’t think this is a good thing at all.
And I hope the Repubs never find another Reagan to run for president. I don’t think we’d survive it.