Ghost of Reagan hovers over US pandemic catastrophe

If you live long enough and pay attention, you can discern historical threads that haunt the present. The current catastrophic US response to pandemic carries me back 40 years to the 1980 presidential campaign. Former actor and governor Ronald Reagan campaigned on a conservative platform of tax cuts and reduced regulations for the well off, and an end to social activism that greatly expanded and empowered the middle class, and ended de jure racial segregation. It wasn’t pure coincidence Reagan kicked off his campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, site of the 1964 triple civil rights murders, advocating for states rights as a 1980 campaign theme in the South and beyond. Then Reagan announced the clarion call of his Conservative Revolution: “Government is not the solution…government is the problem” at his January, 1981 Inaugural Address. Reagan’s political genius packaged this regressive vision as “Let’s make America Great Again” which resonated with millions of working class Democrats to vote against their long term interests, powering Reagan to two overwhelming elections against FDR’s New Deal heirs.

It took forty years for Reagan’s governing meme ‘government is the problem’ to bring the US to the brink of economic collapse driven by an unprecedented health care crisis. As regressive as Reagan and his successors Bush I and II were, we were not prepared that a vastly damaged media celebrity would tweak Reagan’s motto, erasing the “Let’s”, to simply “Make America Great Again”. It worked again brilliantly with working class Democrats to install a regime hell bent to grant trillion dollar tax cuts, decimate regulations affecting health and safety, while cutting gaping holes in the social safety net. While every other industrialized country strategically supports the commons, allowing an orderly reopening of their decimated economies, America thrashes about in an utterly dysfunctional fashion almost certain to worsen the collective health while threatening an unprecedented second Great Depression.

The young and the uninformed need not ponder long how we got here. They simply need to study the history our culture loves to ignore.