Whither Reagan’s America?

Lots of the presidential election talk these days is about “Reagan’s America.” The GOP candidates all claim to be from there and they speak of it like it’s some kind of magical Camelot or a Lake Wobegon where all the men are natural-born citizens, all the women are against abortion and all the children are exactly average.
It’s not just the Republican presidential candidates who get Reagan’s contributions to our nation’s history mostly wrong; even textbooks, leftist liberals and tea party followers mistake fable for fact when it comes to our nation’s 40th president.
But right or wrong, what’s more telling is that so many people — Democrats, too — say they want a different America than the one they have today. If we can’t have Reagan’s America again, some of us want a Trump’s America, or a Hillary’s America, but no more Obama’s America and please, not another Bush’s America.
Maybe we’re all just “Lost in America.”
Before there was a Reagan’s America, there was a Reagan’s California. Here in Sonoma County we know a little bit about that because  the ex-actor came to Healdsburg in 1966 and made the historical announcement that he was running for governor. He got elected and served from 1967 to 1975. He then defeated Jimmy Carter for president in 1980 and led what became known as the Reagan Revolution.
Today, GOP candidates like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and others think Reagan’s America was a place where immigration was outlawed, Big Government was shrunk, abortions were still illegal and all taxes were cut to record lows.
The problem with this view of Reagan’s America is that it is 100 percent backwards. The facts are that Reagan gave amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, signed pro-abortion legislation, raised taxes to preserve Social Security, opposed his own Defense Department hawks and refused to put any U.S. “boots on the ground.” He ended the Cold War with the Soviet Union, not with carpet bombing or invasions but with diplomacy, compromise and trade talks with Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Reagan didn’t crush Big Government either. When he left office, the federal budget and bureacracy was the same size he inherited from Carter, even as he allowed our National Debt to soar.
We’re not sure what Ronald Reagan might say about a Trump presidency or where exactly he would fit in today’s Republican party. But we’re pretty sure he would be upset over all the angry, ugly and dark images that now engulf our nation’s presidential politics.
Reagan’s America was built on optimism, hope and plain talk. He promised a “new morning” for America and a rebuilt confidence in Congress, calling it that “shining city on the hill.” His vision for America was closer to Roosevelt’s New Deal or Johnson’s Great Society than most GOP leaders would like to admit.
We sit here in Sonoma County, far from the current loop of presidential debates, TV attack ads and the underground gurgling of all that “dark money” that steers most of the major candidates’ campaigns in both major political parties.
Out of the loop, we find ourselves mystifed and horrified at the shape of the next America to be.
Only a few U.S. presidents have ever led a true revolution and none was ever successful without a strong basis of optimism, entitlements, new opportunities and expanded rights for not just a few, but all Americans. These include the New Deal that ended the Great Depression and Reagan’s revolution that closed the chapters of Watergate and the  Vietnam War.
We can’t go back to Reagan’s America, because the one we’re told to imagine never happened. We admit we’re as confused as anyone about this current presidential election.
But we don’t think any of us want a new America based on anger, fear, fake history or manufactured gloom.
— Rollie Atkinson