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NYTimes
New York Times
30 Aug 2024
Jacob Heilbrunn


NextImg:Opinion | Conservatives Are Fighting Over Ronald Reagan’s Legacy. They Overlook What Made Him So Successful.

The small town of Dixon, Ill., where Ronald Reagan grew up, last week celebrated the premiere of a Hollywood film called “Reagan,” which is scheduled for theatrical release on Friday. A citywide parade began in the early evening at Mr. Reagan’s boyhood home and ended at The Dixon, a local theater, for the screening. There, the actor Dennis Quaid, who plays Mr. Reagan in the movie, declared, “He was my favorite president.”

Such reverential treatment of Mr. Reagan has been a constant in American political culture for several decades. The new film is based on a 2006 book called “The Crusader” that suggests a parallel between Mr. Reagan’s teenage experience as a lifeguard and his readiness as president to rescue America from the Communist threat. Several other fawning books about Mr. Reagan have been published this year, including “What Would Reagan Do?” by Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, and “The Search for Reagan” by the political consultant Craig Shirley. (A judicious biography, “Reagan,” by Max Boot, is scheduled for publication on Sept. 10.)

But all this fanfare can’t obscure the fact that Mr. Reagan’s reputation has come under fire in recent years from an unlikely quarter: conservatives.

“Boomer porn,” Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, scoffed when I told him about the event in Dixon. “Reagan may have been a conservative, but he wasn’t a nationalist. Reagan got the big issues of the future wrong — foreign policy, trade and immigration.”

The ascendancy of Donald Trump, whose economic populism and nationalist instincts are at odds with the free-enterprise principles and foreign-policy idealism of Reaganism, has been the main driver of Mr. Reagan’s reassessment. A Pew poll last year found that 41 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents named Mr. Reagan as the best president of the past 40 years, while 37 percent awarded that laurel to Mr. Trump.

The result is a veritable schism on the right over Mr. Reagan’s legacy, and more broadly, over whether the conservative past should shape its future. What’s perhaps most telling about this internal battle, however, is that the various factions — those who reject Reaganism, those who defend it and those who stress the commonalities between Reaganism and Trumpism — all tend to paint portraits of Mr. Reagan that omit the very attributes that made him such a broadly popular political figure: his pragmatism and nose for compromise.


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