Last night’s post about Reagan has elicited a good and spirited back-and-forth in the comments. I’ll let that debate be, with one clarification: When I wrote, “America would have been a lot better off if Ronald Reagan had never been president,” some readers seem to take that to be synonymous with “America was a lot better off in 1980 than in 1988 (when Reagan left office).” Of course things changed in 8 years, some of them for the better. Was Reagan responsible for all those changes? Would a different president have seen inflation decline (Paul Volcker did more to accomplish that than Reagan, and guess who appointed him?)? Or seen the Soviet Union begin to decline and fall? Could the positives of the Reagan era have been realized without the hefty negatives? Could a real leader rather than a Potemkin-village leader have done a better job? This is the direction in which my comment was aimed.
And no, I do not think that — outside of popular music (even Elvis Costello managed to produce one bad album!) — the ’80s were a dark age. But the moment at which Reagan won office felt to me, as a young man who’d come of political age in the ’70s, like a closing of horizons and a snuffing out of hope. (If I’d been writing in the morning instead of at midnight, the sentence would have read, “that moment felt like the start of a dark age.”) In retrospect, that feeling was plainly unwarranted. But the world looks different to you at 21 than at 44. If it doesn’t, something’s probably wrong!
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