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Ronald and Nancy Reagan for “The Reagans” Ronald Reagan Library
This article originally appeared here on Salon.com
Forty years after Ronald Reagan’s rise to the presidency, his legacy is still treated with children’s gloves. Centrist Democrats looking to find common ground with Republicans quote him as a saint, the modern example of a conservative with a bipartisan appeal, except, you know, a few mistakes that he did not remember. In 2003, CBS was set to air a fictionalized miniseries that romanticized Ronald and Nancy Reagan, but was hunted down by the GOP until the network transferred it to Showtime, the same network airing the new series. Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary “The Reagans,”
“The Reagans” doesn’t take enough interest in who Ron and Nancy were or tell us a lot of things we don’t already know about them within four hours. But at some point someone should.
This missed opportunity is just one on a list that anyone seeking to understand Reagan’s presidency will lament after spending time with it. “The Reagans” isn’t terrible, but just usable – not particularly flattering, but not quite enlightening either.
At least, the timing of the premiere is fortuitous, given that Tyrnauer focuses on the Reagans as vectors of the Republican mission to fully realize the Southern strategy within the Republican Party. There are also plenty of reasons to assume that many people are unaware that the very basic facts on the less flattering side of Reagan history turn out to be the eye-catching aphorisms of “Morning in America” or Shining City Mythology on. the hill.
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From the start, the director’s intention to make a connection between then and now is crystal clear when reporter Lesley Stahl recalls a sighting of Reagan that followed her over the years. “” If you’re not a good actor, you can’t be a good president, “she recalls, saying,” And it happened. If somebody’s running for president and they don’t want to do what an actor does – look good, read your lines carefully – you can’t direct. “
That involvement plays out well in 2020. Beyond that, much of the show’s early review of Reagan’s rise in politics is relatively superficial, relying heavily on old Hollywood blueprints to reinforce the mythological nature of the forays. the actor’s initials in politics, and the similarities between the Hollywood political machine and the one that crushes Washington.
Son Ron Reagan’s observations provide additional insight into the President and the First Lady as parents and individuals and serve as a reminder that despite their flaws, they are still human beings. However, what Reagan lends is limited. His father adopted destructive policies that hurt America’s poorest even though he grew up in a family that benefited from many of the same government safety nets he tore. It would be fascinating to find out what fueled such a lack of empathy, but I regret to inform you that right-wing tax reform activist and lickspittle Grover Norquist has no answer.
Watching “The Reagans” and hearing Tyrnauer’s relatively limited gallery of experts describe the direct parallels between Reagan and Donald Trump without explicitly mentioning the latter is a reminder that Trump represents the apotheosis of a destructive political ideology as opposed to an aberration. .
Reagan had moves a long time ago, so anyone who has spent the past five years drowning in Trumpland is easily recognized. “Make American Great Again” is directly cribbed from the Gipper; if you weren’t aware of this, the show reminds us that it is. As civil rights activist Maya Riley puts it, “Reagan’s genius was that he wrapped his racism in a facade of fatherly love. And that was something that black people in this country understood as a facade. And we understood it from his words and his actions. “
Several film experts use the term “genius” in reference to Reagan, but the documentary does not sufficiently justify his genius. Instead, “The Reagans” does away with the folkloristic polish surrounding man by pushing back rhetoric to state the true meaning behind noble sounding terms such as “small government,” which seems to preach support for reinvesting more. money in the pockets of ordinary Americans, but it is in fact a cover to cement the power and privilege of the upper class.
Presumably, if you’re reading this, you’ve survived the last 30 years of right-wing partisan hacking and so you already know it. You may also know that Reagan is the first president to deceive the working class into voting against their best interests, because doing otherwise would also benefit non-whites, which “The Reagans” also points out.
At least, it’s a useful reminder of the main difference between Reagan and the incumbent President of the United States: Trump dispensed with the racist subtext Reagan pushed in the ’80s and simply made white supremacy. its main text.
And while it’s not as effective now as it might have been, given that Reagan won the presidency in 1980 with 489 out of 538 votes and received just 14% of the African-American vote, 73 million of voters tell us that marketing racial animosity to white voters is always damn effective.
And while “The Reagans” leaves the viewer wanting in terms of properly examining the extent of Nancy’s influence on Ronald and how it may have manifested itself in terms of the policies he enacted, the series is on his best by examining the method by which Reagan changed racist messages into coded language that spoke of the racist angst of white Americans while allowing them to profess that they weren’t saying anything racist.
His early posts weren’t particularly well disguised, as shown in the documentary in an advertisement featuring Reagan describing the streets of the city of California as “jungle paths” and claiming that “the jungle is getting closer to this little one. patch that we have civilized ”in the wake of the Watts riots. We are still hearing some of it today. “Law and order”, anyone?
Yet some of Reagan’s greatest hits are aired on the breeze. “The Reagans” does a decent job of addressing how he sold unions and dismantled social programs in the name of the taxpayer economy and progress while demonizing poor black women as “aid queens social ”.
But I would trade the time spent galloping through the early days of Reagan’s film career for more information on his and Nancy’s abject ignorance of pleas for help from the American LGBTQIA + community as AIDS tore the country apart. under his administration. Indeed, many of the scandals that we have closely associated with Reagan are hastily mixed up by the fourth hour, along with the “Tear Down That Wall” soundtrack.
Eight years of Reagan produced a legacy we still grapple with. It’s a shame that four hours of “The Reagans” doesn’t help us better understand what his role in reshaping America at the time implies for our future.
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The first episode of “The Reagans” premieres Sunday, November 15 at 8 p.m. on Showtime.
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