After watching that documentary on the Reagans, which I recommend, I think it may have begun earlier. The specter of mass unemployment and poverty and homelessness in 1981-1982, which so haunted the Depression era, seemed hardly to make a dent in public conscience. It doesn't
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Replying to @lionel_trolling @EricLevitz
Very curious to hear your thoughts. I mean, I know I was prone to look for continuities, but even I was startled by how much of Trump was in Reagan.
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Replying to @CoreyRobin @lionel_trolling
2.5 episodes in and would say the same. Also struck by its portrayal of Reagan as a nigh-cipher/perma-character actor ready and willing to adapt his type (genial all-American) to whatever script his paymasters dictate, be they of the Hollywood, corporate or political variety
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(Which isn’t to say he didn’t eventually become a genuine ideologue, just that it’s striking to me the degree to which he was shaped into an exquisite tool by more powerful men around him. Knew all this from Perlstein but the doc somehow made his vacuity more eerie)
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the degree of vacuity was surprising to me, as was the sheer extent of his demagoguery. i said this on here, but the footage from the philadelphia, mississippi rally was genuinely shocking.
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Replying to @jbouie @EricLevitz and
and it says a lot about where the political press was in 1980 that it seemed to barely warrant a mention
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Yeah, real vicious stuff there and I believe in one other excerpted speech to a Southern audience though I forget the context. (The footage from his misbegotten trip to the Bronx also quite memorable)
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Replying to @EricLevitz @jbouie and
Reagan & Trump clearly belong to the same species but there are differences worth drawing out. I might be too sensitive on this, but Trump's anti-immigration stuff really looks past Reagan to the 1920s/1930s right.
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said this before, but there is a kind of flip between Reagan and Trump, where the former leveraged anti-blackness to bolster a pro-immigrant message, the latter, xenophobia to bolster an oddly inclusive message towards Black America (at least in his first campaign)
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There's something to that. My worry is that more disciplined post-Trump Republican demagogue would craft xenophobia narrow enough (say focusing on Muslim immigrants) that it'd be more of a clearcut winner -- Trump was still too broad for his own electoral success.
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