Perhaps the most un-American act by a president in the history of the country was Ronald Reagan’s selling the American people the message that their government was their enemy.
That one act has led to the American people opposing good policies because they’re misled to think the government policy is harmful, to vote Republican because of a general sense that Republicans are on their side against the oppressive government, and a misguided opinion that the private sector does anything better, ‘more efficiently’.
Democrats have had limited success in elections largely because they have not countered the policy lie.
Democrats still run conventional campaigns. Of course issues are mentioned, but each election is about ‘the candidate’— their background, their story, their ability to give entertaining speeches.
Many voters aren’t even listening, because they’d voting based on the idea of voting for Reagan’s message of voting for ‘small government’— i.e., vote for the Republican.
This goes to the ‘bubble’ issue, why it seems Republican voters ‘can’t even be talked to’— because they’re locked into this myth and the things Democrats are running on don’t matter to them.
Democrats need to challenge the Reagan lie as a party. They need to show the Republican agenda is to simply benefit the wealthy interests, at the expense of the American people.
They need to show the American people the real effects of Republican policies — reduced prosperity for the American people other than the very rich.
They need to have policy messages — just as Republicans do with their think tanks, Heritage, Cato, AEI, Hoover and others.
If Democrat can’t win over the public to support ‘good government’ over ‘small government’, they’re going to struggle to win power.
So we don’t need all the focus on John Kerry’s war service, on Obama as the first black president, on Hillary as the first woman president — only some of the focus on that. Rather, we need the focus on the issues, and that all of those candidates happens to be on the right side of the issues — they all stand for ‘good government’ against Republican plutocracy.
It’s hard for someone at odds with the religion of the voters to win. Atheists poll very low in presidential elections. And Reagan’s small-government ideology is like a religion.
And Democrats have an uphill battle running against it. We need to change the voters’ views on that issue.
We were able to do this after the Great Republican Depression, ending a string of Republicans with FDR. The people understood Republicans at that point. Many no longer do.
And that’s a problem with Democrats not countering Reagan’s lie effectively.
So, the country has take a decades-long wrong turn away from the policies of democracy and Democrats good for the American people, toward neo-liberalism and worse.
The plutocrat interests have always existed — but under FDR, they had limited power.
They had the Supreme Court and blocked FDR that way for a while. They had enough influence to force FDR’s VP Wallace off the ticket to replace him with a more pro-business Truman. But they had a lot less power then. Since they learned to get power in the post-Nixon era — creating all those think tanks, getting the Supreme Court to rule ‘money is speech’— they’ve had dominant power in the country, and the return to record inequality is the proof.
Democrats needs to stop running ‘personality’ campaigns and wage war on the Reagan Republican myth that government is the enemy.
Until we do, we either will let Republicans win, or get ‘centrist’ Democrats who adopt some of the Republican policies sharing some of those views.
This defeat of the San Brownback Kansas experiment to test Reagan economic should be the loudest message from the Democratic Party nationally: that it proved Reagan was wrong.
It shouldn’t just be a loss for Brownback — but for the Reagan economic myth.
To be clear: I don’t mean selling specific policies, like ‘higher minimum wage’ or ‘protecting the climate’. Democrats do that.
I mean selling the policies directly attacking the Reagan ‘government is the enemy’ myth, as a party.