"[I]magine the Norquist and Shirley standard being applied to Reagan in the 1970s. If Jeb Bush’s comments unleashed heated attacks, even given his sterling anti-tax record, think about what Reagan’s support for unprecedented tax increases–including higher taxes on top rates, sales taxes, bank and corporate taxes, and the inheritance tax–would have elicited. The Gipper would have been accused of being a RINO, a pseudo-conservative, unprincipled, and a member of the loathsome Establishment. Fortunately for Reagan (and for America) the temptation to turn conservatism into a rigid ideology was not as strong then than it is now."
Let's face it.
Reagan was a Democrat in recovery who brought a substantial number of Democrats in recovery to the Republican Party, where they met fellow liberals with whom they could forge an alliance around the liberalism bequeathed to them by Wilson and FDR, without the communist fellow traveling. Conservatives got pushed to the side, or taken for a ride.
Reagan defended the welfare state but on a scaled back basis with emphasis on less reliance on government and lower income taxes. The New Deal was not scaled back, nor was The Great Society. Even the ramped up Cold War to defeat the Soviets was interventionist and therefore arguably anti-conservative in its basic impulse. The resulting glorification of the US military would horrify the founders who feared them as instruments of tyranny in the hands of an American Caesar.
And now here we are with an enlarged welfare state in OBAMACARE, and actually having a public kerfuffle about an administration which resisted abjuring the use of said military on American soil to snuff out people it and it alone decides are a threat. You know, like gun owners. Are we really supposed to be charmed by the likes of the Krauthammers of the world who insist what Obama has been doing is entirely consistent with the model of Abraham Lincoln who put fellow Americans Confederates to death based on a private interpretation of the constitution?
Nothing's changed, except for the worse. His truth keeps marching on.
