Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 via a massive landslide. The reasons for this enormous margin and the reasons it favored the Republican nominee Reagan became clear after any investigation into the circumstances surrounding that election: The economy was performing horribly. A terrifying mixture of increasing unemployment and amplifying inflation was purging the wallets of everyday Americans. Renewed Cold War tensions emerged following the Vietnam War and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Iran had fallen to a far-right theocracy whose supporters, infuriated by then-President Jimmy Carter's choice to let the former-Iranian shah seek cancer treatment in the US, had been keeping dozens of Americans hostage in the US embassy located in Tehran. The times were chaotic, depressing, and stressful. And for many Americans, the poster boy of this chaos, depression, and stress was Jimmy Carter. So, when Carter became the Democratic nominee and Reagan became the Republican nominee, the choice was obvious to the American people: Ronald Reagan. But sadly, Reagan was far worse than Carter in the end.

Back in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal, a campaign of progressive economic reforms aimed at ending the Great Depression and preventing repeats of it. The New Deal, I believe, was very successful. Although it didn't single-handedly resolve the Great Depression (entry into WW2 helped as well), it ensured some level of economic recovery and, in the long term, provided decades of government protection for the rights and freedoms of the working class. However, since the New Deal had become the new economic order when the economy began to sputter out, the blame was pinned on the New Deal. As a result, Reagan dismantled the New Deal during his first few years in office. He repealed many crucial New Deal economic and financial regulations and slashed taxes. While this did help the economy in the short term (Carter's policies also helped end stagflation), it also hurt the working class in the long term.

Many people are so upset with Reagan for abolishing the New Deal that they consider him a bottom 5 president. I do not belong to this clique. I dislike Reagan's choice to scrap the New Deal, but I fail to view it as singularly his fault. As I just explained, the New Deal was blamed for the stagflation crisis because the New Deal was the centerfold of the American economy. In reality, stagflation was the result of the Oil Shock (when OPEC banned the sale of oil to the West in protest of Western support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War) and Soviet purchases of American wheat. But what was the reality didn't matter. What the perception was mattered and the perception was that the New Deal caused stagflation. Gerald Ford also deregulated the oil industry and cut taxes and was the first economically-conservative president since the Roaring 20s. It was clear that the next time a popular Republican moved into the White House, the Grim Reaper would come for the New Deal. And that popular Republican happened to be Reagan. Reagan's choice to dissolve the New Deal was abysmal and deserves the ire it gets, but should not be viewed as particularly Reagan's fault.

Economic incompetence was not Reagan's sole issue, though, even if it was one of his foremost issues. In fact, certain economic policies of the Reagan Administration help his score. Reagan dismantled the New Deal, but never intended to. In fact, he looked up to FDR and felt nostalgia for the early days of the New Deal. It was Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society campaign that he truly held disdain for. Because of this, while Reagan did go after New Deal programs, he mainly targeted Great Society programs. As a result, he was still willing to increase funding to several social programs, something that keeps him from being lower than he already is. Reagan also appointed the first female member of the Supreme Court: Sandra Day O'Connor. Reagan's biggest achievement, I believe, is financially compensating victims of the Japanese internment policies that existed during WW2. But aside from that, little else positive can be said about Reagan's presidency.

On October 25, 1983, Reagan launched an invasion of Grenada in order to topple its Marxist-Leninist government. He excused the attack by saying that the socialist leaders in control of Grenada had been endangering Americans living in Grenada, many of whom were medical students. This invasion was unnecessary and imperialistic, as Grenada, for as despotic and cruel as its government was, had no realistic way of threatening the US or even Americans within Grenadan territory. The invasion also could have been a total failure. The American soldiers participating in the invasion had to use tourist maps to find important Grenada military and political bases. The Marxist-Leninist government was disbanded after just 4 days - on October 29, 1983 - but only because of how big the US military was.

Similarly, in 1986, Reagan bombed Libya in order to curb the influence of Marxist-Leninist dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Ironically, the bombings did the exact opposite of what Reagan intended. Libyans responded negatively to the attacks and the attacks actually hardened Gaddafi's control. Gaddafi became a martyr, able to declare himself and all of Libya victims of imperialism. He could now prove his accusations of Western warmongering and, from there, could declare himself Libya's sole source of salvation. Reagan also placed sanctions on Libya, which did nothing but worsen life for the average Libyan. Sanctions only work against democracies because the unpopularity of the ruling powers that stem from said sanctions serves as pressure on officials desperate for reelection. But there were no elections in Libya. Gaddafi was a lifelong dictator who continued to abuse his people until 2011.

Reagan often gets credit for reducing Cold War tensions by meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union. This argument is flawed for several reasons. First of all, while Reagan was willing to negotiate with Gorbachev and that was a good element of his administration, Reagan also bulked up the military, which ran the risk of reversing the very same progress that he and Gorbachev had just produced. Reagan even talked about modeling the military after things he saw in Star Wars and since he expanded the military at the same time that he cut taxes, he caused the national debt to skyrocket. George W. Bush and Donald Trump made the same mistake. Reagan also was only able to improve these Soviet-American relations because of Gorbachev's liberalism. Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko (all men who led the Soviet Union during Reagan's first term, each of whom died in quick succession) were about as aggressive and isolationist as Lenin or Stalin. Reagan simply got lucky with Gorbachev.

Perhaps Reagan's biggest failure was the Iran-Contra Scandal. The Contras were a terrorist organization in Nicaragua that brutally murdered their fellow citizens and destroyed infrastructure all in the name of anti-communism. Reagan was willing to fund them, which was bad enough. But this fact becomes even worse when Reagan continued to fund the Contras even after their participation in the sale of illicit drugs was exposed. Congress, however, was less willing to support the Contras once it became apparent that they sold cocaine, heroin, and similar substances. So, they passed the Boland Amendment, prohibiting Reagan from aiding the Contras.

In November of 1986, a Lebanese newspaper revealed that Reagan had started selling weapons to Iran and then had secretly been giving the profits to the Contras. In exchange for selling the weapons to Tehran, Iranian authorities were asked to have Hezbollah release their American hostages. While Hezbollah did relent on a few occasions, liberating 3 Americans, they went on to capture even more hostages. Reagan was selling weapons to a belligerent theocracy responsible for abridging women's rights and suppressing religious freedom all so he could support a terrorist organization that was complacent in the black market. While many Reagan Administration officials were arrested for their involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal, Reagan himself got away with it.

Although memories of the Reagan Administration conjure up in the minds of Americans alive for the 1980s images of recovery, optimism, and restoration, the reality is far from any of those things. Reagan's economic policies left the working class to a gang of ravenous wolves cloaked in laissez-faire capitalism and opulent wealth, while at the same time, he also expanded the national debt more than almost any other modern president. He supported unnecessary, bloated militarism and strengthened dictatorships in Iran and Libya, while at the same time murdering people in the Caribbean and helping those murdering people in Central America all so he could spite the Soviet Union.