The Legacy Of The 1980s

     My formative years were dominated by the 1980s, the smiling gentle image of Ronald Reagan, the warm waves he recieved from cheering throngs of supporters, a Middle America of hard working plumbers and doctors and steel mill workers. The omnipresence of the red, white and blue against the existential foreign threat of Communism. In my childhood, that is the America I thought existed, that still existed, of course I was born near the turn of the millenium with no experience of the 80s, I had devoured the Fox News Propaganda, as well as that from the endless swarm of GOP Presidential candidates who would quote Reagan for every policy question. I remember in College I had attended a meet and greet for a Republican running for Governor and someone had asked him "what relevance is Reagan to someone who wasn't even alive during his Presidency?" the question seemed to have stumped him as he largely ignored it and went on some long-winded diatribe about "freeing industry from the shackles of government". Reagan had cast a wide shadow on the Republican Party a shadow that had obscured the underlying realities and political degeneracy that had happened since the 1980s. 

    There have been many theories on the rise of Trump, but there is one here today that I wish to posit. In 2012 the mind of the average Republican was shattered completely by the humiliating defeat of Mitt Romney. Why 2012? 2012 was when the 1980s went to die, it was when the Republicans suffered a horrid kind of cognitive dissonance as the mantra they had repeated to themselves had been disproven in front of them. What was this mantra, this 1980s equation? It was based on the two landslide victories of Reagan in 1980 and 1984, that fundamentally there was a 50/50 split in the way the country voted, on the one hand Conservative Catholics and Evangelicals, the Middle Class and so on and opposing them were Immigrants, Young People (Pinkos), the Blacks and one more group, the mythical Reagan Democrats. These blue-collar workers who would comprise about 10 percent of the electorate were enamored by Reagan and delivered unto him the mighty states of Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania, these were critical states in the Electoral College and so these fickle Democrats were the coveted prize in every election. 

    In 1988, H.W Bush had managed to not screw up enough to be validly presented as Reagan's third term and while he won with less of a landslide against Dukakis than one would have liked he wasn't Reagan after all. In 1992 and 1996, something strange had happened with the emergence of Ross Perot, the enigmatic Independent, he screwed these elections up so bad that the 1980s equation didn't apply. In 2000 and 2004 the Democrats had manged to hang on to the Reagan Democrats, but since without them the Republicans were still about 50 percent of the electorate they managed to get victories. In 2008 there was a huge financial crisis going on that was largely blamed on Bush, and Obama as the first credible Black candidate had an unstoppable aura about him so 2008 didn't count either in the minds of Republicans. 

    In 2012 though they had brought out the most inoffensive safe moderate candidate since Carter, Romney had done everything correctly, he had managed to hold together the Conservative and Moderate wings of the party in common hatred of Obama while also picking up those Reagan Democrats. Yet Romney was delivered an unexpected battery taking the entirety of the Republican Party by shock. In the minds of the Republicans this was unbelievable, they were the silent majority after all, the Conservative unenthusiasm for Romney was tempered by the so-called conventional belief that the more moderate primary candidate would do better in the general election. Republicans had a playbook that would have given them a landslide in 1980, the problem is that they didn't realize that it was 2012. 

    And so Trump is born from the ashes of a whole movement being shown that they were not the majority they believed themselves to be the entire time. And they did the one of two things one can do when in the cognitive dissonance, they chose to double down on their existing strategy. Trump managed to eek out a victory by the slimmest of margins by running up the scores amongst voters that had already leaned Republican. By 2016 the Reagan Democrat had been almost entirely absorbed into the GOP and so by the grace of the Electors, Donald I reigned supreme - for a time. 

    The 2016 election was a fluke. The Republican strategy might have been viable anytime before then but surely not after 2016. And this shows with the popular vote, Republicans have not won more votes than Democrats since 2004. Republicans must engineer a new strategy as suggested by Josh Hawley that targets the Working Class and work towards ending Citizens United which will only give Democrats bigger and bigger war chests through which to pursue their goals, as the Democrats have become the party of big business. A new alliance that we saw glimpses of in 2020 where more and more Hispanics voted for the Republicans, just as 1964 sowed the seeds of 1980 must 2020 sow the seeds of an eventual coalition that will reclaim power from the elite to the people.