Quite apart from the smarminess of it all, the national Week Of Dribble for Reagan makes me mad because the guy is getting credit that should go elsewhere.
Reagan didn't invent the contemporary American political landscape; they just put his face on the outside of it. The real inventor, of course, was Dick Nixon, with his 1968 Southern Strategy.
The triumph of Nixon, of course, was to make the old Dixiecrat peckerwoods into Republican voters -- an achievement right up there, in terms of scope and historic significance, with anything Andrew Jackson could boast. The peckerwoods all live in the suburbs now and drive leased SUVs, but the mentality hasn't changed that much. They're still debtors -- more than ever, in fact -- and the great task is to make them mad at anybody BUT their creditors.
For some reason we don't want to give Nixon, that weird tortured genius, his due; we'd rather snivel over a papier-mache nonentity like Reagan. Perhaps
this is partly because we don't really want to look too closely at what the modern Republican hegemony is really all about. Nixon and his bilious rapport
with resentment and fear are the product; the robotically grinning Gipper, with his cereal-box twinkle, the packaging.
Poor old Dick was always filled with hate and fear for something he called the Eastern Establishment, which was, at least in its Nixonian lineaments, largely a product of Dick's own overheated California imagination. How piquant the irony that his achievement has been appropriated, not by some white-shoe scion of privilege, but by the most essentially Californian of constructs, a third-rate Hollywood actor.
Posted by gracchus at June 10, 2004 10:00 PM | TrackBack