The rise of the American Right is a major area of research among historians. One of the better studies is Suburban Warriors by Lisa McGirr which uses Orange County California as a case study.

McGirr argued that the American Right was created

within the context of the Cold War; postwar demographic transformation; the dynamics of economic, cultural, and political change; and their cumulative impact on the values and beliefs of ordinary people... (p. 12)

She further notes that modern conservative movement in the US started as a fiscal and social cause but very quickly became tied into a different politico-religious cause through the work of groups like the John Birch Society and people like Billy Graham.

Reagan gets so much credit because he succeeded where other conservative leaders failed. Barry Goldwater was the arch-Conservative who was defeated by Johnson for the Presidency. If he had won (in what would have been among the greatest electoral upsets in American history) he, most likely, would have the position Reagan occupies among your conservative friends. Reagan's election to Governor of California two years after Goldwater's crushing defeat kept the movement alive under the new standard bearer.

None of that addresses the particular fiscal/political beliefs of so-called Reagan Republicans, but it does give a little idea about why Reagan and not someone else.

Check out McGirr, its a pretty easy and very interesting read. She approaches the movement like an anthropologist, which is an interesting way to go about it.

Hello everyone,

Just a reminder that since the Reagan Presidency is on the far side of the 20-year rule, this question is acceptable, but we do expect responses and any ensuing discussion to be kept to established historiography of the Reagan era, and not be an excuse to simply share your personal opinion of his legacy.

Thank you!

In the early 20th century the Republicans and Democrats were more ideologically diverse than they are now. There were conservative Democrats such as Strom Thurmond and liberal Republicans such as Nelson Rockefeller.

A lot of the story of the politics of the US in the era after WW2 has to do with the sorting of conservatives into the Republican party and liberals into the Democratic party. Within the Republican party this struggle for control was represented by the conservative Barry Goldwater wing of the party against the liberal Nelson Rockefeller wing of the party.

There was a battle over the control of the Republican party at the 1964 Republican convention between the Goldwater and Rockefeller wings of the party. Goldwater won, and got the nomination. He was pasted in the general election in the aftermath of Kennedy's assassination.

Ronald Reagan campaigned for Goldwater in 1964 and gave a televised speech that is often incorrectly attributed as the keynote address at the 1964 convention. The youtube link I gave for the speech has it listed as the keynote address despite this not being the case. The success of this speech, retroactively titled "A time for choosing," helped him to run successfully for Governor of California in 1966, defeating Pat Brown, the father of Jerry Brown, the current Governor of California.

Reagan in fact served between two Brown Governorships. He defeated Pat Brown in 1966, and when he decided not to run for a third term in 1974, he was succeeded by Pat's son Jerry Brown, the same person who is currently the Governor.

Reagan attempted to get the 1976 presidential nomination as the conservative alternative to Jerry Ford. His success in getting the nomination in 1980 represented the triumph of the conservative wing of the Republican party. His overwhelming victories in both the 1980 and 1984 general elections cemented the Republican party not only as the conservative version of the party, but as a winning conservative party.

All of this is my long winded way of saying that Ronald Reagan is the father of the modern Republican party. Although Reagan himself started as a follower of Barry Goldwater, who is properly seen as the intellectual father of modern conservativism, Goldwater never became President and thus has taken on a sort of John the Baptist role with regard to Reagan.

In addition to revering Reagan as the founder of the modern version of their political party, conservatives generally point to the following achievements or attributes:

1. They believe he won the cold war. This is an enormous issue for history which I will not address the inherent truth of. This belief is very strong and very important to them.

2. They wildly approve of the 1981 tax law This law is the model of all subsequent Republican tax efforts. It cut tax rates across the board, dramatically reduced the top marginal rate, reduced inheritance taxes, and introduced special rules for business taxes.

3. They like his social conservatism.

4. They like his personal style.

It's hard to discuss current opinions without violating the 20-year rule, but I'll give it a shot.

First of all, President Reagan happened to be in charge when the Soviet Union collapsed, which makes a handy just-so story for higher defense spending, "straight talk" in dealing with geopolitical rivals, etc. Lebanon and Iran-Contra surely complicate that narrative, but it's still a powerful one.

As for the cost of Reagan's anti-drug policies, here's an NYT article from 1987, which reports that Congress approved $3.96 billion in new spending for anti-drug programs the prior year, and Reagan wanted that number cut to $3.03 billion (about $6.4 billion in 2015 dollars). To avoid breaking the 20-year rule, you'll have to do your own cost comparisons.

For similar reasons, we can't really do much with the idea that Reaganomics is a "failed economic theory", since we can only talk about the US economy up to 1995. Having said that, conservative publications like the National Review draw a contrast between Carter-era "malaise" and the boom 90's, and cite Reaganonomics as the explanation. (That source is 11 years old, but I posted it as a popular conservative interpretation of the history. If that's inappropriate I'll delete it.)

Suffice it to say, macroeconomics is sufficiently complicated and causality is muddy enough that the impact of Reagan's policies are still a matter of debate among economic historians. You might get additional insight from /r/economics.

There are a few reasons, but ultimately policy aside Reagan was a very skilled politician. First and foremost, Reagan essentially built the Republican Party as it is known today, he saw there were a lot of different groups in the country feeling disenfranchised (i.e. the religious, those in the South who were unhappy with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, militarists, etc...) and managed to bring them under one roof. He did this so successful that Reagan managed to win every single state in the 1984 election except for Minnesota and DC, one of the biggest landslides in American history (there has not been an election that has been that successful since).

The other is really taxes. Prior to Reagan, taxes overall, especially on the wealthy were extremely high (whether this was a good or a bad thing is up for debate). The tax rate on the highest bracket before Reagan's first reform was 70%. This is because taxes were increased after World War II to pay off war debt but never decreased thereafter (I think, I could be wrong). Reagan managed to decrease taxes drastically through two bills (the Economic Recover Tax of 1981 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986) which made the tax code resemble what it is today much moreso. Whether or not you think it was a good decision, this clearly was a large accomplishment, and required a lot of diplomacy in Congress to get by.

Now of course there are a lot of issues that Reagan gets criticism for (War on Drugs, the tremendous rise in military spending, decreases in welfare spending, increases in the prison population, etc...); however, many of these are things that some conservatives would not necessarily view as a bad thing, so when you think about it, it makes sense that conservatives are enthusiastic about him.

I don't think people give enough credit to Anita Bryant, and this is not a joke. Bryant thrust religion and politics on a national stage like never before. She campaigned to end the anti-discrimination clause in Miami, Florida in 1977 that protected gay people. She was wildly successful. Her campaign launched similar efforts across the U.S. One of those was in California, called Proposition 6, when Ronald Reagan was governor. It failed there actually because Reagan opposed it.

Where Bryant worked to overturn an already-existing anti-discrimination law in Miami, a state senator in California was trying to get a referendum passed that said openly gay public school employees could get fired, but more importantly would make supporting any form of homosexuality -- including voting against this referendum -- just cause for termination of employment. Reagan thought it way too broadly applied and spoke against it, turning popular opinion against it almost overnight.

But the campaigns in other cities attracted people and made them national celebrities. Jerry Falwell got a national platform. He went on to start the Moral Majority, a coalition of conservative religious representatives aligning itself very strongly with the Republican Party. Falwell rather ingratiated himself with Reagan in 1980. Until the Moral Majority's influence on the Republican party, religion was mostly kept out of the political sphere.

Fun fact! Anita Bryant explained why she got involved in the Miami campaign: she was driving her 9-year-old daughter somewhere and the little girl asked her about the anti-discrimination clause and Bryant claimed she thought explaining gay sex to her daughter was beyond the moral pale. "And a child shall lead them" Bryant wrote. When Falwell explained how he started the Moral Majority, he said he got the idea from his innocent son's question... about abortion as I recall. The Moral Majority focused in equal measures on legislation against homosexuality, abortion, and pornography.

Source: I wrote this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_Our_Children in 2009. Think what you will with those citation needed tags... prats. (Proof: http://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-articleinfo/index.php?article=Save_Our_Children&lang=en&wiki=wikipedia )

And this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Milk (Proof: http://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-articleinfo/index.php?article=Harvey_Milk&lang=en&wiki=wikipedia )

Edit: what the anti-discrimination law was for

This is all very interesting (not sarcastic), but can someone delve a bit more into what Reagan's two terms specifically did to embed him into the Republican consciousness? Was it that trickle-down economics drew party lines in terms of rich/not as rich and that, as politics became more reliant on diversifying media, these wealthy Reagan Republicans perpetuated the image?

It's interesting to see how many have attempted to frame Reagan as only being lauded by the right. He passed a comprehensive tax and economic reform bill that was directly responsible for a decade of economic growth and reformed a tax system that was onerous, burdensome, and unfair to rich and poor alike. He was far more than simply a foreign policy president.