I've copy and pasted this comment from a similar previous question, which asked why Reagan is such a controversial figure.

Reagan is one of the "great" presidents from which you can really define an era around. I'm not saying his policies were good, but I am saying that he was highly consequential. Sean Wilentz, a political historian, argues that Reagan deserves to be listed among Jefferson, Jackson, and the Roosevelts as one of the most influential presidents in history. This is particularly notable because of Wilentz's self-professed liberalism.

To a large degree, Reagan is so mythologized by both conservatives and liberals because he embodied the transition into a new era of politics for the United States, an era in which liberalism was dying and a more hard-line form of conservatism was rising. If the 1940s-1960s were the heyday of American liberalism, the 1980s-2000s were the heyday of American conservatism. Even Bill Clinton took many of his economic ideas from Reagan. We see this transition from liberalism to conservatism in the mid-1970s. Republicans like Nixon and Ford were, in comparison to Reagan, moderates. Moderate republicans by the 1970s had for the most part eschewed segregationist beliefs, didn't oppose wholesale the federal programs established under the New Deal and Great Society, and supported detente--or the lessening of tensions--with the Soviet Union. Hard-line conservatives, as part of what is called the New Right, viewed these moderate Republicans as too weak on both domestic and foreign policy issues. This New Right movement arose largely for the same reasons as the New Left in the 1960s. Specifically, it was a counter-cultural revolution against the ideas and government programs that made up Lyndon Johnson's Great Society--civil and voting rights acts, federal aid for the indigent, etc. Throughout the 1980s, Reagan and his supporters cast himself as the embodiment of the New Right. This is probably why you see liberals vilify Reagan so much.

The mythologized Reagan also comes from his foreign policy outlook. Throughout the 1970s many Americans, particularly conservatives, believed that detente wasn't working. The Soviet Union had made gains throughout the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in Africa and Asia. Couple that with the embarrassments of the Vietnam War, the Iran Hostage Crisis, and a series of oil shocks brought about by OPEC in the 1970s, and Americans quickly arrived at the notion that the U.S. had become weak. Reagan wanted to reverse that notion.

Reagan's election to the White House in 1980 appeared to usher in a new, more assertive era of American foreign policy. In his acceptance speech as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 1980, Reagan urged Americans of the need to “recapture our destiny” by rejecting the “weakness, indecision, mediocrity, and incompetence” of President Jimmy Carter. Two months later, during a speech delivered at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, Reagan put forth a plan in which the United States could stop its moral, political, and military decline and become a respected superpower once again. Stressing that “promoting the general welfare and providing for the common defense” were “one and the same,” Reagan emphasized the need to drastically increase American military power. The only way to ensure American security toward the international Communist threat would be to “convince them that they could not win at war.”

Despite Reagan's bellicose rhetoric, this desire to reclaim American global prestige through a militaristic foreign policy didn't really pan out. In 1982, Reagan sent U.S. Marines to Lebanon in the midst of a civil war. The goal was ultimately to keep the peace, although there wasn't any peace to keep. A year after the Marines arrived in Lebanon, a truck bomb went off at the Marine Barracks at Beirut International Airport and killed 241 Americans. In the aftermath of the attack, the press brutally criticized Reagan, arguing that he didn't understand the nature of an increasingly multi-polar international order and that the U.S. no longer had the capabilities to assert itself abroad militarily. The criticism Reagan faced for his policies in Beirut eventually led to a turn away from overt militarism (with the brief exception of Grenada) and toward covert support for rebel groups. This "Reagan reversal" soon laid the foundation for what would become the Iran-Contra affair, in which the administration illegally provided arms to Iran in order to free American hostages taken in Lebanon. The money gained from these arms transactions were then used by the administration to funnel money to the Nicaraguan contras, another illegal action. At the same time, by mid-1985 Reagan was actively trying to improve relations between the United States and Soviet Union. Obviously, Reagan’s foreign policy initiatives didn’t exactly square with his overly-patriotic, take-it-to-the-Soviets rhetoric. I think this disparity between Reagan's words and actions is really important to your question as it gets at the heart of how Reagan became so mythologized by conservatives. Many conservatives today look at Reagan’s rhetoric, not his policies. They see him as a president that lifted the United States out of a freefall--both domestically and internationally--that began with Johnson and became exacerbated under Jimmy Carter.

In fact, it appears now that the historical Reagan of the conservative imagination is largely inaccurate (as is the liberal idea of Reagan, although that's a different question). In general, the most recent historians view Reagan as being a "pragmatic conservative" that, despite his rhetoric, was not quite as much of an ideologue as most Americans would today consider him.

Sources:

Bell, Coral. The Reagan Paradox: US Foreign Policy in the 1980s. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Cannon, Lou. President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. New York: Public Affairs, 1991.

Erhman, John. The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Farber, David. Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Fischer, Beth A. The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.

Rossinow, Doug. The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Wilentz, Sean. The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

If this were an "Ask Economists" thread you would get many answers that praise Reagan from economists with different political leanings. Reagan believed in small government and tested many ideas. What made him great, from the point of view of economists, was his willingness to reject ideas that didn't work, rather than dogmatically stick with them.

For example, ideas that were tried and rejected include "starve the beast" and the "Laffer Curve." The first was the idea that you can force lawmakers to reduce spending on pet projects by reducing taxes (and therefore shrinking their budgets) and the second was the idea that you could increase tax revenue by cutting tax rates since the stinulation of the economy would outweigh the loss in percentage taken from the economy. If that second idea seems bizarre, imagine a government taxing 0% and a government taxing 100%. In the first, the government takes nothing and in the second, the people produce nothing, so governments get zero in either case. It follows, somewhat simplistically, that there is some tax rate between 0% and 100% that allows maximum tax revenues and if your tax rate is higher than that number, the only way to increase revenue is to decrease taxes.

Well, it turned out that lowering tax rates slowed government revenue growth and that pressured nobody into cancelling pet projects. Reagan abandoned both ideas.

Other ideas, however, were very successful. Reagan pushed for Volcker as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve despite Volcker insisting that he would attack inflation based on Milton Friedman's NAIRU model. At the time it was understood that less inflation meant more unemployment, but Volcker believed this to be a necessary, temporary evil, and Reagan gave him the mandate to fix inflation. He did, it worked, unemployment came temporarily, and the economy stabilized at a healthier rate of inflation.

So Reagan's mistakes, economically speaking, were short-lived, and his successes had long-term impact.

Unfortunately (and this is my political opinion), many current conservatives talk of Reaganomics as everything that Reagan tried, not just the parts that passed the test.

Does Reagan deserve credit for the tearing down of the Berlin Wall? Were there other factors at play?

My fellow user,

this thread has seen a huge number of answers that did not comply with our rules that state all answers must be in-depth, informative, comprehensive and based on historical scholarship

Of 125 posted comments, only three have been serious attempts to answer the question while the rest of the removed comments were either one or two sentence responses, jokes or personal anecdotes. There was also a high number of posts soapboxing against Reagan or soapboxing against those who do not like Reagan.

For all those attempting to answer, this is your only warning. All further comments should adhere to our rules about answer, and especially about civility. Otherwise we reserve ourselves the right to take measures we deem appropriate as moderators.

Thank you!