Reagan and the Great Man in history

Missing word: “based on an implicit or explicit that”

From TIME: “As a result of the 1981 and 1986 bills, the top income tax rate was slashed from 70% to 28%.”

That’s a sweeping change that was very difficult to undo.

“Two bills passed in 1982 and 1984 together “constituted the biggest tax increase ever enacted during peacetime,” […] The bills didn’t raise more revenue by hiking individual income tax rates though. Instead they did it largely through making it tougher to evade taxes, and through “base broadening” — that is, reducing various federal tax breaks and closing tax loopholes.”

That was indeed very important, but much less easier to dismantle. Moreover, the momentum changed towards reducing the tax rates — and here we are today.

I don’t know why Bush 1 would be a bad memory, other than his losing re-election to Clinton. GHWB won a huge victory over Dukakis, the Soviet Union fell, GW1 was a quick success. The economy was reasonably sound, other than a slight downturn with just the wrong timing.

“Nixon was Nixon”

Have Republicans disowned Nixon? His southern strategy made them “the party of Jefferson Davis” which is why they control the House, most governorships and state legislatures, and contributed decisively to all their White House wins since 1968.

As many others have observed, the “party of Jefferson Davis” is closer to the mark.

I think the formulation you’re looking for, used many places, is “The Party of Lincoln became the Party of Calhoun.”

I haven’t read Perlstein yet, but a lot of the discussion is based on an implicit or explicit assumption that the shift to the right in the US since the 1970s can be explained by the successful organizing efforts of movement conservatism, culminating in Reagan’s 1980 election victory.

Then reading Perlstein, any of his three books about conservatism, should be pleasing to you, because he utterly rejects the idea that the shift to the right in the US can be explained that way. His stories of Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, and the conservative movement are really about the intersection of cultural, economic, demographic, and social factors that gave rise to the political apparatuses and constituencies that were willing, eager even, to elevate men like them to leadership positions, but also about the particular pathologies and ideologies that drove each of those men as an individual.

It’s a very holistic approach, but it’s also exhausting because it takes a ton of pages to paint that complete a picture.

Also for everyone wondering why GHWB would be anathema in Republican circles… really? That’s a mystery? The man raised taxes, wasn’t a culture warrior, and appointed David Souter to the Supreme Court, an act still regarded on the right as a massive failure at best and the foulest of betrayals at worst.

And that’s without even noting that (though it would never be said openly now) at the time lots of conservatives considered him a wimpy coward for refusing to conquer Iraq. That cooled a lot of them towards him.

Funnily enough, The Economist has an article on a (modest) George H W Bush revival today

“TWO decades since losing the presidency after a single term, George Bush senior is in fashion. No living ex-president enjoys higher net approval ratings (though his successor, Bill Clinton, comes close). George W. Bush has written a loving book about his father, out in November. Two other books are in the works (one wistfully titled “The Last Gentleman”). They follow admiring television biographies on HBO and PBS.

The establishment cheered Mr Bush’s 90th birthday in June, which the former navy pilot marked with a parachute jump. “Happy 90th to our former boss,” beamed the CIA, tweeting a picture from Mr Bush’s security badge as agency director. Sailors on the USS George H.W. Bush, an aircraft-carrier, formed the message “41=90” on their flight deck. The Republican National Committee (RNC) hailed Mr Bush’s WASP-ish sense of style, selling socks in the vivid colours loved by the ex-president, a “sock man”.”

Supposing you date the rise of neoliberalism from the year of the other September 11 and the OPEC oil crisis – I think individuals/families /groups drove that particular response (of shoring up resources and control for the West) – the neo-liberal response wasn’t built in to the socio-economic situation.

George H W Bush was made director of the CIA shortly afterwards in 1976, but is reported to have had a side career with the CIA linking with aspects of his business interests dating back to the early 1960s:

“According to Joseph McBride of The Nation, “a source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine activities.” ”

The Bush family was also involved in the Iran-Contra affair somehow apparently:

” Jeb Bush in 1986 was the 33-year-old chairman of the Dade County Republican party and he was up to his eyeballs in the Iran-Contra scandal. …
George Herbert Walker Bush: “Sarah, if the American people ever find out what we have done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.”
That is a famous 1992 quote by George Herbert Walker Bush to Sarah McLendon, a Texas journalist who Bush had known for years and who was the grand dame of the White House press corps at the time. McLendon had asked Bush: “What will the people do if they ever find out the truth about Iraq-gate and Iran contra?”
Jeb Bush to intelligence operative Al Martin, who had worked closely with Jeb Bush during the Iran-Contra scandal and was threatening to go public: “There is no constituency for the truth.””

The article claims the Bush family were somehow involved in a murder of CIA drug runner Barry Seal around that time (1986). I can’t tell whether it is a reputable claim or not – if the government insists on being involved in CIA intrigue and not transparently keeping proper records of the intrigue I don’t know how you can tell what things are reputable and what are not.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/04/03/1199001/-Jeb-Bush-Oliver-North-and-the-Murder-of-CIA-Drug-Smuggler-Barry-Seal-in-1986

@Scott-

And Hoover was around for the Great Depression – and either had Andrew “liquidate everything” Mellon as Treasury Secretary busily liquidating everything or sold out A(le)M in his memoirs.

Really? I mean, that Amity Shlaes is a few beers short of a six-pack is something I already knew, but I’ve heard plenty of silly conservatives defend Mellon and claim letting the free market sort it out was the right idea, and castigate Hoover for reluctantly voting for Smoot-Hawley. And even in grade school in Jersey, they taught us that Harding was one of the most corrupt presidents in US history, and that Coolidge shifted the burden of income taxes almost exclusively to the super-rich and created the first American agricultural subsidies. I can’t see either of them working for the Tea Party.

GHW Bush is unpopular partly because he came right after Reagan and he didn’t have all that much charisma. Also he tried to rein in some of the “voodoo economics” and that reduced various people’s opportunity to siphon lots of money out of the economy.

The deficit went way up in his administration, by 1992 it was about a third bigger than Reagan’s biggest. I don’t know that anybody was paying much attention to that at the time, though, since Reagan had shown that deficits didn’t matter.

how about the stupidity of Mondale
?
At the Presidential Debate, Concord NH, iirc

W Mondale: I question if my opponent is to old to be president
RR: (joking) I won’t make an issue of my opponent’s youth..
a great reagan moment
lets re write history
RR: (joking) I won’t make an issue of my opponent’s youth…
WM (serious) I don’t think the National Security of the United States is a joke. Some of us are hale and active at 80 or 85; however, we do get older. You, Gov Reagan, will be 8x years old after 3 years in office.
If you get woken up at 3am and a young man says, Mr. President, we are under attack – what are your orders ? – will you, R Reagan have the mental and physical stamina needed ?
I do not think this is a joke, and I do not think the lives of our brave young men (all men thne) in the armed forces should be at risk because you are to old to think clearly
I think the American people are entitled to know if you are physically up to the job, just as they are entitled to know if I m up to the job.
sigh,

90 year olds always get a boost in popularity. People think “good on him for doing a parachute jump at the age of 90”, and it also reminds people of GHW Bush’s wartime activities. As his presidency fades into history, he’s no longer the headline news, he’s the “and finally…” feelgood story, no longer a major actor but an irrelevance. See also Prince Phillip, who has now moved from “oh no, what’s he said now” to “grandad sometimes uses slightly dodgy language, but things were different when he was growing up.”

This probably applies more to the general public than to Republican operatives, who might be thinking more of “squandering his legacy” (oh, the irony…) and “losing to the devil incarnate”. I guess the equivalent on the other side would be Al Gore.

In the 1980s, my college classmates used to report back from their semesters in England that they’d spent a lot of time apologizing for living in a country that elected Ronald Reagan. (I would have found that annoying, but most of them seem to have relished the opportunity to proclaim themselves Democrats.) Presumably, the people they apologized to were leftists who hated Reagan because he was a right-winger. But what about Thatcher? I’ve never been able to figure that out. But that kind of thing might be one reason why people feel there’s a strong need to explain what makes the US different.

bianca steele @ 22:

As a British student during the Bush / Blair years, I saw plenty of American students having much the same conversations. Is the answer an acceptance that the USA has vastly more influence on the world stage than the UK? Blair was regularly described as Bush’s poodle, and the many issues people in the UK had with Thatcher are almost all about UK issues, not international ones.

But as I recall it was always something that the Americans brought up – maybe it’s just that all 20-somethings assume that the world revolves around them?

Ed @19 : Perot’s platform was actually more similar to Anderson’s

Anderson supported imposing martial law in non-white neighborhoods, and demanding payback from Germany and Japan for postwar reconstruction?

Pearlstein’s books are about the rise of the right, of movement conservatism, but political evolution over time was driven by the collapse of the left.

The fact that GWHB isn’t being pursued with torch, pitchfork, and noose is deeply indicative of American idiocy, and proof that you can in fact polish a turd. Poppy appears to have been a scumbag from getgo (he learnt it from Daddy, American bagman to the Nazis), the kinda guy who reportedly will fire on enemy survivors in lifeboats, abandon his airplane with his crew still in it, learn that his daughter has died in morning then play golf with Babs in the afternoon, be boning his mistress in Houston ( and hence MIA for awkwardly long) when the President is shot. Then of course he will go on to avidly participate in the scheme to send missiles and cake Bibles to the same people who blew up our Marines in Lebanon, thereby enriching death squads down south. He will of course lie about it (“I was out of the loop.”), and also later pardon people who helped him cover that lie so that he could get elected and pardon them. He gave us Willie Horton ads. He put on a totally mendacious presentation about crack being sold in Lafayette Park so that he could declare war on an abstraction and of course black people — who were soon going away for decades behind a few bucks worth of rock. (Colin Powell would reprise this white-powder gag for the UN a few years later, to different but equally evil effect.) Soon Poppy and April Glaspie drummed up a real war against our erstwhile allies in Iraq — a war which he then actually botched in many different ways…. It goes on and on and on. But of course the worst thing Poppy did was teach his sons his MO — ‘Do whatever you feel like and lie your ass off.’ They seem to have learned this lesson well, especially George Junior, much to the further detriment of the world. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

Tabasco 08.08.14 at 8:12 am:

Have Republicans disowned Nixon?

Nixon, like racism, is a topic Republicans avoid or deny. In their hearts, they know he turned out to be Right. For such topics, they know enough not to express their thoughts. Nixon may be publically disavowed, but he has not been disowned.

Tabasco’s question reminded me that Rick Perlstein, in 2005, wrote ‘I Didn’t Like Nixon Until Watergate’: The Conservative Movement Now, which is mostly a transcript of his presentation as the Token Liberal at a conference full conservatives.

I get the question all the time from smart liberal friends: what is conservatism, anyway? They’re baffled. “As far as I can tell, anything someone on the right does is, by definition, ethical. It’s not about the act, or even the motivation. It’s about who’s perpetrating it.” It has become the name for a movement that can scream from the rooftops that every Supreme Court nominee should have an expiditious up-or-down vote, then 15 seconds later demand tortuous proceduralism when that nominee is Harriet Miers. Flexibility is the first principle of politics.

The postscript explains the origin of the article’s title:

Postscript: The response to my address was, understandably, defensive. My co-panelist Stan Evans retorted that my invocation of Richard Nixon was inappropriate because Nixon had never been a genuine conservative. He added: “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.” I responded: “Thanks for making my point.”

I don’t know; I think if Reagan had lost in 1980, particularly if it wasn’t close, that would have done a lot to discredit movement conservatism as a path to political power, and that might have convinced the Republicans to go on a different path. The comparisons to other countries aren’t very convincing, because the right-wing parties in other English-speaking countries don’t seem to share the radicalism of the US right (at least on economic issues). The sample of English-speaking countries is also very small, and it’s not an independent sample; right-wing parties influence each other. Maybe a general shift to the right was inevitable, but I think the extremity of the manifestation in the US has a lot to do with Reagan specifically. There are also direct long-term effects; e.g. on judicial appointments and institutional culture of government agencies.

And Carter wasn’t really a conservative even by the standards of his time, except perhaps relative to other Democrats.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_administration_scandals

cassander 08.08.14 at 4:32 pm:

the share of total taxes paid (compared to share of total income) is a much better way to evaluate the progressivity of taxes over time.

Then why don’t you use that better method? It appears that you are ignoring any tax other than federal income tax. Or do you have your own definition of “total taxes paid”?

Paul Krugman’s weighed in on this one now! :)

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/on-reaganolatry/

Sometimes I think it’s sensible to write the history of the right wing (at least in English-speaking countries) in terms of what they decide to throw away. A big long-term one is shame – the realization that they can get away with never apologizing, never feigning being sorry, once they succeeded in beating mass media into lasting submission. In the course of the ’70s, the British and American right didn’t stop being pants-wettingly fearful of the Soviets. What they realized, I think, is that they could pursue their mindless ongoing obsession while ceasing to make any pretense of caring about the lower classes at home. Their planners figured out that with the right mix of propaganda and gestures, they could stop worrying about any bad treatment their enemies might exploit in propaganda.

They made it work, too.

@Ogden

>Then why don’t you use that better method?

I did use that method.

>It appears that you are ignoring any tax other than federal income tax. Or do you have your own definition of “total taxes paid”?

No, I am not. my definition of total taxes paid is the all government revenues according to the CBO.

The true effects of “McCarthyism,” especially in the labor movement, took decades to really take effect. If you want to call mass repression of the left a political collapse, I suppose you can. But I think that was essential to the so-called rightward movement of the population.

Reagan’s election is also when the current conservative constellation came together. It was a founding moment: the South became Republican. Before then, contraception and abortion were uncontroversial among evangelicals; afterwards they became shibboleths. The coalition’s design was carefully fashioned.

Hypothesis:

The ecstasy that Reagan originally produced in the wealthy N American cabal that would replace the vacuum of social democracy in the West in the late 70s was this:

In Reagan, here was a social genius (14 perstein) who had discovered a role (48 bad Jim) that could get populist voting patterns yoked to the movement conservatives yoked to the wealthy donors yoked to the old conservative wing of the beaurocratic wing of the State.

As per the subject of the OP, geopolitically any one political faction or individual politician was of course strongly overdetermined to find a way to mold a single identity out of what had been disparate but similarly-striving forces as the social democratic wave receded.

Perstein is correct: the most summative and relevant biography of Reagan would be one that framed his life as a particular member of the species (of right-wing fusionist politician personalities, see above). But without having read the book, perhaps Perstein fails to note that anything as simple as demographics or as complex as social perceptions of political theatre explains that Thatcher and others would accomplish a similar feat.

Anarcissie in #24. Your attractive theory suggests a new reading of May 1968, as the moment when the Old Left ceased to be a genuine threat to capital. Cohn-Bendit etc were high-class clowns; even Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigades were plainly for show, and alienated workers.

Reagan’s signature’s on my Berkeley diploma. I cherish it, perversely.

Politics has always been a variety of entertainment, and you cannot refine it. America’s bombing Iraq again, and stock are up! Yay?

Eisenhower Republicans were what are now called RINOs Barack Obama

That’d be my adjustment, which illustrates how far to the right both the Republicans and Democrats have moved.

Anarcissie @ 46

I think you understand “collapse of the left” perfectly. As Wimberley wryly put it, you make it seem in retrospect, that May 1968 is the moment that the Left ceased to be a threat to Capital.

The collapse of the establishment Left into neoliberalism was articulated by Charles Peters, publisher of the Washington Monthly, in 1983: “. . . we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. . . .” That articulation came in 1983, after Reagan’s election and policy triumphs, but the political ideas animated Carter’s election and administration: it was the idea that they could make liberalism work “better” by stripping away the institutions and, as they saw it, animosities.

So, yes, the “collapse” was the neoliberal Democrats agreeing with the neoconservative and conservative-libertarian Republicans about pretty much everything, but style. And, that collapse happened in Carter’s Administration, with deregulation, the political abandonment of unions and countervailing power, and the appointment of Volcker.

There were distinctive choices made by Reagan. The most salient ones concerned oil and the financial sector. But, those choices were not much opposed. Mondale’s forlorn hope campaign sometimes tried to articulate what was going on, but with a consciousness of no longer having a winning electoral formula.

A two-party political system is normally a contest for the middle ground between the parties, with the consequent exclusion and marginalization of other possibilities. I am not as cynical about that, as you are. I regard it, in the main, as a good thing — all political systems have to find ways to narrow political choices and controversies down, and build a legitimating consensus. The collapse of liberalism meant that the two Parties were contesting the Reaganite agenda, whereas, before 1975, they were contesting a liberal agenda.

The neoliberal v conservative libertarian dialectic that has dominated the public discourse ever since is a peculiarly synthetic one. It is kept alive as the opinions that journalist-pundits can get paid to articulate in a Media bought and paid for by billionaires and corporate advertising. Neither pole represents the natural opinions or interests of any actual electoral grouping, in the way that a labor union or a small town chamber of commerce might once have brought their interests to bear in the form of ideas. That artificial quality and its role in a vacuous propaganda troubles me.

I attribute the hollowness of political thought to the evaporation of institutional and financial support for anything else, not to the two-party system, per se. It’s the story Chris Hedges outlines in The Death of the Liberal Class. The rise of institutional support for right-wing views that Perlstein documents has its counterpart in liberal neglect and abandonment of institutional support. The openness of the Republicans to cryptic racism, voodoo economics and the religious right has its counterpart in the fierce hostility of mainstream liberals for anything to their left, and the contempt of upper-class liberals for the authoritarian followership of what remains of the working classes.

There are two requisites to satisfying a left aspiration to power. One is that the Left has to be willing to contest with the Right for the leadership and confidence of the mass of ordinary people, whose political psychology might be characterized as that of authoritarian followers. That means mass-membership organization and making populist appeals. It’s not the sort of thing an “open-borders” idealist or a “racist!” shouting Democrat, is entirely ready for. The other requisite is the credible threat of some more radical agenda or force further to the Left. (Right now, for mainstream Democrats, the threat is the far-right agenda of the Tea Party, and we can see how that perverse dynamic works out.)

I am old enough to remember the whole arc from Nixon to Obama. And, the rise of the Right is an interesting and multifarious story of building ideas and institutions. But, the success of the Right depended also on the collapse of the Left over that time period. When the whole long deterioration from Reagan through George W. Bush finally reached a crisis, the Democrats produced a continuation rather than a contradiction. It’s truly horrifying.

Reagan *looked* good on TV
if u turned off the sound, his facial expression is positive
Our brain responds to images very strongly

Sort of like dead children in gaza, in reverse
(and yes, I know it is sort of grotesque to reduce dead kids to image analysis – the point is about how we react to some subset of events; in any event, all the ardor displayed here in CT about the horrors of Israeli Bombs – I expect at least as much ink , for each body, re syria, ISIS, etc etc etc)

I think it is a rather gross simplification to speak of Perlstein’s book as an example of “great man” historiography, since, though I have only read excerpts, he situates Reagan in his social context. He certainly does not present him as a “hero” à la Carlyle.

Tolstoy’s Calvinistic determinism is equally dated.

There are probably at least two varieties of “big man”: the ones who are good at hypnotising the public, and the ones who set the agenda.

I suppose a “great man”, for good or evil, would be someone who did both and left a lasting legacy. But most of the hypnotic “big men” are puppets, like those postulated in Erich Kästner’s comedy “Die Schule der Diktatoren” (The School of Dictators).

From what I’ve seen, there are also lots of duds coming out of the “dictator factory”, but their parties often invest far too much in them for far too long before discarding them as failures. This is particularly true of lower level apparatchiks, or those who are lucky once because the tide is with them. Reagan wasn’t a dud: his powers of hypnosis were excellent to the audience which mattered, even if he seemed like a clown to others.

In the UK, he provided wonderful inspiration for the satirical puppet show Spitting Image. (My favourite is 10 minutes into the following clip):

Reagan won, say my thoughts on my memories, both because he was a great demagogue and liar and he bribed with his Reaganomics and he had was an electorate evil enough, like Nixon.

Reagan’s ju0st most openly worshiped because his Teflon Wall NEVER fell, even in the big Iran-Contra Scandal. Nixon’s and Shrub’s worship are mostly secret. Shrub, especially, was an unPresident until this year.

But Perlstein’s Nixonland is rigbt about Nixon having started one of the radically evillest coalitions in our history,

Conservatives, make up your minds – isn’t Carter a sweater-vest wimp whom did nothing?

It always struck Eli that when Reagan went on about how politicians are liars, Carter should have pointed out that as an actor, Reagan was a pro.

@66
I meant structuralism in a more general sense. Althusser never entirely goes out of style, for instance. Append a ‘post-‘ as you like.

Naturally, one was permitted (and expected) to speak about individuals and their actions. What I meant is that discussion of social history, class conflict, economic interests, and other broad historical processes was a given in the classes I took. While there certainly was a push from certain pomo writers toward de-emphasising process in favour of language, I don’t think anyone was trying to rehabilitate Ranke.

“Nobody heard what you said.” Lesley Stahl’s Fable about Reagan:
http://archive.pressthink.org/2004/06/09/reagan_words.html

cassander 08.08.14 at 11:46 pm:

…my definition of total taxes paid is the all government revenues according to the CBO.

You do realize that the CBO produces info within the parameters ordered by members of Congress? They can do good work, but it can be skewed by the constraints.

Are you using the CBO report that, among other things, attributes 75% of corporate tax revenue to high-income individuals? It sounds like something Romney would have commissioned, if he were a member of Congress. Or owned one.

jack1473 08.11.14 at 2:15 pm @ 76 — So you don’t believe in social forces? There is just this one guy and he changes everything?

jack1473 08.11.14 at 3:14 pm @ 78 — What evenly-matched competing social forces? It seems to me that in the period and place we’re talking about — US, late 1970s to the present — the ruling class has been firmly in control of policy and quite coherent about it. Such social forces as were raised against the prevailing order were absorbed (Civil Rights, feminism) or deflected and dispersed (anti-war, anti-imperialism). Foreign and military policy have actually been consistent in principle since World War 2; the big change around 1980 was the decision to start rescinding the domestic Welfare state, and even that has been done by slow continuous torture rather than swift execution.

It is true that under certain conditions a single person or small group may seem to make a tremendous difference. The timely elimination of Hitler and his friends, for instance, might have led to German domination of Europe in 1940 instead of decades later. But I think that’s rare, a case of the butterfly in Brazil starting a typhoon in China, or the two-penny nail whose failure loses an empire.

Addendum: “Although each of his three books is structured around an individual politician, Perlstein’s subject is always political movements and political culture. “Biography doesn’t much interest me,” Perlstein wrote in The Baffler in 2012. ‘Powerful men are but a means to the more profound end of sizing up the shifting allegiances on the demand side of our politics.’” — Mark Schmitt, Righting the GOP, August 01, 2014 http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2014/08/diplomacy-then-and-now.html

Bruce Wilder 08.12.14 at 2:55 am @ 80 — I read the referenced article, and I don’t see the big change. It seems to me the US ruling class played with the idea of a global role, even of world domination, on and off during the earlier part of the 20th century, but then World War 2 convinced them it was time not only for an American century but an American world — that is, for a fundamental commitment to intervention, hegemony, imperialism anywhere and everywhere. Those in the r.c. who disagreed were extruded — they were ‘isolationists’, a word which became an abusive epithet even in the grade schools of my childhood. The Kennedys wanted a change in style from both Truman and Eisenhower; they wanted to be clever, intellectual, agile, cool — but they, too, wanted to dominate the world, by persuasion or bribery if possible, by force if necessary. Those who have power must rule, etc. etc.

“GHWB agreed to raising taxes” And so did Reagan. Something is missing in the narrative to explain Reagan’s appeal.

cassander:

“Reagan’s impact is also overstated by the left who claim he massively deregulated the economy (actually, the biggest deregulation was done by carter) that he slashed taxes (taxes as a percent of GDP averaged exactly the same from 1950-80 as from 81-2011), or that he made the tax code less progressive (the top 20% paid 55% of taxes in 1979, 58% in 89).”

“Taxes as % of GDP” – what taxes? Just federal taxes or all taxes? Anyway, it is correct that Reagan did not simply “slash taxes” – that is actually a right wing myth – in reality he raised taxes 10 times. It is however true that he overwhelmingly cut progressive taxes and raised regressive taxes such as the SS tax. Remember also that the SS trust fund was immediately plundered to help pay for the massive deficit spending (mostly military) which accounts for any success in job creation that may be attributed to Reaganomics. Reagan’s contemporary worshippers claim that Reagan slashed taxes and spending and reigned in the deficit (again see https://arkansasmediawatch.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/bradley-gitz/) – the polar opposite is true.

“the top 20% paid 55% of taxes in 1979, 58% in 89” Again, does this include all taxes, including state and sales taxes and so on? Very likely not. Even if it did it wouldn’t support your argument because the income share of the wealthy increased.