Many of the policies initiated during the Ronald Reagan administration have left a perpetually destructive legacy.
Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, passed away 22 years ago on June 5th, 2004, at 93 years of age. When it comes to Reagan's legacy in the political establishment, he is lauded as perhaps one of the best presidents in American history. Upon his death much of the nation was brought to a veritable standstill, as his funeral acted as an unofficial national day of mourning.
As Reagan's casket was brought out of the Capitol rotunda, cannons fired in his honor, the reading of his funeral rites broadcast in New York's Times Square as well as on televisions around the world. Over 100,000 people attended his funeral to pay their respects, including multiple former presidents, government officials, and diplomats from around the world. In a CBS News broadcast the day of his death, Reagan's personal biographer Edmund Morris described him as "looking and acting presidential, a man with dignity".
Morris describes Reagan's "largest mission in life" as "the moral leadership of the United States". In Morris's words Reagan saw himself as a savior sent to tame the government and get it off the backs of the American people. But beyond the aggrandizement and grandstanding, when one takes a more critical look at the legacy left behind, what is revealed is a much darker history than American political revisionists like to admit. One fraught with systemic corruption and the exploitation of the American people.
In this article, we will take a look at Ronald Reagan's true legacy, and while not exhaustive, highlight several policy decisions that still impact the lives of American citizens today.
Naturally, we shall start with foreign policy, as it is arguably the most impactful and extensive. In this area Reagan is typically hailed as a hero more than most in the annals of American exceptionalist revisionist history. He started off his presidency in January of 1981 being credited with bringing an end to the Iran hostage crisis, as Iran would agree to release 52 Americans after 444 days in captivity shortly after Reagan was sworn into office.
This immediately did wonders for Reagan's image as a diplomatic tough guy that Americans could look up to. But the reality is much more sinister. Acclaimed investigative journalist and founder of Consortium News Robert Parry (1948 - 2018) spent decades amassing evidence ignored by the DC political beltway proving that, in truth, members of the Reagan campaign, particularly campaign manager and future CIA director William Casey, undertook efforts to sabotage attempts by the Carter administration to free the American hostages for political gain. Casey and others would covertly meet with Iranian officials in Madrid during the summer of 1980 and strike a secret deal insuring that Iran would agree to only release the hostages on the day of Reagan's inauguration in exchange for arms shipments.
With this act of political subterfuge, Reagan's presidency began with a borderline act of treason, treating American lives as bargaining chips.
Of course, this was only the beginning. As secret dealings with Iran would scandalize the entire Reagan presidency. The Iran Contra affair, beginning in 1985, would go on to leave a lasting and disastrous blight both inside and outside of the United States.
During the height of the Cold War, the staunchly anti-communist Reagan administration would go to any lengths no matter how deplorable to exert American imperialist dominance across the globe. When the leftist Sandinista government came to power in Nicaragua, the Reagan administration sought to oust them with a coup. When Congress denied funding for this operation, Reagan would once again turn to his pal William Casey, now director of the CIA, and their Iranian allies, as well as the cartel.
The CIA would begin making covert arms shipments to Iran via Israel, despite an embargo in place at the time, using the revenue to fund an insurgency by the Contras, a right wing militant terrorist group fighting to oust the Sandinista government. At the same time, the CIA would put itself in business with the Contras cartel allies in a plot to help bolster the Contras funding, a scandal later exposed by journalist Gary Webb whom revealed the CIA helped to facilitate cocaine trafficking into the United States, resulting in the disastrous crack epidemic of the 80s and 90s which unceremoniously claimed thousands of lives.
These undertakings initiated by Reagan have left lasting scars on American society and politics. In the decades since, Nicaragua has continued to be a prime target for imperialist regime change efforts, particularly following the 2006 election of Daniel Ortega which brought the Sandinistas back to power and lead to a series of coup attempts against his government by both the Bush jr and Obama administrations, as well as a deadly relaunching of Reagan-era destabilization efforts against Nicaragua as recently as 2023 under the Biden administration.
Despite their seemingly cozy relationship with the Iranians, this did not make Iran impervious to US imperialist aggression. Since the US/UK backed coup against Iran in 1953 and the installation of the brutal regime of the Shah, Iran had effectively been an imperialist puppet state until the Islamic Revolution of 1979. It was during this time, in an attempt to prevent the installation of a communist government, that the governments of the United States and United Kingdom would intervene once again and assist the Islamic fundamentalist regime to power in Iran. The plan being to wage a successive color revolution to install a more favorable Western-backed puppet government once the threat of a communist revolution was successfully thwarted.
As such, the green light was given to Iraq's Saddam Hussein (another Western installed puppet) to invade Iran in 1980, leading to a brutal eight year war during which the Reagan administration would secretly support both sides ― providing covert chemical weapons shipments to Saddam, all the while maintaining the illegal Iranian arms shipments for the Contra affair. Ultimately the plan to overthrow the Islamic regime in Iran failed as Iraq would lose the war, building Iran into the regional powerhouse that they are today. Similarly, the support given to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s played a pivotal role in laying the foundation for the false pretexts necessary for Western intelligence to instigate the Gulf War, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which we are still living with the fallout of.
These, however, are not the most egregious of the Reagan Administration's foreign policy quagmires. At the same time as the rest of these aforementioned operations, they were simultaneously undertaking clandestine agendas in Afghanistan that would go on to have disastrous global consequences.
In April 1978, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) waged a revolution in Kabul which unseeted the US backed dictatorship of Mohammad Daoud Khan and established a socialist government with friendly ties to the Soviet Union. Concerned with the possibility of expanding Soviet influence, Carter Administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, ever the imperialist opportunist, set about formulating plans to uproot the new Afghan government.
Ultimately, the decision was made to instigate a conflict and pull the Soviets into a regional quagmire, "their own Vietnam", as Brzezinski characterized it. And thus, Operation Cyclone was born, with the United States providing arms, funding, and logistical support to anti-Soviet Islamist militants known as the Mujahideen in order to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred in December of 1979.
This operation initiated during the Carter administration would bleed over into the Reagan administration, who would subsequently expand US support for the Mujahideen, now locked in a brutal war against the Soviet Union, exponentially.
As Democracy Now would report shortly after Reagan's death in 2004, throughout the 1980s Reagan's CIA along with Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Division and the Pakistani ISI would tacitly provide support through funds, armaments, logistics, training, and intelligence to jihadist militants led by the likes of Osama bin Laden in their fight against the Soviets. Upon the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the very same groups and individuals built up by this support would morph into two distinct factions: al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Ronald Reagan's policy decisions played a direct role in the rise of two of the most infamous terrorist organizations in world history, the impact of which should not be understated. The ramifications are still being felt to this very day. These groups were subsequently utilized as assets by Western intelligence to facilitate imperialist interventions both in the Middle East / West Asia and the global south, justifying a three decade so called "War on Terror" that has claimed countless innocent lives abroad and led to the evisceration of civil liberties here in the American homeland.
However, Reagan's abysmal foreign policy track record isn't the only aspect of his sordid legacy that earns him ire and condemnation.
Domestically too, his policies have left lasting scars on American society.
Economically, Ronald Reagan effectively handed the American market to multinational corporatists on a silver platter. The alleged "trickle down" effects of his "supply side" strategy, prioritizing massive tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations, failed to materialize dividends for the working class, leading to increases in income inequality that are still prevalent today. The policy did however manage to skyrocket the national debt. As Robert Parry explains in his piece The Abject Failure of Reaganomics:
Reagan’s tax cuts brought a rapid ballooning of the federal debt, which was $934 billion in January 1981 when Reagan took office. When he departed in January 1989, the debt had jumped to $2.7 trillion, a three-fold increase. And the consequences of Reagan’s reckless tax-cutting continued to build under his successor, George H.W. Bush, who left office in January 1993 with a national debt of $4.2 trillion, more than a four-fold increase since the arrival of Republican-dominated governance in 1981.
Additionally, the Reagan administration's cuts to social assistance programs without any further addresses to low income socioeconomic factors directly led to increase of poverty rates among America's poor. In regards to the crisis of the unhoused, upon repealing the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 numerous mental institutions around the country faced closure, pushing many of the severely mentally ill out on the streets resulting in an influx of homelessness.
The lasting student debt crisis, too, falls at the feet of Reagan. Ronald Reagan had seemingly always been a staunch opponent of higher education, even during his tenure as governor of California, cutting funding for public education. As president, Reagan slashed education spending by 25% and instituted a policy which replaced federal grants with loans. This played a crucial role in pricing out much of the working class, turning higher education into a luxury and bringing an end to the era of low cost or tuition free college that Americans had benefited from for decades.
But while Reagan riled against welfare for American citizens, he openly embraced welfare for big corporations.
Early in his presidency Reagan drastically altered and reduced enforcement of section two of the Sherman Antitrust Act, removing safeguards against corporate monopolization. As a result, in the decades since corporate consolidation has exploded, creating unprecedented monopolization where only a few corporations control most of what we buy while asset managers like Blackrock, the Vanguard Group, and State Street have become a cornerstone of the global financial elite.
And while Reagan was selling out Americans to big corporations, he was also hard at work laying the foundations for the police state. In December of 1981, President Reagan persuaded Congress to pass The Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act, a pivotal turning point for the militarization of American police. This, coupled with amplifying President Nixon's failed war on drugs, and catalyzing the privatization of the prison industry by becoming the first administration to hand out federal prison contracts to private entities, resulted in a ballooning of mass incarceration, and a watershed moment that led to the creation of the prison industrial complex.
This article only begins to scratch the surface of the numerous policy decisions instituted during the Reagan administration that still heavily impact American politics and society today. The length of this piece could easily be doubled by expanding upon the ways in which Reagan's harsh immigration policies paved the way for the systemic abuses of today; How the institutionalized racism of his presidency still permeates American right wing politics; The way his administration facilitated the polarization of biased news media and the proliferation of propaganda with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987; Or the disaster that came from his decision to indemnify pharmaceutical manufacturers from liability for vaccine injuries with the passage of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.
These and many other points could be expounded upon endlessly, but one thing is for certain ― when it comes to getting to the root of much of modern America's dysfunction, all roads lead back to Reagan.
