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The undercurrents shifted right under Reagan, Clinton was so popular in large part because he moderated so much.
I guess when I said
I meant to be asking why so many leftists seem to have this vitriolic hatred for Reagan to this day, to see if there's an explanation besides just "they'll have vitriolic hatred for any Republican who's in power".
So are you saying that the left to this day hate Reagan because he actually had sway over the populace, and he managed to shift the country right?
It is worth noting that the liberal elite/centre-left establishment/Deep State/Blob do not have the same kind of hate-on for Reagan that they do for Bush Jr and Trump (and, as far as I am aware, never did - although I was too young to be following US politics when Reagan was in office.) For example, Reagan usually comes slightly above average in historical rankings of Presidents by academics.
The anti-establishment left hate Reagan because he successfully claimed the moral high ground for the US at a time when the anti-establishment left had been rooting for the Soviet Union with varying degrees of plausible deniability for decades. The pro-establishment left are broadly pro-Reagan because he gets the credit for achieving two long-term uniparty goals - winning the Cold War and working with Volcker and the congressional Dems to clean up the Nixon/Carter economy.
That's interesting. I will say that it's hard for me to determine how much the left (in various factions of the left) hate Reagan, and this is probably because I wasn't around then. But fairly often, I hear people positively hating on him in what seems like an irrational way. I may be weighting those cases too heavily.
I'm probably one of the older people who read The Motte. I was an adult for all of Reagan's time in office. And I was a daily NPR news listener too.
I can assure you the left hated him with a passion back then.
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When I was much younger, the transformation of Poland into a free market democracy and reactions to it by the communist party remnants (turned social democrats) was quite fresh in my memory. I thought that leftists hate Reagan because he presided over the victory of capitalist America over the communist vision of the world.
Then I got fluent in English language and eventually American politics, and learned about many policies of Reagan that were quite disastrous, like kicking The War On Drugs up a notch. I thought then that leftists hate Reagan because he gutted the welfare state, broke a major strike (air controllers) and left the gays out to die.
These days I think that many of the things that Reagan was blamed for were inevitable, or rather that they were symptoms of larger trends not influenced that much by the presidency - that stagflation was the result of forsaking atom, and so the American civilization's capacity to generate energy stopped growing (I don't remember the details, but I remember seeing a group of charts that suggested that energy prices and capacity over the centuries are the answer to "why did everything started going to hell in the 70s"). And after reading the Salo thread, I don't believe that a Dem president would make a difference w/r/t AIDS - the public sympathy just wasn't there yet for this to get major funding, that required decades of positive propaganda. No funding means that PrEP isn't developed, which means that mostly nothing can be done.
(The viable solution would be to go full authoritarian and shut down the bathhouses, but no American president would do that. I think that for example in the USSR less gays per capita died of AIDS, mostly because homosexuality was much more seriously persecuted and so they had, ahem, less opportunities to get infected. That's some heavy duty tragic irony.)
Also, seeing people talk about Late Stage Capitalism I'm kinda back to thinking that many leftists do in fact have unprocessed grief over the collapse of the USSR and a miserable failure of their imagined future. Mark Fischer pretty much made an entire sub-school of thought out of that grief. And so they hate Reagan because he is the face of the triumph over their future.
What's the Salo thread?
This one probably:
https://archive.ph/2020.10.16-171741/https://salo-forum.com/index.php?threads/patient-zero-and-the-early-days-of-hiv-aids.3167/
Yep, that's the one. By the way, if anyone has a better, more mainstream source to read up on the history of AIDS crisis, I'm all ears.
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I really believe the current view-back of AIDS in the 80s is hysteria. What would the activists rather have happened? Gays were dying of a novel disease, the government opened an investigation, started spending money, and eventually facilitated a cure. Meanwhile, people were catching AIDS because it was a sexually-transmitted disease -- and nobody blames gay men for spreading it. Was the government supposed to tell gay men to stop having sex? And somehow, it all becomes Reagan's fault.
If you take the COVID response as yardstick, which many on the left still endorse, then the answer should be unequivocally "yes". While not the same as HIV/AIDS, I found the contrast between the "stay indoors/wear a mask/etc" response to COVID and the soft-touch response to monkeypox incredibly jarring. After large parts of the country were imprisoned in their own homes and dissent suppressed in response to a novel disease, the message to the gay community dealing with its own novel disease was more like "please consider at least getting the names of the men you have unprotected sex with, so that we can actually attempt some contact tracing". I wish I'd saved some tweets from that era, which feels like another lifetime ago, but my browser history is being uncooperative.
That said, it all seems to have died down, so maybe the monkeypox response worked, which is more than can be said for the COVID response. And perhaps that soft response was necessary to get enough gay men to come forward and get vaccinated, which cut off the transmission chains.
Of course the response to monkeypox was different from COVID. Monkeypox:
Obviously treating monkeypox as anything as bad as COVID would have been absurd.
Separately
The government has learned the hard way over and over again that that doesn't work. Both in abstinence-only education of teenagers, and the HIV/AIDS reaction of adults back in the 80s, telling people how to behave in private doesn't work. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. Gay men did largely stop hooking up after it became apparent what was happening; monkeypox takes a while to present symptoms after infection.
You seem to be a little aggravated that the government got COVID wrong but you are.. also a little mad that they got monkeypox right.. because it feels unequal?
Something like that, because it shows that the correct thoughts were in people's heads and yet they still managed to get COVID so wrong.
COVID came first. So maybe they didn't have the correct thoughts in their heads then. The massive criticism they received during and after COVID seems like it would cause exactly this.
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They got it wrong because their "utilitarian" calculus was fundamentally compromised by tribal bias. When it came to their ingroup, Liberty was priceless. When it came to their outgroup, no punishment was too harsh.
Eh, the lockdowns and other measures applied to all tribes.
I think the most relevant distinction here is women. Namely, there weren’t all that many women dying from their bathhouse adventures in the 90s. So the men kept doing their high-risk behavior.
Covid on the other hand involved all of society, so the neurotics wanted to give it all they had.
Don’t blame utilitarianism for situations where it clearly is not being applied!
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I broadly agree with what you're saying, but I guess I was making a different point: if the government had done something like close the bathhouses, the activists would not be happy that something was done. I think they would be furious, and call it a proof of oppression. My experience is that older gay men refuse to think of AIDS as "just" an STD. And if you suggest that the gay community perpetrated the disease through risky sexual behavior, they can become furious. I don't think they can distinguish something like that from the idea that Christian evangelicals are saying they deserve to die and AIDS is the proof. I don't think they can be rational on this topic. If you broach these ideas to the younger generation, they'll just roll their eyes and refuse to hear what you're saying, in the way that people today internally cancel you for breaking a social taboo. But the older generation will understand what I'm saying, and immediately shut it out.
I don't think there's anything the government could have done that could have solved the AIDS crisis, and I don't think there's anything the government could have done that would have assuaged the gay panic at being outcast and broken and dead. Reagan is a convenient scapegoat.
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One of the effort-posts I haven't gotten around to writing is to compare the social narrative surrounding the AIDS pandemic with that of the COVID pandemic. The consensus narratives for the two are completely irreconcilable.
Please do this, I'd love to read it!
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I mean, they don't have a vitriolic hatred for Bush sr.
Reagan was popular and charismatic enough to win blowout elections, and he also forced the national dems to moderate on policy by a lot. I suspect this latter part is a big reason for why leftists hate him so much; Clinton stuck pretty close to the center in actual governing and dragged the DNC with him.
I don't know that you can really call it vitriolic hatred, but they certain didn't think highly of him at the time, while he was in office.
The truth is that there is a certain segment of the Left that has and will hate any Republican President whatsoever, under the pretense that they're an incipient authoritarian dictator. Truman accused Dewey of being an American Mussolini.
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That could be true. I honestly don't even know enough about him and his term to say one way or the other. I may not know enough about him either because he was just bland and forgettable, or maybe because the left didn't hate him as much. Or maybe the left didn't hate him as much because he was bland and forgettable?
Bush Sr. is regularly pilloried by many on the left as a warmonger due to Panama and the first Gulf War, as well as, later in his life, accusations that he was a sexual assaulting perv (see the David Copafeel joke). In my view he was the last honorable man to be elected president, though full disclosure I did not vote for him. The world was different then, or seemed so to my younger self.
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I suspect, yeah, that's it. He was popular and charismatic and beloved and totally destroyed the left in his elections and thus he's loathed by his enemies.
He also pushed a lot of deregulatory policies that upset the left. But I think the hatred for Reagan on the left outpaces the actual impacts of his policies.
I think it's similar to Obama, who was and remains pretty loathed by the right, but whose policies haven't really made much of an impact -- the big one was the ACA, which has been mostly defanged. It's the fact Obama was popular and charismatic and defeated the right's challengers, some of the most qualified Presidential candidates in recent memory, easily (and, admittedly, with often dirty rhetoric).
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