Category: science

Reagan, Trump, and the Decay of the US Empire

Published on the anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s death, and in memory of my friend Kate Doolan, who was an enthusiastic student/author of US and NASA history.

Those of us who lived through the 1980s might remember them fondly despite ourselves. It was the decade when hippies became yuppies, when “greed is good” stopped being a punchline and started being a philosophy. The stock market report appeared on the nightly news for the first time, as though share prices were suddenly everyone’s business. A fictional teenager named Alex Keaton — conservative, ambitious, briefcase-toting — became one of the most beloved characters on US television, and audiences on both sides of the Pacific adored him. The actor who played him, Michael J. Fox, also played Marty McFly — a kid who travels back to the 1950s and finds it charming, wholesome, and full of promise. Back to the Future was the highest-grossing film of 1985. It also contained one of the decade’s quieter jokes: when Marty tells Doc Brown, living in 1955, that the President of the United States in 1985 is Ronald Reagan, Doc Brown reacts with comic disbelief. An actor? President? Impossible. US audiences laughed, then went home to a country where it was true. What neither Marty nor the decade’s nostalgia registered was what else the 1950s contained: McCarthyism, segregation, the systematic exclusion of women and other marginalised groups from public life, and a conformity enforced by fear. The past looked wonderful only once you’d edited out everyone it had harmed. That selective memory wasn’t a movie plot. It was a deliberate political choice. The mood crossed oceans: Thatcher caught it in Britain; Jeff Kennett in Victoria caught it too, dismantling public services with the same breezy conviction that government was the obstacle rather than the solution. Reagan didn’t just reshape the USA; he exported a worldview: one built on the promise of restoring a greatness that had somehow been stolen and could be reclaimed. Versions of Reaganomics surfaced elsewhere: Thatcher in Britain, Mulroney in Canada, Kennett in Victoria, and Rogernomics in New Zealand, each advancing the same conviction that government was the problem and the past held the answers. This piece asks what that worldview cost. Not to fight old battles or mock the people who found it genuinely hopeful — many did, reasonably — but because the bill from those choices is still arriving, and it helps to understand who is paying for it.

The Myth Before the Reckoning

Ronald Reagan’s presidency is often remembered as an era of renewal: the optimism, the rhetoric, the promise of a “shining city on a hill.” But the reality beneath the mythology tells a different story. His administration marked a decisive turn in US life, away from collective responsibility and toward a politics built on deregulation, moral panic, religious nationalism, and the erosion of public institutions.

The consequences did not end with the 1980s. They shaped the economic, cultural, and political landscape that produced the crises of the twenty‑first century, culminating in the rise of Trumpism. This is the story of how decline begins long before anyone notices it happening.

When Ronald Reagan died in 2004, the obituaries were reverential. The New York Times described him as a leader who “restored the nation’s confidence” and embodied a uniquely American optimism. The Guardian called him “the great communicator,” a president whose genial style reshaped the political landscape. Across memoirs and retrospectives, Reagan was celebrated as the man who won the Cold War, revived the economy, and rekindled national pride.

Even his critics often conceded the power of his image: the Hollywood polish, the reassuring voice, the fantasy of a country made whole again — a sentiment that would later return in a cruder form under a different president. Over time, Reagan became less a political figure than a national myth, invoked by those who longed for a simpler, more certain America.

But mythology is not memory. And the record beneath the glow tells a different story. Behind the rhetoric of renewal lay policies that reshaped the country in ways that were less visible at the time but far more consequential: the dismantling of public institutions, the rise of moral panic as governance, the retreat from civil rights, the fusion of religion and politics, and the elevation of ideology over evidence.

This article looks past the eulogies. It examines the structures Reagan weakened, the movements he empowered, and the long tail of consequences that stretched far beyond the 1980s — consequences that shaped the crises of the twenty‑first century and helped pave the way for Trumpism. To understand the present, we must first look clearly at the past, without the soft focus of nostalgia.

The Economic Pivot That Broke the Middle Class

From the 1940s through the 1970s, the United States built a broad middle class through strong unions, high taxes on the wealthy, public investment, and a robust social safety net. Inequality shrank. Mobility rose. Life expectancy climbed.

By the late 1970s, the economy faltered — and voters turned against the postwar consensus.

Reagan promised renewal. What he delivered was decay.

He slashed taxes on the rich and corporations, gutted regulations, weakened antitrust enforcement, and championed supply‑side economics — the idea that prosperity would “trickle down.”

It didn’t.

To be fair to Reagan’s supporters, the stagflation of the late 1970s was real and painful. Carter-era interest rates crushed small businesses and family budgets. Something had to change, and the argument for deregulation and tax cuts was not irrational given that context. The tragedy is not that people believed it, it’s that the evidence since has been so consistently disappointing, and the promised correction never came.

Recent analysis underscores how deep this rupture ran. As The Atlantic observes, the broad middle‑class prosperity of the mid‑twentieth century was not organic or inevitable; it was the product of deliberate New Deal structures that “made the middle class possible.” Those foundations began to erode in the late 1970s and were aggressively dismantled under Reagan, accelerating a shift toward a winner‑take‑all economy. What followed was a slow, measurable collapse in mobility, wage stability, and shared prosperity — a trajectory that continued across subsequent administrations and helped create the political volatility that later defined the Trump era.

Inequality soared. Living standards stagnated. Life expectancy fell behind peer nations. No other advanced economy pivoted so sharply to free‑market ideology, and none experienced such a dramatic reversal in mobility and public health.

A child born today in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than a child born in the United States.

Reagan’s economic worldview did not stop at US borders. Through the influence of the IMF and World Bank, it became the backbone of what economists later called the Washington Consensus: a global program of deregulation, privatisation, weakened labour protections, and shrinking public sectors. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, these policies were imposed on developing nations as conditions for loans and debt relief, reshaping economies from Latin America to Eastern Europe. The result was a worldwide shift toward market fundamentalism whose social consequences — rising inequality, fragile public institutions, and declining mobility — echoed the trajectory already unfolding in the United States.

This was not an accident. It was a choice — and it reshaped economic realities.

The Educational and Civil Rights Retreat

Reagan’s hostility to public education was ideological, not fiscal. He viewed schools as battlegrounds for moral instruction, not engines of equality. His administration pushed for a return to “traditional values,” aligning with organisations like the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council.

He attempted to dismantle the Department of Education entirely — a department originally created after the Civil War to educate formerly enslaved people, and revived in 1979 to enforce civil rights and equal access. Historical documentation confirms this origin and purpose.

Reagan’s administration:

• undermined desegregation orders
• opposed affirmative action
• intervened in court cases to dismantle busing
• weakened federal civil rights enforcement

In 1982, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights accused the administration of deliberately retreating from the nation’s commitment to educational equality. Commissioner Clarence Pendleton warned that Reagan’s policies would “lead us back to a separate‑but‑equal society.” He was right.

The Human Cost Reagan Ignored

Reagan’s response to AIDS cannot be separated from his administration’s broader hostility toward LGBTQ+ people. The Religious Right had already framed queer existence as a moral threat (Britannica overview), and the White House absorbed that framing through silence and omission. By the time Reagan first mentioned AIDS publicly in 1985, thousands of gay men had already died (ACT UP timeline). Funding was delayed, warnings were dismissed, and public health was subordinated to the culture‑war belief that some lives fell outside the nation’s moral concern — a belief rooted in Christian nationalism and the New Right coalition that shaped the administration’s moral priorities.

Reagan’s presidency unfolded against a widening social divide. His administration cast poverty as a matter of personal failure rather than structural neglect, attacking welfare programs while cutting the supports that kept millions afloat. His cuts to mental‑health funding deepened the emerging crisis of homelessness, shifting care from hospitals to the streets and, eventually, to prisons. The rhetoric of “welfare queens” and “dependency” hardened public attitudes and narrowed the nation’s moral imagination. By the mid‑1980s, homelessness surged, child poverty rose, and the social ideals that had defined the postwar decades began to fray.

The administration’s “Just Say No” campaign reduced addiction to a matter of personal virtue, treating drug use as a moral failure rather than a public health issue. It ignored structural causes — poverty, trauma, lack of treatment — and reinforced the punitive logic of the War on Drugs (DEA historical overview). The irony grew sharper as Reagan himself began to show signs of cognitive decline, later diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease (New York Times), while Nancy Reagan’s reliance on prescription medications was widely discussed in Washington (Washington Post). The rhetoric of purity masked a reality of dependency and deterioration. What the campaign offered was not policy but performance: a moral narrative that justified punishment while deflecting attention from the social conditions that made addiction a crisis in the first place.

As AIDS spread through communities already pushed to the margins, the White House remained silent. For years, tens of thousands died without acknowledgement from the president. Public health agencies were constrained. Funding lagged. Activists begged for action while the administration treated the crisis as a moral problem rather than a medical one.

“By the end of 1989 and the Reagan years, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States, and more than 70,000 of them had died.” — ACT‑UP

Writer and activist Larry Kramer captured the fury of those years with devastating clarity. In a 1988 speech, he said: “Our government has the blood of thousands on its hands. Ronald Reagan is responsible for more deaths than any president in history.” (Village Voice)

It was not until April 2, 1987 — deep into his second term — that Reagan finally addressed AIDS publicly. Even then, he used the moment not to mobilise resources or acknowledge the scale of the crisis, but to moralise:

“How that information is used must be up to schools and parents, not government… AIDS information can not be what some call ‘value neutral.’ After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lessons.”

This was the truth about his presidency: suffering was a moral failure, public health was a matter of personal virtue, and government intervention was suspect unless it enforced traditional values. The result was predictable and devastating. A generation was lost. Trust in public institutions collapsed. And the administration’s silence became part of the tragedy itself — a political choice that allowed a preventable catastrophe to deepen unchecked.

The Rise of the Religious Right and the Culture Wars

Reagan’s presidency cemented the alliance between conservative politics and evangelical Christianity. He recognised the growing electoral power of the Religious Right and aligned himself with its agenda. In return, he championed:

• opposition to abortion
• prayer in public schools
• “traditional family values”
• the moralisation of public policy

The most influential of these groups was Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, founded in 1979. It mobilised millions of conservative Christians around a narrative that framed social change as moral decline. Alongside the Southern Baptist Convention and the broader
New Right coalition, it provided the organisational machinery that powered Reagan’s rise and reshaped the Republican Party.

This movement did not emerge in a vacuum. It was built on the demographic realignment produced by the
Southern Strategy — a political shift that drew white evangelicals into the Republican coalition through appeals to cultural grievance, states’ rights, and racialised moral panic. Together, these forces created a durable political bloc that fused religious identity with conservative governance.

Reagan often grounded his politics in explicitly religious terms. He praised the Ten Commandments as superior to “millions and millions of laws,” presenting them as the foundation of legitimate governance. This was not a neutral appeal to heritage; it was a declaration that public policy should reflect a specific religious morality.

This was not a neutral appeal to tradition. The Ten Commandments, examined objectively, are a narrower moral framework than the civil and human rights principles democracies have spent centuries building through careful, methodical debate and reason. Invoking the Ten Commandments was a political claim about whose values counted… and whose did not.

This merger of religion and conservative politics laid the groundwork for the culture wars that define US politics today. Attacks on LGBTQ+ people, bans on teaching Black history, and the policing of gender and sexuality all trace their lineage to this moment. Reagan mainstreamed a form of
Christian nationalism that would later become a defining force in the Republican Party.

The culture wars did not begin with Trump. They began with Reagan. His moral politics reshaped the nation’s cultural landscape, and the consequences of that ideology soon collided with science, engineering, and public safety — with catastrophic results.

This moralised worldview extended into foreign policy. Reagan cast global conflict as a struggle between righteousness and evil, solvable through willpower, military spending, and technological spectacle. The Strategic Defense Initiative, quickly nicknamed “Star Wars”, promised a missile shield that physicists warned was unworkable. It glamourised Hollywood‑style sci‑fi militarism and absorbed billions of dollars that could have strengthened social programs hollowed out by budget cuts. SDI functioned less as a defence system than as an ideology: a belief that US ingenuity could override scientific limits. The diversion of resources and attention into an unworkable fantasy reflected the same confidence in story over evidence that would soon collide with the realities of engineering and risk.

Reagan, Abortion, and the Politics of Selective Morality

Reagan’s stance on abortion is one of the clearest examples of the selective moral framework that defined his presidency. As governor of California, he signed the 1967 Therapeutic Abortion Act — at the time one of the most liberal abortion laws in the United States. Yet by the early 1980s, he had become the political figurehead of the anti-abortion movement.

This shift was not theological; it was strategic. It aligned him with the Religious Right and the broader
New Right coalition, which framed abortion as the central moral crisis of modern America. Reagan’s 1983 book, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, became a foundational text for the movement. In it, he argued that abortion represented a national abandonment of moral responsibility — a claim that mirrored the rhetoric of the Moral Majority and the Southern Baptist Convention.

The contradiction was stark. Reagan defended the sanctity of “innocent life” while supporting the death penalty, a position that exposed the selective nature of his pro-life stance. Life was protected only within certain moral boundaries; outside them, the state retained the right to kill. This was not a universal ethic but a political theology shaped by the
Southern Strategy and the rise of
Christian nationalism.

The anti-abortion movement that Reagan championed was never solely about the protection of life. It was a mechanism for defining who counted as morally legitimate, and who did not. This narrowing of the moral circle would have profound consequences for public health, civil rights, and the federal response to emerging crises. It set the stage for the administration’s catastrophic inaction during the AIDS epidemic and shaped the culture-war politics that followed.

January 1986: The Challenger Disaster and Reagan’s Denialism

On 28 January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart just 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members. That evening, President Reagan addressed the nation, closing with a line from John Gillespie Magee Jr.’s wartime poem High Flight: they had “slipped the surly bonds of earth… and touched the face of God.”

What Reagan did not acknowledge was the context behind the tragedy. Engineers at both NASA and Morton Thiokol had warned that the freezing temperatures made the launch unsafe, with the O‑rings at risk of catastrophic failure. Their concerns were overruled by management under schedule pressure and political expectations.

Reagan framed the disaster as an act of fate rather than the result of ignored science. He did not address his administration’s broader pressure on NASA to maintain an aggressive launch schedule, nor the culture that prioritised political optics over engineering judgement.

His refusal to confront the systemic causes of the disaster foreshadowed a larger pattern: the elevation of ideology over evidence, the sidelining of experts, and the denial of responsibility. The Challenger explosion became a grim metaphor for the trajectory of his own nation: a system pushed beyond its limits, warned repeatedly, and ultimately undone by choices its leaders refused to face.

The Challenger disaster was not an isolated failure. It was an early warning of a political culture that would, decades later, embrace conspiracy, reject expertise, and elevate ideology over evidence.

This is perhaps the most politically neutral tragedy in Reagan’s record, because it transcends ideology. The engineers who raised alarms were not liberals or conservatives; they were professionals doing their jobs, and they were overruled by institutional pressure and schedule politics. Any honest conservative who believes in competence, accountability, and getting things right should find the management failures here as troubling as any critic does. The Rogers Commission report, which Reagan himself commissioned, confirmed everything the engineers had warned. Credit where it is due: he ordered that inquiry. But the culture that silenced those engineers predated the disaster and outlasted it.

What Reagan Got Right — And Why It Makes the Failures Harder to Accept

Before tracing that long tail of consequences, honesty requires a pause.

Reagan restored a genuine sense of national confidence after the malaise of the late 1970s, and that mattered. His rhetorical optimism was not purely cynical — many who knew him personally attested to his sincere belief in America’s promise. The Cold War did end on his watch, and while historians debate how much credit he deserves, his willingness to negotiate directly with Gorbachev in his second term showed more pragmatism than his rhetoric suggested. These things are real.

Which is precisely why the failures cut so deeply. A presidency with genuine strengths that nonetheless chose to ignore the AIDS crisis, silence its own engineers, and build an economic model that hollowed out the working class it claimed to champion… that is a more troubling legacy than simple villainy would be. Villainy is easy to dismiss. Wasted potential is not.

It is because these genuine achievements existed that the longer legacy demands such careful examination — because a presidency capable of real vision was also capable of choices whose consequences are still unfolding.

The Long Tail: From Reagan to MAGA and RFK Jr.

Reagan’s legacy is not confined to economics or education. It extends into the collapse of public trust, the rise of conspiracy culture, and the erosion of democratic norms.

His administration normalised:

• distrust of government
• hostility to expertise
• suspicion of science
• the elevation of private wealth over public good
• racial dog‑whistles
• anti‑intellectualism

Reagan’s own relationship to science was uneasy. After the 1981 assassination attempt, Nancy Reagan began consulting astrologer Joan Quigley to advise on the president’s schedule, travel, and public appearances, a practice later confirmed by former Chief of Staff Donald Regan in his memoir and reported widely in the press. Decisions about timing and security were sometimes shaped not by intelligence briefings or expert risk assessments but by astrological charts. It was an early sign of a political culture willing to subordinate evidence to belief; a pattern that would deepen across the decades and culminate in today’s conspiracy‑driven attacks on science and public health.

By the time Donald Trump entered politics, the ground had already been prepared. Trump did not invent this worldview. He inherited it.

The modern anti‑science movement — antivax conspiracies, climate denial, attacks on public health — is part of this lineage. The appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to oversee U.S. health policy is not an anomaly. It is the predictable outcome of decades spent undermining expertise and elevating ideology over evidence.

Reagan set the direction. Trump revealed the destination.

The Anti‑State Doctrine: From Reagan’s Smile to Trump’s Hostility

Reagan entered office declaring that “government is the problem,” a line that reshaped American political identity. His administration weakened regulatory agencies, cut public services, and framed civil servants as obstacles rather than guardians of the public good. This rhetoric did not merely shrink government; it delegitimised it.

He reinforced this worldview through appointments designed to undermine the missions of their own agencies: James Watt at Interior, Anne Gorsuch at the EPA, Clarence Thomas at the EEOC. Their mandate was not stewardship but dismantling. Legal scholarship documents this strategy.

Trump inherited this anti‑state doctrine and intensified it. Where Reagan weakened institutions through policy, Trump attacked them directly: the “deep state,” the FBI, the CDC, the courts, the press. Inspectors general were purged, scientific agencies pressured, and loyalty demanded over competence.

The result is a nation where public institutions are no longer seen as shared assets but as partisan battlegrounds; a political culture that began with Reagan’s casual distrust and matured into Trump’s open hostility.

This attitude resurfaced a generation later when Trump promised to “drain the swamp” and cut foreign aid on the false grounds of corruption and fraud, continuing the same anti‑state narrative Reagan had normalised.

The Information War and the Rise of the Leader‑Cult

Reagan mastered the art of media control. His administration restricted access, staged photo opportunities, and bypassed critical journalists through friendly outlets. The press was framed as elitist and out of touch — a soft war waged with charm and discipline.

Trump escalated this into open conflict: “fake news,” “enemy of the people,” banned reporters, and disinformation as strategy. Where Reagan cultivated distrust, Trump weaponised it.

Reagan also pioneered the modern Republican personality cult. His image — the cowboy, the optimist, the father‑figure — became a political brand. The “Reagan Revolution” was not just policy; it was identity.

Trump inherited a party already primed for leader‑worship and amplified it into a movement defined by personal loyalty rather than principles or institutions. The shift from party to persona — from ideology to identity — began with Reagan’s mythmaking and culminated in Trump’s grievance‑driven cult of personality.

The Legacy: From Reagan to Trump: The Downfall of the USA

Reagan claimed credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union, a superpower that ultimately fell under the weight of its own internal decay rather than any external triumph. In doing so, he overlooked the uncomfortable truth that he had set his own nation on a similar path.

The United States did not collapse suddenly. It declined through a series of deliberate choices: to deregulate, to defund, to divide, to moralise, to privatise, to forget.

Reagan accelerated the shift. Trump completed it.

The downfall was not a moment. It was a trajectory — one that began with a president who preached morality while ignoring suffering, who dismantled the institutions that held the country together, and who empowered a movement that would one day turn against democracy itself.

The consequences are now visible: a nation fractured, mistrust entrenched, public health weakened, and a political culture defined by grievance, conspiracy, and fear.

The United States built something remarkable in the mid-twentieth century: broad prosperity, rising life expectancy, a growing middle class. That was not a left-wing achievement or a right-wing one. It was a national one. The argument here is simply that the choices made from the 1980s onward eroded it — and that naming that clearly, across partisan lines, is the first step toward rebuilding it.

The thought was already forming in my mind in 1988, while visiting Britain, standing among the remains of a late‑Roman villa dating from the early fourth century — the final decades before Rome withdrew its legions and left its provinces to fend for themselves. I tried to imagine the villa’s last occupant watching the departing ships, knowing he lived on the edge of an empire collapsing from internal decay. Then and there, I recognised the same pattern across the Pacific: a modern empire beginning its own long decline for many of the same reasons — rot from within, and a trajectory no individual could likely alter.

Reagan promised a shining city on a hill. Then he began to extinguish its lights.

References:

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© 2026 Geoff Allshorn. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri‑Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this blog was prepared. Research/editorial assistance from Copilot AI and Claude AI.