Book Review: Clear Partisanship Diminishes Important History in “Tear Down This Myth”

Despite its centrality to conservative cosmology, the Reagan myth is just that: a concerted, cynical effort to re-invent the fortieth President into a tough-talking, tax-cutting, God-fearing, anti-globalist conservative intellectual that never existed. The real Reagan called himself a “citizen of the world,” talked about but never delivered on the far-right social agenda, negotiated with foes without preconditions (*GASP*), raised taxes after dangerously cutting them, racking up a deficit that crippled his successor and only diminished under Democratic stewardship, committed (or permitted) legal breaches that would make David Addington blush, and, in general, destroyed rather than restored America’s faith in conservatism. The man described by Newt Gingrich as a popular visionary persistently lagged in approval polls behind Bill Clinton, the supposed hyper-partisan. When Reagan was popular, it was because the man was popular – not his political philosophy.

These are facts that every American ought to know, especially as the Republican Party attempts to rebuild itself by hearkening back to a golden age that never really existed. Accordingly, Will Bunch’s Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, which makes all these points & more, is a vital warning about the dangers of Reaganomics. Unfortunately, the book’s reach is doubtful. Bunch divides his time between history and polemic, leading to a kind of “mission creep” that does his vitally important thesis a grave disservice. As the reader learns more about the history of the Reagan years, Bunch increasingly slips in easy political points, forcing the reader to question the objectivity of his severable & independently verifiable historical narrative. Salvation is in the extensive endnotes, yes, but authors shouldn’t depend on endnotes to rehabilitate their credibility.

Ultimately, the best cure for revisionist history is objectivity, and the appearance thereof. Bunch succeeds on the first point, but without the second, what’s the point? Fighting the right’s Reagan myth will require a historian, not a pundit.