On November 3^rd, 1984, Andrew Kopkind wrote in America’s oldest weekly journal of political and cultural news, opinion and analysis that was established in 1865 – The Nation:

Not since the era of the late junior Senator from Wisconsin has an American political figure given this country an eponymous ism. Reaganism is now an established movement and an important historical event. Its roots can be discerned in periods long past, and its consequences will carry beyond the Presidential tenure, and perhaps the earthly existence, of the man who gave it a name. … Like other native American movements – Populism, Progressivism and the various “new radicalisms” of this century – Reaganism lacks sharp ideological definition and programmatic coherence. It has not yet produced a unitary creed to resolve the differences among its components: the Moral Majority, the corporate class, blue-collar ethnics and the country-club set. … those who are making the movement have a precise idea of their goals and a fair sense of the strategies to achieve them. … The rise of Reaganism is focused in the electoral arena this year, but it is not primarily a phenomenon of political campaigns, public office or even Republican Administrations. A landslide victory for Reagan and his allies next week would certainly advance the movement, but a good Democratic showing would not stop or reverse it. For power is already in place to continue the movement’s mission in the coming years. The first targets of choice are clear: all those liberal institutions that have defined and shaped American culture for fifty years or more – the press, the churches, unions, academia, local public education, urban government, philanthropic foundations, the artistic establishment, Hollywood, publishing, Federal service, the liberal professions and their organizations. They will come under increasing pressure to redirect their orientation along lines that have already been drawn, to change their social roles, to reassess their values – even the term “liberalism” has been dropped from political discourse. A major ideological conflict is under way. It’s not necessary to establish a conspiracy or identify a cabal to confirm the reality of Reaganism. … Reaganism underscores the issues and subsumes the symbols of the electoral debate. Grenada, Central America, the Pentagon budget, taxes and deficits, school prayer, abortion, family values, patriotism, leadership – those words have specific referents, and in an ordinary campaign they would acquire no larger meaning. … Reaganism’s long-term policy of destroying socialism and preventing revolution in the Third World … Defense spending is not a set of figures but a way of increasing militarization of America’s political economy, and its cultural life as well. Taxes and deficits are tools for increasing the power and enriching the coffers of the corporate class. Family values refer to more rigid social controls, leadership means authoritarianism, school prayer and support for religious education are means of hastening the privatization of American society – a key strategy. … Reaganism has developed from the several trends and transient phenomena that followed the convulsive social activity of the 1960s. It takes ideas, energies and some personnel from such varied elements as the George Wallace movement, neo-conservatism, the New Right, neoliberalism, fundamentalism, post-feminism, the “back-to-basics” movement in education, the “return to roots” trend in Judaism, Catholic orthodoxy, the white backlash to integration and affirmative action, the straight-male hostility to women’s liberation and gay rights, the Anglophobe aversion to bilingualism. It also draws on historic American Populism, especially its racist, nativist and regional themes. It twines with some curiously contradictory threads in Progressivism: America Firstism and moral imperialism, a distrust of politics and politicians, an antagonism to Wall Street and monopolies. For its personal values it draws on social Darwinism, but its economic vision looks quite the other way, to a heavenly city of corporate control. Chronologically, Reaganism belongs to a late period of America’s imperial drama, as fear of impending doom and a sense of inevitable loss prepares the actors for unwonted roles. Many people or groups of people feel that they lost something, or lost out, in the Vietnam era and after. … There is nothing new or inherently sinister in the process of ideological institution building. Liberals did a good job of it for many decades and succeeded in creating a liberal value system for the whole country. Radicals made a stab at the same thing in the 1960s. … Reaganism grasps that simple and profound reality, and is taking appropriate measures. … For a long time liberals carried on a painful search for “new ideas,” a self-defeating maneuver which merely confirmed the popular impression that the liberal intellectual and political program was finished. Next, liberals began adopting Reaganist constructs – family values, national security, and patriotism – and attempted to give them progressive content.

But what about the founder of what has become known as Reaganism? In the next part I will examine and relate the history and diversity of one of the best presidents to date in American history; and while George W. Bush has, on occasion, alluded that he falls into the ideology established by Ronald Reagan, he doesn’t come close in his actions and policies during the two terms he served as president. Ronald Reagan was not great because he belonged to a certain political party; he was great because of his character, genuine love for America and appreciation of the American people, America traditions and American history. Something to keep in mind as you formulate your pick of a presidential candidate for 2008.

I believe the author is referring to the death of Senator John W. Reynolds, Democrat who died of heart failure in 1984, World War II veteran (1942-1946) and was also the Governor of Wisconsin from 1963 to 1965.

Progressivism has given way to liberalism after its long history of gradual change, but continued to strive to assimilate the concept of socialism and the welfare state. In other words, the change in descriptive terminology has changed, but their concept of the basic population remains clear within the concept of its inceptors – Karl Marx, Lenin, et cetera – who all proclaim the common public as useful idiots.

The primary decade of the advent of progressive socialism in America, and those who committed themselves as protesting college students then are now a part of the academic and political group who still remain in the mind set of the 1960s. And how can this be so when that decade represented the birth of the Civil Rights movement, long overdue after the Civil War, in which the phrase “all men are created equal” became more than just written words in the preamble of the American institution?

To be continued ...