Despite his stated admiration, Trump is no Reagan: While conservatives aim to conserve, extremists want to push against all limits, venturing into the great beyond—a potentially abyssal, violent beyond.
Reagan (2024). Directed by: Sean McNamara. Starring: Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller, Jon Voight. (IMDb)
I must confess that Ronald Reagan’s appeal has always mystified me somewhat. Reagan (2024) the movie goes some way toward filling in the blanks, and anyone interested in thinking critically about U.S. politics would benefit from watching it. Despite being widely panned by critics—it currently holds a putrescent eighteen-percent score on Rotten Tomatoes—the film helps account for the long-standing appeal of conservatism in American society. Perhaps in spite of itself, it also demonstrates just how far conservatism has fallen, to such a degree that Trump’s MAGA movement now bears little resemblance to its ideological forbears.
The lead actor Dennis Quaid portrays Reagan as a down-to-earth, essentially likable, folksy, hard-working man motivated by transcendental values: a rock-solid faith in the Lord. Cynically urbane secular liberals may roll their eyes at Quaid/Reagan’s almost childlike pieties, but it is worth bearing in mind that even in 2024, some three-quarters of the U.S. population believes in God, and much of what passes for politics in America is really secularized political theology. In a short and surprisingly moving scene—part of a hectic newsreel montage effectively cutting through multiple decades—Quaid/Reagan prays for his mother’s soul: “Thank you, Lord, for my mother. Take care of her—I know you will. Your faithful servant has come home.” Anyone who doesn’t understand the scene’s strange potency, including a future president prostrate before the Absolute, will never really be able to grasp the U.S. political situation.
But besides relaying some of the comforting qualities of religion, and seemingly by implication conservatism, Reagan paradoxically ends up showing just how dated traditionalist conservatism now feels: Trump is expressly not a conservative but a radical; not so much a traditionalist as an extremist—threatening to deport 18 million undocumented immigrants, for instance, or plotting to variously bomb Mexico or deploy kill teams across the U.S.-Mexico border, or buy (extract) the territory of Greenland from Denmark, or defending white nationalists as “some very fine people.” Trump represents something far more sinister than Reagan’s crude mix of neoliberal economic policy and social conservatism: MAGA is at once a violent intensification of conservatism and a mutated deviation from it. Conservatives, lest we forget, want to conserve; extremists, on the other hand, want to push against all limits, venturing into the great beyond—a potentially abyssal, violent beyond.
Above all, Reagan tries to communicate an essential decency said to be at the core of the conservative project; say what you will of Regan’s administration, but at least he didn’t plan on populating his cabinet with thuggish, tattooed buffoons or suspected predators and criminals. The film celebrates 1980s conservatism with great sentimentalism and nostalgia, even if its overall message is built on a mirage: Reagan himself was a joyful participant in the project of racialization and demonization of the poor (railing against “welfare queens,” for instance), equated concentration camp victims with 18-year-old Nazi soldiers (in the so-called Bitburg controversy), and viciously attacked organized labor (e.g. shutting down the PATCO strike in 1981), to name just a few benighted episodes from his presidency.
But the affect of nostalgia is highly effective, politically speaking. No wonder, then, that Trump himself has tried to tap into the nostalgic allure of Reagan and siphon it off for his own political gain: Quaid himself has come out in support of Trump, personally appearing in pro-Trump rallies ahead of the 2024 presidential election, and at a campaign rally, Trump praised the movie:
I thought the movie was great. Dennis Quaid is here. [Turning to Quaid] Did you like Reagan? He liked Reagan. I think you have to like Reagan to play him that way. You did a beautiful job.
The irony, of course, is that it is a job so beautiful, to speak in Trumpisms, that the movie actually ends up undermining the broad ideological project it seems to want to uphold; Reagan feels cheap and cheesy, on the whole, but it effectively draws attention to the abysmal state of the contemporary Right, if only by way of contrast; as Noam Chomsky has said, the GOP is not so much a political party as a "radical insurgency.” The supreme irony is that the Right of today owes everything to Reagan and his political legacy—and so we must pass beyond Reagan the movie, to Reagan himself, and to the political events that followed in his wake, in an attempt to parse how we got from there to here. On this point, the film remains silent.
Originally published in The Theory Brief.