We Need to Reckon With Ronald Reagan's Legacy

The Atlantic

17-06-2025

Everything We Once Believed In
I didn't wake up today thinking I would write a thank-you to The Atlantic, but after reading David Brooks's 'Everything We Once Believed In,' I feel compelled. For so long, I've felt the pain and embarrassment of seeing my country forsake its honor while most of the people I used to see as political allies cheered—but I've never been able to express it adequately. Brooks put my feelings to words. His article gives me hope that our nation can and likely will be made stronger over time.
Tom Dornish
I always look forward to David Brooks's articles and often agree with much of what he writes. However, his continued lionization of the Reagan administration—and Ronald Reagan himself—strikes me as an odd blind spot.
Brooks's critiques of progressive missteps, including those outlined in ' How the Ivy League Broke America ' and reiterated in his recent article, have given me much to reflect on. But I don't believe Brooks has paid sufficient attention to the role the Reagan Revolution played in undermining the American dream and weakening the working class.
Consider Reagan's massive tax cuts, which drove a marked rise in income inequality. His firing of unionized air-traffic controllers dealt a major blow to organized labor, and his divisive racial rhetoric—his use of the infamous 'Welfare Queen' trope; his 'States' Rights' speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi—feels in keeping with the reactionaries of today whom Brooks criticizes.
This doesn't diminish the legitimate critiques of the left. But a fuller reckoning with Reagan's legacy—by Brooks, especially—would offer a more balanced and persuasive analysis. It might also help his critique of liberal excesses land with readers who see Reagan not as a paragon of leadership, but as a key architect of our current inequality and division.
Adam Udell
Downingtown, Pa.
It's not every day that a public intellectual castigates himself for a 'pathetic' lack of foresight, and David Brooks is to be commended for doing so. I was struck, though, that nowhere in his discussion of 19th- and early-20th-century reform movements, nor in his call for a 'Whig-like working-class abundance agenda,' does he mention labor unions. As Brooks surely knows, there would never have been a middle class in the United States if unionized workers hadn't fought to obtain a fairer share of the fruits of their labor. I am a proud union member at The New Yorker. Any viable 'working-class abundance agenda' must recognize and celebrate workers' right to organize in the workplace.
Douglas Watson
New York, N.Y.
I did not attend an elite university of the kind David Brooks describes until graduate school. But I never experienced anything that would have ignited the bitterness that Brooks diagnoses in the reactionaries. I don't think it's fair to blame universities for our current political predicament. My higher-education experiences promoted ethical behavior and instilled in me a commitment to serve society with the knowledge I gained.
Barbara K. Sullivan-Watts
Kingston, R.I.
David Brooks's 'Everything We Once Believed In' was characteristic of all his work: insightful, and chastening but hopeful. I wish I shared his optimism that conservatism may yet find its way back.
I think Brooks may misunderstand the ascendant right. Although he correctly identified its source in the snark of The Dartmouth Review, the ascendant right is anything but reactionary—it is triumphalist. Triumphalism is the kissing cousin of nihilism. Those of us who joined the conservative movement in the late '70s and early '80s had read our Edmund Burke too well to imagine conservatism sweeping away all before it to establish a conservative utopia. Indeed, we were conservatives precisely because we believed there was no such thing: Here we have no abiding city. We were a distinct minority fighting an uphill battle that we could never truly win. Those who joined the movement during the second Reagan administration and later were, I think, more attracted to power for its own sake. That is what we are seeing today.
Brooks fails to properly blame conservatives for the rise of this triumphalist right. Conservatism is institutionalist, but the one institution we neglected in the '90s was the most important of all: the family. We got distracted by the culture wars and ignored the economic challenges that families faced. We were reading Milton Friedman when we should have been reading Pope Leo XIII. If the triumphalist right has seized control of conservatism, then we conservatives have only ourselves to blame.
Rockland, Mass.
I am genuinely heartened by the constructive honesty in David Brooks's mea culpa. Still, after reading through his article several times, I am left with the sense that he has not yet thoroughly plumbed the questions his reflections raise.
Why didn't Brooks see this coming? Did conservatives in the 1980s really think that reactionaries would simply pave the way for the conservative agenda and then allow themselves to be shunted aside? Perhaps conservatives then, as now, saw themselves as working with the lesser of two evils. To bring about the civic renewal Brooks hopes for, however, they will need to fully separate themselves from the reactionaries and focus again on the public interest.
In 1895, an article in The Atlantic described a group of politicians called the 'mugwumps,' who worked to free themselves from party affiliations and focused on what was best for the country, to significant effect. The mugwumps, it noted, 'form a class, never a large one, of persons who possess the power of seeing fairly the opposite sides of a question, and who lack the barnacle faculty of sticking tight to whatever one is attached, whether it be the steadfast rock or the restless keel.' If just a handful of members of Congress from both parties were willing to act in a similar manner, the rebirth Brooks hopes for might actually become a reality.
I applaud David Brooks's essay on not foreseeing the current 'conservative' takeover of the country. What I don't share with Brooks, though, is his optimism regarding the United States' ability to recover. Although he cites numerous historical examples of nations that bounced back after disaster, there is one variable that wasn't present in those cases: climate change.
The Trump administration has moved to gut decades-old environmental regulations, as well as federal expertise and oversight. It has eliminated funding for climate action and doubled down on fossil fuels. This means that even our current, arguably modest efforts to reduce carbon emissions are being reversed, potentially making it impossible to prevent catastrophic climate change. Once this happens, the wildfires, floods, and extreme weather of recent years will seem like paradise.
So while the United States as a democracy may eventually recover, it will likely be too late for our planet.
Michael Wright
Glen Rock, Pa.
Behind the Cover
In this month's cover story (' Witness '), Elizabeth Bruenig describes her experience watching executions during her years of reporting on the death penalty. What she has seen has not altered her conviction that capital punishment must end, but, as she writes, 'it has changed my understanding of why.' The death penalty promises justice, or at least vengeance, but it forecloses the possibility of mercy. For our cover, The Atlantic 's creative director, Peter Mendelsund, painted an image of the corridor leading to an execution chamber, and a prisoner lying prone on the table within it.
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