Paul Fanlund: How Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan connect to Scott Walker

[hue]

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/writers/paul_fanlund/paul-fanlund-how-richard-nixon-and-ronald-reagan-connect-to/article_21a708d7-c396-5aa0-bd87-5717d48e298a.html

Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political theorist, is credited with first describing the United States as “exceptional” back in the 1830s.

“American exceptionalism,” a familiar phrase in recent years, generally holds that ours is a uniquely good and just nation, born from revolution and evolved as a more or less perfect democracy, a model for countries everywhere.

Jelani Cobb, a University of Connecticut history professor, sees it differently. “I think that there is an idea of American exceptionalism that is misunderstood and misapplied,” he said in a podcast by The New Yorker, where he is a regular contributor.

“It becomes an idea that America is as close to blameless … as any political state could be. And being confronted with huge moral wrongs is taken as an indictment of everything that people hold dear.”

Cobb wishes exceptionalism represented “a more reasoned and perhaps more mature approach to this idea, saying that the people who founded this country were intimately familiar with the shortcomings of humanity and human capacity to do wrong,” pointing out that some among the founders were slaveholders...

...Walker imagines himself a 21st century Reagan, capable, in his mind, of being president. In his 2013 book, titled “Unintimidated,” Walker invokes Reagan’s relentless optimism in harshly critiquing Mitt Romney’s failed presidential campaign. Walker, we are left to infer, would run more like Reagan did.

In fact, Walker’s obsession with Reagan is, as I’ve previously written, genuinely creepy. Walker writes how he and his wife host an annual party on Reagan’s birthday and serve the late president’s favorites: “macaroni and cheese casserole, and red, white and blue Jelly Belly jelly beans” with musicians performing patriotic songs and Irish music, according to his book.

In Walker, the politics of division that Nixon set in motion and Reagan helped evolve still endure — minus Nixon’s intellect and Reagan’s charm.

[Half-Century Man]

1. More to the point.

Walker has sharply separated Wisconsin along urban and non-urban lines, also regularly dividing us on race, culture, gender, education and occupation.

Walker survives in the cracks between us, the ones he himself has created. The same for Cruz, King, Gohmert, Alex Jones, etc. When we close those gaps, they have no where to be.
Exactly has he was taught.

Some adored him, while others regarded him as “a phony and a hustler.” Perlstein writes: “In this book Ronald Reagan is not a uniter. He is in essence a divider.”

A book review passage in The Economist summed Reagan up nicely: “To the rage of those longing for America to grow up and face its flaws, along came a man capable of turning its most complex problem into a moral fable, in which bad and good might struggle for a while but American greatness and innocence would surely triumph in the end.”

Or consider these headlines from The Week: “How Ronald Reagan turned America into a nation of children … A new book argues Reagan’s rhetoric infantilized our political culture — with devastating consequences.”

(An excerpt from a book and a literary review by the Economist.)