Today, though, you’d never know any of this happened. In the two decades since it bottomed out, Reagan’s image has been resurrected, thanks largely to a relentless campaign from conservative activists. Will Bunch, who writes for the Philadelphia Daily News and is a senior fellow at Media Matters, chronicled Reagan’s image makeover — and the reality of his record as president — in his 2008 book “Tear Down This Myth.” We spoke with him recently about how the myth of Reagan has taken hold, and whether there’s any truth to it.

I’m really struck by the poll that showed Carter much more popular than Reagan. It’s not something that people would think is possible if you asked them now. Can you talk about how we reached that point, back in the early ’90s?

By 1992, Reagan and Carter were kind of being compared as ex-presidents, and on a lot of levels, Jimmy Carter has had this very successful ex-presidency with the work he’s done for Habitat for Humanity and from the other peace-oriented types of missions he’s been on around the world. Reagan received an enormous amount of criticism a couple of years after he left office, particularly for an episode that’s probably not going to get mentioned a lot this week, which is accepting, I believe it was $2 million, to give a speech in Japan. At the time, it was unusual and kind of jarring for Reagan to accept that much money to give a speech, plus the fact that a bunch of millionaires in California had all chipped in to buy Reagan a house, which a lot of people thought was kind of suspicious and didn’t look too different from bribery.

Also, Nancy Reagan actually published her memoirs (1989′s “My Turn“), and they were very poorly received as being kind of nasty and vindictive. And so there were a lot of negative feelings about Reagan. But the real reason Reagan had fairly high unpopularity in the early 1990s was that people were not happy with the aftermath of his policies as president. The American economy was doing very poorly in the early 1990s, there was a recession during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Bush 41′s presidency basically collapsed because he was forced to increase taxes to deal with the continuing deficits that were a legacy of Reagan. There was high anxiety among the American people starting in Reagan’s second term about the loss of jobs in manufacturing, the growing clout of Asia — so all of these things really caused Reagan to be viewed pretty negatively at the time. Bill Clinton campaigned very aggressively against Reaganomics. When Clinton was able to get some of his economic policies through Congress in the first two years of his presidency, Time ran a cover with a picture of Reagan upside down, and it was about the death of Reaganomics. That was the tone in the early ’90s, before this conservative campaign to build what I call the Reagan myth got started.

Going back a step to his time in office, the popular version of Reagan’s presidency is that he was elected kind of overwhelmingly, and then in 1984 reelected in a 49-state landslide, and then he just rides off into the sunset at the end of his term. But that second term was — there were some serious problems in there, weren’t there?

Oh, absolutely. A lot of people — and I mean people in Congress who were in a position to do something about it — felt that Reagan possibly committed impeachable offenses in the Iran-Contra scandal. There were several reasons he wasn’t impeached. One, I think, was his age and some concern about his mental state, and the fact that he was in his second term. You have to remember that in the late 1980s, it really didn’t feel like it was that long after Watergate — and I think there’s a tendency in politics to not want to relive something that’s so traumatic. I mean, obviously, Congress had shed its qualms about impeachment by the late 1990s, but I think with Reagan there was a reluctance to do that.

Reagan’s poll numbers really suffered a lot in the last two years of his presidency, partly because of Iran-Contra, but the other thing was the huge crash of the stock market in October 1987, which in the short run caused people to really start to reexamine Reagan’s economic policies and whether the economic boom of the mid-1980s had maybe been a house of cards. I believe there was a poll that showed maybe a third of the American people wanted to see Reagan resign before his term was over, and certainly his approval ratings fell back under 50 percent.

The thing about Reagan and his approval ratings is they really went way up and way down. I mean, he was elected by a pretty big margin in 1980, probably because of Jimmy Carter’s unpopularity. Then, when he came into office, he cut taxes and always gets so much credit for improving the economy — except the economy got much worse over the next year, to where unemployment hit a high point, I think 10.8 percent. And Reagan’s approval ratings dropped much lower than Obama’s ever has, down to 35 percent. And then in ’84 — talk about good timing — he really got the most benefits of the inevitable capitalist cycle of the reversal of the economy. It was really roaring back in ’84, and the Democrats didn’t really nominate the strongest opponent in [Walter] Mondale, and Reagan did win a big landslide. But then his popularity really plunged again because of Iran-Contra and nagging worries about aspects of the economy.

When he left office, his approval ratings were pretty high, and I think that after all the failed presidencies that came before him — Nixon, Carter and Ford — there was a sense of relief that he’d gotten through two terms and nothing disastrous had happened. There was goodwill toward Reagan because of his personality and his age. So he left office with a pretty high approval rating. And when he left office and people started to ponder the effects of his policies, his poll numbers dropped again only to be resurrected in the late 1990s.

But here we are just 15 or 20 years later and that whole story you just outlined is forgotten by so many people. What was the turning point from, say, that summer of ’92, when Carter was actually more popular than Reagan, to where we are today?

There was always an effort on the right, starting from 1989 on, to try to give Reagan credit for winning the Cold War. The funny thing was, at first the public didn’t really buy into that because the public was following the day in and day out of the news very carefully and felt what I think most scholars feel, which is that the credit for the Soviet Union collapsing largely belongs to Mikhail Gorbachev — that it was Gorbachev pressing for these reforms and Reagan was an external force that wasn’t quite as important. I quote in “Tear Down This Myth” a USA Today poll that was taken after the Berlin Wall collapsed (in October 1989) and a majority of Americans credited Gorbachev and only 14 percent credited Reagan.

How the myth gets started is that memories get softer and you have one group that gets very aggressive in pushing this notion that it was all Reagan’s doing, that it was because of his defense buildup. The other thing is, during the 1990s, it was a great time economically — probably better than it should have been because of the dot-com boom. At least among one class there was a lot of affluence in America — and there were improvements that reached down to lower income. Black unemployment, for example, dropped during Clinton’s presidency. It created this feeling that America had been on a roll and people forgot the recession of the early 1990s and how bad things had been and their anger with Reagan. They were more willing to say, “Well, this all started with Reagan,” forgetting all those bad things that happened in the ’80s and ’90s.

It’s no accident that the push to glorify Ronald Reagan started in 1997, because it was the year that Bill Clinton started his second term. He had just defeated Bob Dole overwhelmingly and things looked bleak for the broader conservative movement. They didn’t seem to have anybody on the horizon to be a leader of the party, so there was this very conscious and calculated effort to look back. Something else that you can’t overlook is that in 1997 Reagan was still alive and he announced with a lot of class and dignity in 1994 that he had Alzheimer’s, so the public hadn’t actually seen Reagan for three years. And the public impression of Nancy Reagan softened quite a bit, for good reasons — she was out there pushing for stem cell research and other things. It would have been very difficult to criticize Reagan because of his health, a situation that engendered personal goodwill.

And that was something else conservatives could use as they launched this campaign to build up the Reagan legacy. They call it the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, started in 1997 by Grover Norquist. It was this aggressive push to rename as many things as possible across the country for Reagan. It started with the airport in Washington, which they successfully renamed Reagan Airport. And it’s funny to see news from that time, because a lot of Democrats were biting their tongues because they had no good memories of Reagan’s presidency, but because of his health nobody was going to vote against renaming the airport for Reagan. Not all of the ideas have been enacted. We still don’t have Reagan’s picture on a $50 bill, or alternating on the dime with FDR, as some people proposed. But there are an increasing number of Ronald Reagan statues across the country, and you can almost drive across the Sun Belt continuously on some sort of Ronald Reagan boulevard or freeway or highway. Not surprisingly, the push to rename things for Reagan has been more successful where conservatism is the most popular. 

It seems that a lot of people aren’t even aware of what Reagan actually did as president, and you can point out areas where he clearly didn’t do things that you would call conservative — immigration comes to mind, with the amnesty in 1986. Do the Reagan deifiers even know what they’re worshiping?

Especially now that Reagan’s passed away, I think they’re able to purport this idyllic, mythological version of Reagan who happens coincidentally to support all the pillars of the modern conservative movement. Political movements need a hero and Ronald Reagan — the word “roles” is often associated with him because of his acting career, and his final role has been hero. But to do that, this movement had to do a rewrite, and things like the amnesty for undocumented immigrants had to go to the cutting room floor. He increased taxes on a number of occasions, either to undo the damage of his first tax cut, or because — unlike modern conservatives — he would actually engage in negotiations and try to compromise with Democrats on certain issues. All these things get lost because they don’t fit the storyline that they’re trying to push out there.

What goes through your head when you hear conservatives talk about Ronald Reagan now?

Well, I think they’re misusing Reagan to push policies that in 2011 are destructive and could continue to be destructive to America. The whole tax thing is kind of insane — that you can never raise taxes, which is not anything like what Reagan actually did. Even when he was governor of California, he actually signed the biggest tax increase that the governor of any state had ever signed at that time. So Reagan never subscribed to the idea that you can never raise taxes. The other thing that really rang true in the Bush years is using the great sound bites Reagan produced — like “tear down this wall” or “evil empire” — to justify things like the war in Iraq.

I don’t know if you saw “The Social Network,” but there’s a line in it about how every good creation myth needs a devil. Does this help explain why, just as Reagan’s popularity has gone up in the last two decades, Jimmy Carter’s has taken a hit? Is he a casualty of the creation of the Reagan myth?

Yeah. The issue that was really the centerpiece of Carter’s presidency was energy — trying to promote useful alternative energy. And I don’t see how you can look at what’s happened over the last 25 years and not say that Carter was right: that we should have been researching alternative energy the whole time, and as a result we’ve fallen behind other countries; that we’re addicted to oil and unable to shake that. But if you listen to talk radio, Jimmy Carter is reduced to wearing the sweater and turning the thermostat down at the White House. They’ve done such a good job creating Carter as kind of an anti-Reagan — that part of Reagan’s greatness was that he saved America from the malaise, which, by the way, is a word that Carter never actually uttered. This has become the modern equivalent of waving the bloody shirt was for the post-Civil War Republicans: waving the Jimmy Carter cardigan sweater.

On a trip to the United States after winning the Nobel Prize in 1984, Bishop Desmond Tutu memorably declared that Reagan’s policy was ”immoral, evil and totally un-Christian.” Reagan’s record on South Africa was also marked by at least one embarrassing gaffe, when he told a radio interviewer in 1985: “They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country — the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated — that has all been eliminated.” Of course, that was simply not true, and Reagan later walked the statement back. 

To learn more about  Reagan’s policy on South Africa, I spoke with David Schmitz, a historian at Whitman College who has written widely on U.S. foreign policy. His new book is a biography of Brent Scowcroft. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Where did things stand between the U.S. and South Africa when Reagan entered office in 1981?

Carter had imposed sanctions and restrictions on South Africa and also had publicly criticized the South African government many times. Reagan went back to supporting the government, and he did it under the guise of the policy of “constructive engagement.” This policy had been worked out by Chester Crocker, later a Reagan State Department official, who wrote about it in Foreign Affairs in 1980.

Can you define that term, constructive engagement?

The idea of constructive engagement was that there were moderates in the South African government and so you wanted to encourage them. And if you constructively engaged with them, they would promote gradual change, political reform and so on. But to just oppose the government would make it intransigent and that would create greater polarization, and that was a situation that only extremists would benefit from. The Reagan administration saw the African National Congress (ANC) as a dangerous, pro-communist movement. So the notion of constructive engagement was gradual reform. It was also linked to Reagan supporting the Sullivan principles as a proper way to bring about change.

What were the Sullivan principles?

They were an idea promoted by an American religious leader, Reverend Leon Sullivan, a Baptist minister in Philadelphia. What he said was that, if corporations agree to certain standards of fair employment in South Africa, they shouldn’t be subjected to protests or divestiture. At that time there were a lot of protests in the United States demanding that universities and corporations divest from South Africa. Sullivan argued that these principles would be part of a middle ground between two extremes that would allow for change and betterment of the conditions of blacks in South Africa. Reagan seized upon that. Constructive engagement was presented as a middle ground between apartheid forever and those that wanted immediate change — which Reagan and Crocker argued would lead to chaos that the Soviets would take advantage of.

So what did that policy mean on the ground? Were the two governments close?

Yes, the Reagan administration worked very closely with [South African Prime Minister] P.W. Botha. He came to Washington and there were meetings in Europe as well. Reagan gave a lot of public support to the South African government, portraying Botha as a moderate who was willing to start political reforms and would stay on the side of the United States and help us block Soviet influence in southern Africa.

How did that square with what was actually going on in South Africa?

Nothing was going on. The reforms were cosmetic at best. Sullivan would eventually say in 1987 that it didn’t work. The crackdown of 1986 and the reimposition of martial law just made a total lie out of the notion that there were moderates in the Afrikaner government.

Talk about that crackdown and the U.S. response to it.

There was a lot of pressure building up in the United States, and Congress was threatening to pass legislation that would put sanctions on South Africa and restrict the flow of American aid to South Africa. Reagan always said he would veto that. Then Botha gave a speech on Aug. 15, 1985, in the face of increasing unrest in South Africa — this known as the “Rubicon speech.” And he said that South Africa would never accept one man, one vote in a unitary system. Real democracy, he said, would lead to chaos. This disappointed Reagan. But he stuck with Botha. Pressure built both inside of South Africa and outside, and the protest inside of South Africa led to the imposition of martial law. Congress then voted sanctions.

Was this the incident in which sanctions were voted and Reagan vetoed and was then overruled?

Yes. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum took the lead of the Republicans. She said that the situation in South Africa was virtually beyond hope and that constructive engagement was irrelevant. This regime was not going to change unless forced to. The United States was just party to this continued oppression. That sort of broke the Republican unity behind Reagan on this policy. The larger context was that Reagan had just failed in the Philippines in trying to back [Ferdinand] Marcos to the end. The Reagan doctrine was collapsing in Central America as well, with opposition growing to his interventions there. So that was also now happening in South Africa. The House vote wasn’t even recorded, it was so overwhelming in favor of imposing sanctions. The Senate vote was more than enough to override the veto, which it did.

What about U.S. policy toward the opposition groups like the ANC and Nelson Mandela?

They called the ANC terrorists. It was just continuing this notion that the ANC members are the extremists and the South African government has these moderates, and you’re going to end up with one extreme against the other if you don’t work with the government. Clearly, it never worked. This was a flawed policy.

By the end of the Reagan years, had the policy changed?

Well, Reagan’s attitudes hadn’t changed, but the policy changed because Congress changed it and voted sanctions. That cut off a lot of the flow of American capital. Sullivan renounced his position. Bishop Desmond Tutu came to the United States in 1984 after being awarded the Nobel Prize. He speaks in the House of Representatives and says that constructive engagement is a farce, and that it just entrenched the existing order. He said Reagan’s policy was “immoral, evil and totally un-Christian.”

After Reagan met with Tutu, he was asked at a press conference to talk about their meeting. Reagan said, “It is counterproductive for one country to splash itself all over the headlines, demanding that another government do something.” Then he claimed that black tribal leaders had expressed their support for American investment. He was trying to discredit Tutu’s argument that U.S. policy had hurt blacks. Anti-communism trumped so much in Reagan’s view of the non-Western world.

Would you argue that Reagan’s foreign policy extended the life of the regime in South Africa?

Yes. It gave it life. It gave it hope that the United States would continue to stick with it. It gave it continued flow of aid as well as ideological support. It delayed the changes that were going to come. Then you had the big crackdowns in ’86 and ’87. So there was harm in the lengthening. There was harm in the violence that continued.

I think a lot of well-meaning people in the United States bought the Sullivan principles and constructive engagement, because it seems reasonable. Reagan would say, “If we’re willing to talk to the Russians, why aren’t we willing to talk to the South African government?” We’re going to encourage them to moderate and reform — it sounds reasonable. But there was no real pressure. It was all talk. And it was exposed as that.

“From the fireside house, President Reagan suddenly said to me, ‘What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’

“I said, ‘No doubt about it.’”

“He said, ‘We too.’”

“So that’s interesting,” Gorbachev said to much laughter.

That hypothetical space invaders scenario — a sort of “this island Earth” fantasy that sounds profound to either the screenwriter of a 1950s B picture or a very high college freshman — was so compelling to Reagan that he repeated it in public speeches, on multiple occasions, while president.

Here he is, speaking to the U.N.:

Addressing high school students in 1985:

Reagan talked about this alien threat all the time, to the apparent consternation of his staff. When his 1987 U.N. assembly speech didn’t include the alien story, he wrote, “and toward the end perhaps I still would like my ‘fantasy’ — how quickly our differences world wide would vanish if creatures from another planet should threaten this world.”

If Ronald Reagan was a genuine UFO nutter or simply in thrall to a simplistic sci-fi plot makes no difference to me. But the fact remains that he spent a lot of time talking about spacemen. Spacemen killed, according to my estimates, no Americans, at all, during Reagan’s presidency.

Reagan never mentioned AIDS until he was directly questioned about it in his second term, and he never gave a public statement on the epidemic until 1987, when 20,000-30,000 people had already died from it. When it came up in press briefings, it was, at first, a subject of humorous cajoling. Later, the president was advised not to say that children couldn’t catch AIDS from casual contact. Members of the Reagan inner circle attacked Surgeon General C. Everett Koop for encouraging sex education and condom use. The Centers for Disease Control was underfunded and there was never a comprehensive plan for dealing with the epidemic.

The president mentions in a 1985 diary entry, in passing, that Rock Hudson was rumored to have AIDS — and the topic doesn’t come up again for two years. (And for some reason, late in his term, he begins consistently misspelling it, as “Aides.”) There isn’t much evidence that he devoted much time at all to even thinking about AIDS, which was killing a frankly staggering number of Americans throughout his entire presidency. Edmund Morris recalls him wondering if “the Lord brought down this plague [because] illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments,” which does not sound like the statement of a man who’s given the disease much thought.

Whether he himself was an anti-gay bigot who thought that the disease was a punishment from an angry god or simply a callous old man (surrounded by Christian right ideologues) who didn’t concern himself with what was killing so many homosexuals hardly matters. People died either way, because the government didn’t make fighting the epidemic a priority.

Maybe, instead of imagining or wishing for an extraterrestrial threat that could’ve united mankind in an all-out militaristic space battle to save the future, the Great Communicator could’ve spared some of that SDI money to battle an actual, existent threat, with a similar disregard for borders or nations.

Stockman is currently working on a book about the financial crisis, and on Thursday he spoke with Salon about what happened in the 1980s, and how the economic decisions made during the Reagan era connect directly with where we are today. To provide some context for the interview, he also provided his own short written analysis of the Reagan economic record, which Salon is including here in abridged form.

The Reagan Revolution was a Lincoln Day Dinner speech. It never happened in the real world of fiscal policy. During the 1980′s, Big Government got bigger and the Federal tax burden was just shuffled, not reduced. The main fiscal legacy of the Reagan era is that the Federal debt was raised from $1 trillion to $3 trillion. Unfortunately, when the economy rebounded after Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker’s conquest of runaway inflation, Republicans embraced the dangerous shibboleth that deficit-financed tax cuts are good for growth.

The reason spending went up is that there was no reform of the big entitlements like Social Security and Medicare and not a single department or function of government was eliminated…. Further, many of the initial cuts in discretionary programs were restored over the years, and the cost of interest on the ballooning Federal debt rose significantly.

The tax burden rose during the Reagan era as well. Specifically, when Reagan left office Federal taxes accounted for 18.4 percent of GDP — a figure slightly higher than the 1960-80 average of 18.0 percent. More importantly, nearly half of the massive 1981 tax reduction — festooned as it was with every manner of special interest tax breaks that K-Street lobbyists could conjure — was recouped during the next four years in a series of annual deficit reduction bills that a bi-partisan majority was able to persuade the President to sign.

At the end of the day, during the 1980s income tax rates were lowered, the tax base was broadened through loop-hole closing and the 1986 tax reform act and the payroll tax was raised by a full percentage point of GDP as part of the 1982 Social Security rescue plan. On net, however, there was no reduction in the total Federal tax burden during the Reagan era. What survived was an anti-tax religious catechism which has left the country with two free lunch parties and no prospect of responsible fiscal governance.

I wasn’t sure what a “Lincoln Day Dinner” was so I did some Googling and discovered that it is an annual Republican event that in some regions has now been renamed Reagan Day. The rebranding seems to fit nicely into your metaphor: Reagan is remembered as the president who said government was the problem, and he pledged to cut both taxes and spending, but at the end of his term government was bigger, and the national debt had exploded. Given the facts, what explains the persistence of Reagan’s legacy?

Political rhetoric can last for decades, notwithstanding a dramatic change in the underlying facts. To go to the other party, there are a lot of Democrats who are still talking about the glories of the New Deal or the Great Society, and neither of those rhetorical formulations are relevant to 2011 or the decade ahead either. It’s only when there is some dramatic change in circumstances that a new formulation or a new creed appears. That hasn’t happened yet but it will, because I think the next decade is going to be about continuous fiscal crises and it’s going to be about a continuous effort to raise taxes to close this gap, which will be highly uncomfortable for both parties but soon will be unavoidable.

Unavoidable? How so? Except for one short period during the Clinton administration, Congress and the White House have been very successful at avoiding any such reckoning — a habit that dates at least as far back as the Reagan administration. What makes the present any different?

One of these days, the global bond market is going to react pretty negatively to the continued fiscal excesses in the United States. When that happens the market vigilantes will impose the same discipline as the state level constitutions that require balanced budgets are imposing today at the local level.

But why hasn’t that happened yet? Economists like Paul Krugman argue that the bond market is more worried about the slow economy than it is about the debt, so it makes sense to take advantage of low borrowing costs and stimulate the economy in the short term.

I think that is sheer dreaming. The reason that the crisis has not yet come is that the Fed’s policy for the last two or three decades has been to stimulate U.S. consumption beyond what we could pay for in our production and earnings. That created an equal and opposite imbalance among the mercantilist Asian exporters, who wanted to rapidly grow their economies by building up their export industries. We had nothing to pay for their shipments with, and so they loaned us the money. The fact that China today has $2.9 trillion worth of reserves is just a measure of how sick and distorted the system is.

At some point that system is going to break down, and I think it’s near that point now. In fact the largest owner of U.S. debt is no longer China, it is the Federal Reserve, which now owns 11 percent of all Treasury debt — about $1.1 trillion worth. To stimulate the economy the Fed is buying $8 billion or $10 billion of Treasury debt every business day — that’s as much as is being issued — and it is keeping interest rates inordinately low. The negative thing about all this is that it has given a terrible signal to the politicians, who believe that new debt is essentially free. Why are you going to make any tough, painful choices when it seems like you can just fund the government like that, and it’s not going to cost anything? I think that’s an illusory signal and a prescription for disaster. When the debt costs start rising, the cost of carrying all the debt you’ve accumulated starts to soar, and and we’re walking right into the trap.

You keep making references to a time scale of “two or three decades.” In an Op-Ed you wrote for the New York Times last year, you called the easy money era “a 30-year period of phony prosperity.” You’ve also said that the “insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts” dates back three decades. Doesn’t that place responsibility for the political failure to balance our books and pursue a responsible monetary policy squarely within the eight years of the Reagan administration?

The wrong lesson was taken from the 1980s. We didn’t cut back government at all; government got bigger. We didn’t reduce the tax burden, we just avoided increases. But the conclusion was drawn that there was a great prosperity in the 1980s due to the Reagan tax cut. I don’t believe that at all. I believe that the expansion that we had for a few years was due to the fact that Paul Volcker’s Fed crushed inflation. Had we stayed on a disciplined monetary track, the subsequent decades might have turned out better. But instead in 1985, we had the Plaza Accord, in which we trashed the dollar to boost our own exports. I think that was a purely unilateral nationalistic policy designed to stimulate the U.S. economy, regardless of the impact on the world monetary system or on our trading partners. It began a process that lasted for 25 years. The Fed became the underwriter of prosperity that wasn’t real.

Who do you blame for that? The White House? Congress?

I blame the White House in the mid-’80s. Volcker was running decent monetary policy, but he was forced into backing the Plaza Accord.

Does President Reagan deserve any of the blame?

Well, I don’t think so, really. To the extent that Reagan focused on monetary policy, he believed in the gold standard, if anything. So I can’t fault him for easy money. But I can say that his advisors, particularly James Baker, when he went to Treasury, had sort of a Texas attitude toward money, and that is you can never have low enough interest rates.

I was in college during Reagan’s first term, and coming from a very liberal family I was predisposed to be critical, and I was driven a little crazy by the gap between Reagan’s rhetoric and the political reality on the ground. But looking at Congress today …?

That was a small gap compared to today. Rhetoric has become utterly detached from the facts and reality. Republicans think they can solve the $1.5 trillion deficit problem with spending cuts when they can’t even come up with $50 billion in cuts that they are willing to make.

And you think the only cure for this detachment from reality will come from the bond market?

I think there will be massive dislocations. There won’t be just one. It will be chronic. The world bond market will become increasingly unstable, and there will be a persistent trend toward higher and higher interest rates. There will be crises from time to time that will require emergency fiscal action. Congress will paper together grudging measures to restrain spending and raise new revenue, but it will never be enough, and another episode will follow. That’s baked into the cake for the next 10 years.

You’ve written that the Wall Street bailout “in essence repudiated the entire Reagan revolution.” What do you think about the thesis that the deregulatory impulses that received such a huge boost under Reagan contributed to Wall Street’s recklessness … and laid the groundwork for the financial crisis?

The only thing that was seriously deregulated during the Reagan era was banks, and that was the wrong thing to deregulate. Surface transport deregulation was started by Carter and we finished it, airline deregulation was already done by the time we came in. And those were the right things to do. But in the case of financial institutions, banks are not free enterprise businesses, they are wards of states, they have the right to create money out of thin air. They have to be regulated, and they have to be kept out of the speculative use of deposits that are guaranteed by the taxpayer, by the FDIC. And in the ’90s, the Clinton administration joined in on this, with the elimination of Glass-Steagall and all of the other remaining restraints on the banking system. That was a tragic, terrible error; it was a confusion of the free market with a set of institutions that are inherently dangerous. And as a result of bad monetary policy interacting with the deregulation of depository banking you created a witches’ brew that ended up predictably in the meltdown of 2008.

Sounds like we’ve just stumbled on the thesis of the book you are writing about the financial crisis.

Yes.

What do you think about the comparisons that pundits like to make between Obama and Reagan?

I think it’s inappropriate. Reagan was an optimist by nature, it was built into his temperament. But he also was a man of deep conviction, who had built up certain fundamental beliefs about public policy over decades, going all the way back to his college days in the 1920s. If there was any fault, it was an unwillingness to recognize that these great convictions were not being implemented. And that’s very different from Obama. I can’t see the man has a single principle. I think he is an utter opportunist, a pragmatist. The only change you can believe in is that he changes his mind every day and every week. If he believes that the upper 5 percent has way too much income and wealth — which, frankly, I agree with — then he should have dug in his heels and said, “I am not going to sign a bill to extend the tax cuts for the top tax bracket.” What did he do? He folded like a lawn chair within two days. So I don’t think there’s any comparison at all. I thought his State of the Union speech was dreadful — I called it a “ponderous procession of pieties and platitudes.” He didn’t ask the American public for one sacrifice, didn’t warn us of one dark cloud on the horizon, and simply gave a lot of cheerleading hoopla that had almost no connection with the real choices that, unfortunately, we face.

I pushed myself to see whether maybe poverty rates declined faster before the war on poverty than they did afterward. It’s tough to do; the Census Bureau didn’t keep detailed data on poverty until 1959, which is why you’ll see that year used so often. But there were agencies and researchers studying poverty. In a majestic Dwight MacDonald New Yorker review of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America,” I found estimates for the years from the Depression through 1960. They’re fascinating. It’s clear the New Deal did little to reduce poverty; the war plus the postwar reconstruction was the real anti-poverty program: The number of Americans making under $4,000 (the poverty estimate in Harrington’s book) dropped by a quarter from 1947 to 1953, and by another sixth by 1960. But as MacDonald (and Harrington) noted, despite America’s affluence, the decline in poverty rates had slowed. A recession during the Kennedy administration pushed the rate up a little bit, but then, under Johnson, it began to plummet.

It’s hard to tease out how much of the drop in poverty was due to government spending and how much was the strong (for a while) 1960s economy. Still, the postwar boom only cut the rate by a third, so it seems safe to conclude we cut it in half with the help of the War on Poverty. We should remember that the Great Society gave the most help to elderly Americans, whose poverty rates dropped even more sharply. For the non-elderly, government assistance helped some, but not nearly as much. That’s different from saying government programs hurt the poor. Mostly, for the non-elderly poor, the poverty rate closely tracks the median income. Meaning, “It’s the economy, stupid,” not, “It’s the stupid poverty programs.”

Not coincidentally, the Reagan years saw a boom in dishonest research “proving” that welfare itself caused the rise in single-female-headed families (who are in fact more likely to be poor). Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground” purported to put meat on the bones of Reagan’s “Poverty won” argument, marshaling an arsenal of statistics to show that poverty programs, especially what was known as “Aid to Families With Dependent Children,” encouraged promiscuity, rewarded the lazy and destroyed the family — especially the black family. Anti-poverty scholars fought back with their own statistics: The number of white female-headed households not on welfare exploded in the same years, making it unlikely welfare was causing the trend; the share of children born to low-income black single mothers rose sharply largely because married black mothers were having many fewer children, not because single women were having more. But thanks to Reagan’s sunny claims from his bully presidential pulpit, and the right-wing philanthropy enlisted to spread Murray’s lies, the other side prevailed. You might say those scholars fought a war on lies, and lies won.

It’s difficult to overstate how much Reagan-era propaganda hurt the country. It distorted our understanding of how to help low-income people, as well as our optimism they could be helped, and it corroded the social contract that had prevailed since the New Deal. With hindsight, I’m a skeptic of the ’60s push to increase the welfare rolls; I wish we’d worked harder to guarantee the poor jobs instead. We didn’t worsen poverty, but we contributed to the isolation of the urban poor from the rest of us, and failed to create a vision of an economy that had a productive place for everyone. Ironically, as Reagan was ranting about the government doing too much for the poor, no one was talking about the real beneficiaries of public largess in those years: the wealthiest Americans.

Despite his reputation as a tax slasher, Reagan raised taxes three times, and tripled the deficit during his eight years in office. Sadly, his working-class “Reagan Democrat” admirers don’t seem to remember that one of his tax hikes raised payroll taxes, which hurt poor and middle-class Americans and shielded the wealthy. The main reason he’s remembered as a tax-cutter is because of what he did to tax rates for the uber-rich: He slashed the top rate from 70 percent to 28 percent, and income inequality has soared ever since, so that today, the top 1 percent of Americans controls a quarter of the nation’s wealth, as opposed to 8 percent when Reagan became president.

If that 70 percent rate sounds a little high, it’s useful to remember that the top rate was 94 percent at the end of World War II, and after a brief drop to 82 percent, it stayed in the 90s under Republican Dwight Eisenhower; it was Democrat John F. Kennedy who slashed it to 70 percent. (It’s actually worth reading this whole article.) The über-rich — the top tenth of 1 percent — saw their share of income drop from nearly 12 percent before the Great Depression, to under 3 percent by the 1970s. Those are the tax rates that powered the postwar boom — the expansion of public education and universities, highway construction and home-ownership, government-funded research and development — that we think of as the American dream.

So let’s be clear: Reagan began a destructive spiral of concentrating wealth in the hands of fewer people, and deregulating business, that culminated in the economic crash we’re still digging out of today. He even heralded it, by signing the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institution Act, which waved the “Go” flag on the savings and loan scandal, and foreshadowed the repeal of Glass-Steagall a decade later. To review: Under Reagan, income inequality began to grow, household savings dwindled, household debt correspondingly began to rise, and the clout of the financial industry exploded. The top 0.1 percent of Americans saw their share of income climb higher than it was before the Great Depression. And here we are. 

Finally, while President Reagan is remembered as a genial optimist, Matthew Dallek and Steve Kornacki are right to remind us of the original Reagan: the proto-Nixon, who used race and fear to become California’s governor in 1966. Reagan defeated California Gov. Pat Brown, running against Brown’s supposed tolerance for black Watts rioters and Berkeley radicals, channeling white fears of urban violence, and riding a backlash against civil rights and the Great Society. When Reagan beat Brown he vanquished liberalism, and liberalism “never really recovered,” Dallek wrote in “The Right Moment,” his book about Reagan’s first victory. Nixon learned from Reagan, and played on white fears that government was helping undeserving blacks; Reagan then learned from Nixon, and cut out the nasty racial rhetoric, attacking government, rather than its beneficiaries. By the time he became president, he talked less about “welfare queens,” and he’d stopped railing about “young bucks” buying steaks with food stamps, or calling city streets “jungle paths after dark.” But the damage had been done, and all but the super-rich are poorer for it.