“Tear down (wait, build) this wall!”

"I play to people's fantasies.” (from “The Art of the Deal”)

My favorite new meme in conservative political circles is the parallel between the rise of Donald Trump and that of Ronald Reagan. This is based mostly on the mainstream media’s characterization of both candidates as extremists, which is fair enough as far as it goes. It’s certainly true that much of the old media unthinkingly painted Reagan’s principled conservatism in extremist tones prior to his election in 1980.

But the new media has been unthinking in its complicity far more than its disapproval while riding the Trump gravy train. And it’s hard to argue that criticisms about the candidate’s authoritarian tendencies, for example, are the product of liberal bias. They rest firmly on a landfill’s worth of Trump’s own pronouncements, and the denigration he glories in while pronouncing them.

The real problem with the Reagan comparison is the implication that it’s somehow predictive of Mr. Trump’s future greatness. Why else would so many of the usual suspects be rushing to condemn him, if not for the fear that he had the strength and vision to finish the job that Reagan started, and return America to any number of sunnier days in its imagined past?

But all one need do is contrast the bully braying “I’d like to punch him in the face” with the grace and self-deprecating humor of “Honey, I forgot to duck,” and it’s clear that while Trump may be many things, he’s no Ronald Reagan. Other than a coincidental fondness for unnatural hair coloring, the two men could not be cut from more different cloth.

I say this as no fan of Reagan’s politics. The optimism and folksy charm that won over the American people - and the media, which was quick to re-christen their former boogeyman “the Great Communicator” - also managed to sell supply-side economics, unleashing thirty years of redistributing wealth to the wealthiest, out of the pockets of a befuddled middle class.

Similarly, Reagan’s casual stereotype of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen, and his administration’s more generalized survival-of-the-fittest take on social ills, avoided the very real issue that a core promise of the American Dream, upward mobility, was in decline. Instead the choice was made to nurture middle class resentment of America’s poor, the first volley in the right’s utterly classless warfare against those at the bottom.

President Reagan also never uttered the word “AIDS” in public until his old friend Rock Hudson was diagnosed with it, by which time the country was in the throes of a once-preventable epidemic that had already killed nearly as many Americans as died in Vietnam, with my brother Douglas soon to be among them. The Great Communicator’s silence on this issue was not just a failure of leadership, but of morality.

Reagan’s most damaging legacy was the rallying cry he gave to all manner of disaffected Americans that the greatest enemy they faced was their own government. This was not Eisenhower, warning prophetically about the powerful corruptions of the military-industrial complex. This was an attack against the very idea that government is an essential institution in our democracy, let alone one capable of expressing the collective will of the people.

Coming in the midst of the Jimmy Carter malaise and after three decades of expanding federal influence, the Gipper’s timing was flawless. But as successful as the political argument was, it did nothing to stop the growth of federal power. If anything it enabled it, by hardening cynicism and encouraging Americans to withdraw from their political process. The net impact has been to strengthen the grip of what my libertarian friends call “the Party of Washington” and its benefactors, facilitating whole new strains of the powerful corruptions Eisenhower warned against.

Fast forward thirty-two years from Reagan’s landslide re-election, and its morning in America no more. The disaffection has metastasized, with repeated shocks to the system, from terror attacks to economic meltdowns, producing a fear and loathing that’s polarized what’s left of our national conversation into an uncivil war of acrimony and insult.

Enter Donald McRonald and his insane clown posse, promising to wall off the Shining City on the Hill and begin the cleansing to Make America Great Again. Like all tales of time travel, or get-rich-quick schemes (like Trump University for example), the narrative has its appeal. But it’s the appeal of fantasy, not greatness. It’s a common trap that uber-salesmen like Trump are prone to. Lacking the humility gene, they equate success with superiority and a sales pitch with a vision quest.

It turns out that small minds are a lot like small hands. Everything you put in them looks bigger than it actually is.

This story was originally published April 5, 2016 at 1:23 PM with the headline "“Tear down (wait, build) this wall!”."