But at the end of the Day....

Ronald Reagan can also be remembered for three important and ideological innovations within American Movement Conservatism:

1.) As I said yesterday, he made welching on debts the core value in classical conservative economics.
Here Reagan's reasoning was largely political not economic, a huge ongoing public debt supposedly prevented the proliferation of hated government social programs.
If future generations were loaded with huge public deficit then at least they were spared the irksome burdens of universal health care or well paved roads.
The consequences of this have been important, it now impossible to trust any aspect of the public purse to a self proclaimed "Reagan republican"....the very notion now implies our progeny will contend with heavy public debt which is the worst sort of taxation without representation.

2.) Reagan's supporters brought a "counter revolutionary chic" with them to Washington. A pose that the President embraced in due course. Revolution though, is the first recourse of tyrants and the last recourse of free peoples...in time the metaphor took on a life of it's own and now virtually every paltry atavistic notion vomited out of the Cato Institute is "revolutionary" or "Reaganesque in scope"....fine but where is the respect for old time democratic values?
Exactly nowhere these yokels drunk on the memory of Saint Ron will now tolerate any excess rhetorical or otherwise.
Nowadays Reaganism means men must fit the idea and if they can't tough luck.

3.) Lastly the late President had a healthy fantasy life. From his entirely mendacious claims of liberating death camps to his fascination with the end times...weird flights of fancy colored much of Reagan's thinking.
A habit his political descendents have the same diresome tendencies....to this day they are still hung up on such early eighties classics as the strategic defense initiative and a balanced budget amendment to constitution. That neither of these phantasms will ever do anyone a lick of good is beside the point. Saint Ronald dreamed it, and we must go one drifting through his fantasies until we reach that shining chimerical city on a hill.

And so we drift like Peter Pan...even years later.