Sean Wilentz has a new book out "The Age of Reagan"

in which he argues that Reaganism is a sort of bastard offshoot of American Liberalism. He further asserts that liberal social engineering initiatives (busing in other words) impelled Saint Ronald to desert his youthful liberalism and gave hm his big chance to fetch the proverbial blue collar "Reagan Democrats" for the GOP.
Yeah that is an interesting thesis, but let the record show, that Ronald Reagan deserted the democrats in the 1950's when General Electric started paying him 100K a year to act as a corporate shill. Sheer economic royalism induced Reagan to switch sides and that was long before Malcolm X or Dr. Martin Luther King started musing about racial and society. A top rate that ran well over fifty percent was all Ronald Reagan needed to become a standpat republican, race didn't have anything to do with it.
As a politician though, Reagan was a master of exploiting racial fears and divisions in the USA in a genial personally unthreatening way that is how he became Governor of California by smiling like a teachable and braying long and loud about crime in the streets or dirty stinking peaceniks on campus etc etc.
People forget that by 1966 a lot of the civil rights crusader impetus was already spent with the issue of crime (by that I mean black on white crime especially) coming to the fore. He rode this hobby-horse right into the US Presidency, I mean I'm not sure the man ever gave a speech in public where he didn't discuss in some fashion the sheer Frightfulness of the High Crime Rate.
Reagan's other great skill was in peaceably ingathering disparate and divisive conservative factions into his coalition Ayn Rand's utopians and William F. Buckley's catholic toryism among many others all had a friend in Saint Ronald.
To me, Reaganism is naught but a unique set of power-acquisition skills brought to bear on behalf of an ubiquitous conservative movement...it is no wonder that replicating Reagan's political DNA has always been impossible for the GOP let alone curious democrats.
Ronald was too much a man of his time to survive as a movement there is a touch of free silver's fast fading lustre to him. Resignifying him as closet liberal or worse as an example to liberals is futile in extremis. As for his "Reagan Democrats" they must be fetched and just possibly fetched by listening to them and not filling them up with nameless terrors and deluded with shameless lies.
That might be a start.