The MAGA New Right

Ronald Reagan

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Ronald Reagan (1911–2004)

40th President of the United States (1981–1989); the political embodiment of Fusionism in its mature mid-1980s form; the figure both the MAGA New Right and the older fusionist establishment claim — but for opposite reasons; the man whose 1985 Knesset-quoting “City on a Hill” patriotism is the definitional foil for the New Right’s catastrophist mode.

Why He Matters Here

Reagan is the wiki’s reference point for two reasons:

  1. Fusionism’s high-water mark. Reagan synthesized traditionalism, libertarian economics, and anti-communism in a way that won two presidential landslides (1980, 1984) and ended the Cold War. Lee Edwards’s 2007 Heritage essay The Conservative Consensus presents him as the “master fusionist.” Heritage Foundation founder Ed Feulner and the entire pre-Roberts Heritage operation organized themselves as Reagan’s intellectual infrastructure.
  2. The figure the New Right has had to displace. The New Right’s argument for its own existence is that Reagan won the elections and lost the country — that fusionist victories at the ballot box masked civilizational defeat. Patrick Deneen, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Yoram Hazony, and Curtis Yarvin all converge on this charge. Reagan’s optimistic “morning in America” frame is the precise affect the catastrophist The Flight 93 Election was written to repudiate.

The Goldwater-to-Reagan Pipeline

Reagan became a national political figure overnight with his 27 October 1964 televised speech for Barry Goldwater, “A Time for Choosing.” Per Menand: “Reagan attacked the big-government policies of Franklin Roosevelt in what was in every other way a complete imitation of a Roosevelt fireside chat. He even used the New Deal phrase ‘rendezvous with destiny’ to apostrophize the conservative crusade to end the era of New Deal-style government. He made small government sound just as warm and caring as big government.” The wiki’s structural reading: the personality difference between Goldwater (blunt, combative, philosophically doctrinaire) and Reagan (actor, optimistic, rhetorically mobile) is what bridged the 1964 debacle to the 1980 landslide — the political program was substantially identical. Two years after the 1964 telecast Reagan won the California governorship; fourteen years after that, the presidency.

Reagan’s 1965 letter to Goldwater, after winning the GOP gubernatorial nomination: “Had it not been for you and Barry I would not have won this nomination.” And later: “You set the pattern…. I have tried to do the same and have found the people more receptive because they’ve had a chance to realize there is such a thing as truth.” This is the textual canon of fusionist political succession.

The Fusionist Synthesis in Power

Reagan’s governing program was the cleanest expression of the Frank Meyer / Barry Goldwater formula:

  • Traditionalism — restored civic-religious rhetoric (“city on a hill”), invoked the Founders, courted the religious right (Falwell, Robertson) without surrendering executive policy to them.
  • Libertarian economics — top marginal tax rate cut from 70% to 28%; deregulation; Friedman-influenced monetary stabilization.
  • Anti-communism — “evil empire” speech (March 1983); SDI; arms buildup; aggressive Eastern European and Latin American posture; rapprochement with Gorbachev once the Soviet system was clearly failing.

The 1989 farewell address (“‘We the people’ tell the government what it is allowed to do”) encapsulated the fusionist project: a constitutional populism that joined limited government, free markets, and traditional virtue.

Reagan and the Bircher Right

Reagan’s 1965 disavowal of the John Birch Society is documented in Long before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and the GOP purged John Birch extremists from the party. As Reagan considered a 1966 California governor’s run, buzz about his Birch connections grew. At a Republican fundraiser in September 1965 he said: “I am not a member. I have no intention of becoming a member. I am not going to solicit their support.” He cited a “lunatic fringe” that had infiltrated the JBS.

Per Matthew Dallek’s Birchers (2023, Debunking a Longstanding Myth About William F. Buckley): Reagan’s earlier rhetoric about a “Communist plot” in the film industry “dovetailed nicely” with Birch beliefs, and “for the most part Reagan applauded the men and women who peopled its ranks.” The 1965 disavowal was politically motivated rather than principled — campaign hygiene, not ideological correction.

The pattern is the wiki’s Counterrevolution template in miniature: a polished mainstream conservative figure manages the optics of association with conspiratorial right-wing movements while substantially sharing their grievances.

What the New Right Holds Against Him

The post-1991 conservative fragmentation was, in part, a slow indictment of Reagan:

  • Trade and industry: NAFTA-era free trade hollowed out manufacturing; Sam Francis and Pat Buchanan argued Reagan’s economic globalism abandoned Middle America. Oren Cass and American Compass extend this.
  • Immigration: 1986 IRCA amnesty (~2.7 million) is treated by the New Right as the original demographic betrayal. Stephen Miller’s politics is unintelligible without this complaint.
  • Culture: Reagan won elections while progressivism advanced through the courts, the universities, and corporate culture (cf. Longmarcherism). Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution is the canonical statement of “Reagan won and we lost.”
  • Foreign policy: the post-9/11 neoconservative turn is widely blamed on Reaganite Cold War habits applied to a unipolar world. Tucker Carlson’s anti-interventionism explicitly indicts the Reagan-Bush continuum.

The cumulative charge: Reagan’s optimistic, electoral, fusionist style accommodated the very forces it was supposed to defeat. The MAGA argument is that this accommodation is the structural pathology of fusionism itself, not Reagan’s personal failure.

What the New Right Inherits from Him

Despite the indictment, the New Right inherits substantial Reagan rhetorical infrastructure:

  • “Against the administrative state” — Reagan-era anti-regulatory and anti-bureaucratic framing is the genealogical ancestor of Schedule F and the Administrative State critique.
  • “City on a Hill / American Exceptionalism” — the The Claremonters and Hillsdale College still operate within Reagan’s rhetorical frame even when arguing against his program.
  • “A Time for Choosing” structure — the binary catastrophic-choice rhetoric Reagan helped popularize in 1964 reaches its apotheosis in The Flight 93 Election.

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