Which was more dangerous, the Bush Admin. or the Reagan Admin?

I have a confession. I graduated from high school in 1981 and didn't really pay all that much attention to what was going on politically through much of the eighties. One of my partners was quite the activist at that time. I've become quite the activist since 2001. When I get all riled up at the encroaching fascism, he tells me to relax because it's all a redo and we got through the Reagan years without the end of our country and we will this time too.

So, basically, I'm wondering how those of you who were political aware during the Reagan years as well as now see things? Is it worse now or is this just a history redo? Or, choice number three?

I strongly disliked Reagan during the 1980s, but in retrospect, he seems fantastic compared to Bush. We all underestimated Reagan. He did manage to do some good during his administration--arms control principally. But now Bush has undone the nuclear test ban treaty that Reagan negotiated. The Russians are again testing nuclear weapons, and I imagine we are as well.
I'll never forgive Reagan for his war on Central America. That region is full of mass graves as a result of his illegal policies. But Bush is the worst president this country has ever seen. I am certain history will remember him as such.

as usual.With Smirk there's only one way and that's his way.That 49% approval rating mandate is quite intimidating, though.

Reagan transformed the Republican party and American politics along with it. He wasn't business as usual, but there is no question that Bush is indescribably worse.

nasty little twitch they've foisted off on us is the final fruits of their labor.You could deal with Reagan but this little prick thinks God tells him what to do. Hell, by now he may think he's telling God what to do.

One other point. Europeans didn't care for Reagan either, but they mainly laughed at him. Today the world is terrorized by Bush's recklessness. He has made the world a far more dangerous place and compromised America's national security for decades to come.

we will get through this too. Just like we got through McCarthyism and the Gilded Age, etc., etc. I only wish we hadn't laughed the first time we heard Limbaugh, we just couldn't believe that many people would take him and his ilk seriously. Creationism in our public schools for chrissake. Whoda thunk it?

Bush is only playing with guys that have conventional weapons. Raygun tried to push the Soviets into war with us. Bushie so far has only picked-on people that are no danger to us. The Soviets could have destroyed every square inch of our country without breaking a sweat.

Did you see the PBS special on Reagan that was part of the American Experience series? It gave me a different perspective on his presidency, particularly on his policy toward the Soviets. At the time, there was no politician I despised more. In retrospect, Reagan seems great when compared to Bush II.

Like you, I got a slow start...but he's been active in and aware of politics his whole adult life. He keeps saying "don't worry; they always screw up".

and agree with. I'm more trying to see if this really is a closer brush with fascism that Reagan.

He is Poppy's boy and Prescott's grandkid and he thinks he has to outdo them both. That concerns me.

Also, I think it was easier to manipulate Reagan in many ways. But, I don't think he was as conniving as * nor did he have *'s emotional/addiction issues. As I understood it, Reagan asked for proof of what the neocons fed him and wasn't immediately given over to "blind faith"/trust but I don't know that he had the same needs to be seen as competent/powerful/loved as *. I heard that Reagan was basically a decent sort, and was manipulated. But * has a mean streak and can't take criticism at all.

It's his mental illness and instability that scare me the most. I'm unsure about whether he is as smart as you give him credit for but neither am I sure that you aren't right.

Both despise assistance to needy people and favor the uber-wealthy
Both denigrate minorities and people who are different
Both portray themselves as buffoons
Both surround themselves with crooks, liars, and cheats
Both shovel tons of money into the Military-Industrial incinerator
Both have attorneys-general who have absolutely no understanding of the Constitution which they are sworn to uphold
Both talk of war and aggression
Both are rabid anti-environmentalists
Both are involved in killing thousands of people overseas
Both have media backing and cult-like followings
Both have Congress wrapped around their little fingers

through both of their administrations, and I have to tell you that I agree with most of these people...Bush is FAR worse..

Reagan campaigned to win votes from everyone....the Reagan Democrats.

He wasn't nearly as devisive, didn't run dirty campaigns, & except for liberals, he was pretty well liked.

The results of his popularity could be seen when he died.

And personally, I never heard someone who KNEW him, say a negative thing...he & Tip O'Neill got along.

See my post above for details

It's difficult to compare the ultimate effect of the two administrations without the exposition of a great many "what ifs."

I think it's centrally important to consider three things in comparing the two administrations. The first is that, in both, there was a small group of neo-cons in the administration which dictated economic and military policy to a front man, the President (both Reagan and Bush used charm and folksiness--of quite similar styles), who then delivered that policy to the public based on his own very general and unintellectual beliefs about politics. In this sense, particularly, the neo-cons have followed carefully the prescription for governing laid out by Leo Strauss. Both administrations tried mightily, as well, to convince the public that the world outside our borders was imminently dangerous, and that complex international issues could be reduced to black and white, good and evil. That is also characteristic of Straussian philosophy.

The second is that there are notable differences from then to now, particularly with regard to Congress, the military and the media. The military was still smarting, to some degree, over Vietnam. If anything, the army was still in a period of retrospection about that war and was adjusting to an all-volunteer military, a situation that is much different than today. Congress, run by Democrats, was not tremendously more effective at resisting an imperial Presidency--it rolled over for the administration much more than it should have, because of Reagan's perceived popularity with the public--but it did expose through hearings, Iran-Contra, BCCI, and a number of other embarrassments, even if they did not succeed in bringing down that president. Ultimately, those hearings got some of the smaller fish, but they had one other beneficial effect, and that was to force the neo-cons to lie low for the remainder of Reagan's term. In the same way, the press was a bit more aggressive than today. When BCCI and Iran-Contra surfaced, the press did dig in, to a much greater degree than now--some of the questioning of Reagan during televised news conferences was almost brutal compared to news conferences today. The Fairness Doctrine was not nullified until 1987, late in Reagan's second term, and the heavy consolidation of media (and of media opinion) had not proceeded as quickly as it did during the `90s and after 2000.

Last, Bush had 9/11 to cow Congress and inculcate fear and xenophobia and nationalism in the public. I suspect that the neo-cons in the Reagan administration would have behaved identically to the Bush II administration if presented with a similar exploitable situation. 9/11 is precisely the reason why the neo-cons have acted as quickly and assuredly as they have. People tend to forget, but the nation was very sceptical of Bush, and especially of his dawdling on the economy prior to 9/11--seven months after his inauguration, his approval ratings were in the low- to mid-50s. The neo-cons seized this opportunity to introduce a diminishment of rights and an increase in military fervor that would have been seen, out of the context of 9/11, as egregiously excessive--as a raw, naked grab for power for the Executive. But many of the same neo-conservatives in Bush's administration were present in Reagan's, especially in inconspicuous political appointments--they would have done the same thing then as now, if presented with the opportunity.

There are countless other similarities and differences, but less prominent than the ones I suggest above.

Cheers.

I guess to paraphrase you're saying that if the circumstances were a little different in Reagan's time, it would likely have gone just the way it's gone this time. Very interesting and very believable.

and which policies were neo-conservative? I see Reagan's policies as a continuation, though reinvigoration, of the Cold War. I see the two administrations as very different, particularly in terms of foreign policy. For one thing, Reagan didn't commit the US to an unwinable war. Like administrations before him, his wars were by proxy--Central America and Afghanistan--rather than a direct commitment of sizable numbers of US troops. Tens of thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand, died as a result of Reagan's wars--and his policy was utterly morally reprehensible, but America's own security was not compromised as it has been under Bush.

... the economic and military policies of the two administrations are remarkably similar. From beginning to end of the Reagan administration, the already high defense budget increased further by more than 60% in constant dollars, and despite considerable tax breaks for the wealthy and for corporations--virtually identical to now.

The neo-cons, beginning with the Ford administration and continuing into the Reagan administration, had made a concerted effort to distort intelligence and fabricate outright fantasies about a military build-up in the Soviet Union, and attempted to undo the treaties negotiated under Nixon, and to, in Straussian fashion, redefine the US's relationship with the Soviet Union as one of pure good vs. pure evil. There's markedly little difference in that approach to the way in which the Bush administration has described a nebulous, neverending war on terror.

As for committing us to an unwinnable war (actually two, factoring in Afghanistan), I think that's a function of 9/11, which I do describe as a major event in Bush's administration which was absent in Reagan's. As I say, had there been what the PNAC describes as a "catalyzing event" during the Reagan years, I believe they would have acted in the same way as have the Bushies.

There's a curious tale about the adoption, in the Reagan years, of a theory, completely unfounded in the intelligence, that William Casey embraced the notion that all world-wide terror was being directly run out of Moscow as yet another means of world domination. In fact, this was black propaganda distributed by the CIA in European newspapers. When Casey's own CIA informed him that they were the source of the rumors and that it was all false, Casey chose to believe the theory, despite the evidence. Had there been some major terrorist act on US soil, the planning was in place to do many of the same things which the Bush administration has done. Many of those contingency plans were carried out via Executive Orders and by NSDDs, some of which are now in the National Security Archives at Georgetown Univ. A perusal of them (and of some of the inferences about others not available) shows that the administrative thinking on security and secrecy is remarkably like what's happening now.

In short, the neo-cons were working on the means, but they simply failed to have the necessary windfall opportunity as the Bushies had in 9/11 to put them into action. Had that happened, the Reagan administration probably would not have confronted the Soviet Union directly, but probably would have found a lesser opponent upon which to attack the Soviet Union indirectly. At any rate, I still see striking resemblances in the tone of public rhetoric from then to now, which ultimately was crafted by the neo-cons.

Cheers.

All of the above were Cold Warriors. The language of good vs. evil, of democracy vs. communism, pervaded American politics since the post WWII era through the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Today, they have discovered a new enemy and their language reflects that change. During the Cold War, communism was the enemy and terror seen as it's byproduct. Today, the language of American politics claims terror itself as an enemy rather than a broader ideology.
Since the Eisenhower administration (actually it dates to the early 1900s, but for the sake of this discussion I'll limit myself to Cold War interventions), the US government has carried out regime change in the name of "democracy." The US looked to Latin America as it's battleground in the Cold War, and Reagan reinvigorated that after a short period when Jimmy Carter had cut off aid to regimes with egregious human rights abuses. The Guatemalan conflict into which Reagan poured so much military aid began in a US sponsored coup back in 1954. Nixon and Kissinger helped depose Allende in 1973, and LBJ offered to assist the Brazilian military in it's coup against Joan Goulart in 1964. The Johnson and Nixon administrations funded and indeed subsidized wide scale repression, torture, and murder in Argentina,Brazil, and Central America. Reagan continued a policy that imagined Latin America as a central battleground in the Cold War. In the 1980s, Central America emerged on the center state because of the Sandinista Revolution. Ten years earlier it had been Chile. The principle difference between Reagan and his predecessors was that he believed he could actually win the Cold War, and implemented enormous defense spending in an effort to do so.
If you are going to say Reagan and Bush are remarkably similar, it seems to me you have to point to even earlier commonalities with other administrations.
One difference between Iraq and earlier interventions, is that the US has previously invoked democracy as a justification for it's actions, yet presidents were not so naive as to believe their own rhetoric. Governments like Arbenz, Allende, and Goulart were overturned in the name of "democracy" yet the US was quite content to see brutal military dictatorships flourish in their place. Bush, is so taken by his own hallow rhetoric that he seems to actually believe he is making war in order to spread democracy. That, I find, is far more frightening than the real politik of the Kissinger, Nixon, and Reagan era policies.

... that all this happened, but in some sense, the realpolitik of those other admininstrations was more under the radar (at the time) and was heavily dependent on covert action, rather than by an overt appeal to the public to cooperate in and embrace the administration's outright lies, which is very much the strategy of the neo-cons.

In the cases of the overthrowing of the governments of Arbenz and Allende, considerable conservative business influence on the CIA, and conservative Republican administrations, were involved. Johnson seemed to have been favorable to Branco's coup, but overt US military intervention was not used. The documents about the CIA's involvement are still classified. Each of these was prominently anti-democratic (as was Eisenhower's overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953), but, I think, each was the result of a melding of economic interests and a profoundly blurred understanding by arch-conservatives of the differences between democratic socialism and communism. While equally unconscionable, there's a qualitative difference between doing ill in the country's name, and lying openly to the public in order to accomplish that ill with their support. I think the latter has been far more disruptive, domestically and internationally.

In a way, your suggestion that Bush really believes his own lies is an essential part of the Straussian doctrine which was part of the baggage the neo-cons brought with them into the Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations.

As for your last comment about Bush's pronouncements being more frightening, I completely agree, and that's perhaps my point about the influence of the neo-cons in each of the administrations in which they have had positions--the strain of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is fully realized in those times. They really do believe the fantasies they concoct, as well as having reduced arguments about both domestic and international politics to simplistic matters of good and evil.

Kissinger's brand of subterfuge, for example, is despicable, but Bush's modus operandi is dangerous, thanks to the neo-cons.

Cheers.

but they did require talking to. (the senate was GOP for first 6 years of the 8 in Reagan's term)

Bush has no restrictions

In fact one of the reason Bush is worse is BECAUSE he doesn't have a strong rival to America to oppose him as Reagan did (Soviets). He can do as he wishes, imposing his will upon the world without more than token resistance.

I agree with those who state that we will emerge out from under this dark cloud, just as we did from Reagan (though we never really quite got all the way out from under it did we? Even under Clinton) but I think that misses the point. A great many people DIED as a result of Reagan's policies, and far more were harmed greatly by them. The damage he did to the world and to us here in the states was profound. We survived it as a nation, and it seems likely (though just barely) that we may survive Bush as well, but he will do a LOT of harm in the meantime.

We cannot blithely ignore him, saying "we will survive", like demented Gloria Maynor clones. We MUST worry about it because the people he is harming and killing need our help. The nation may survive; you however, may not. Fight, with all you have, because the danger is very real and it is very now. Fighting back is precisely HOW we survived Reagan. He was a son-of-a-bitch, but we minimalized his effect just enough to pull through. Ignore the Neocons at your peril.

or rather my partner's point of view. He doesn't ignore but he doesn't want me to see these days as the end times, the most dangerous times in our country's history. Since I'm unsure if he is right, I was asking for input with regards to these two administrations.

I am merely poor at rhetoric. What I tried to say was that these could indeed be the final rites of the United States of America, but that we can get through it intact if we fight with all we have. If we do not we may well find that in 4 years all the fight in the world will be too late.

In any case Bush is worse. Reagan was limited by many things; though popular, many of his more partisan ideas were not. He did not have as Republican a congress as Bush does. Internationally he had the Soviets as a viable threat. Bush suffers from none of these problems, though his main second term goals may well prove to be anathema to the American public. I am not sure that he can sell them on Social Security reform, nor on his idea of a "simplified tax code", particularly if it includes doing away with property and mortgage tax deductions. He seems bent on accomplishing these things, but I do not believe the public will support them if we fight. If we merely allow them to dictate and orchestrate the media however, we could lose even those. If we do lose there, and Bush gets an extremely conservative USSC, the nation is dead.

Okay, makes sense to me.

Both Reagan and Bush share electoral appeal based on anti-intellectualism.

For me, the difference is that Reagan, though not a very virgorous thinker, at least generally gave the emotional impression that he was an adult. Not an adult I want in the White House, but at least residually an adult.

Dubya hasn't self-actualized yet. Just because you snort a little coke in early party days and have hair on your dick doesn't make you a grown-up. I think Bush believes it does, redeemed by his being saved by Jesus, etc.

He reminds me of a early grade school playground bully who likes things his way and who shuns thoughtful, curious, and challenging adult-like influences.

He's a child still trying to prove to his dad that he's good enough and if not that, giving his father the finger.

He certainly is intellectually incurious, giving rise to one of his apt nicknames, Incurious George.

-- about Reagan's Central American war.

It really is unforgivable and that foreign policy abomination more than anything else defines the Reagan years for me.

Not to be outdone, Dubya has attacked a sovereign nation and is reducing it to bloody rubble as we speak.

Historians are likely to take note of the number of innocent dead in the wake of both these men's presidencies.

Arrogance. Ignorance. Greed. Belligerance. And plain stupidity.

Dangerous combo.

I was in my early 20's during the reagan white house , and like you I did not follow politics that closely ,however I know I could not stand the reagan wgite house. However , I feel that this white house of bush jr. is the biggest wholesale raping of our economy , and even though reagan was far from a road scholar , I believe even he had more brains the bush ,and reagan had more say and control over those under him. I maybe wrong causelike I said I was younger and except for believeing that Reagan represented a old dying way of thinking in goverment ,it appears like the youth that support the nazis, bush supporters have been totally mislead as well as the rest of us , and its really sad for our country that after 8 years of President Clinton ,we start out a new century with this idiot in office .We went from the one of the best (Clinton) to the worst! The rest of the world is as put off as Iam by the arrogance and stupidity of the white house.

So there was some oversight. The media was still critical then, and things like Iran/Contra at least were investigated and discussed.

but in terms of outright danger to the world, Bush is the greatest threat to peace since Adolf Hitler.

What, with 3% majority, he's got "political capital" enough to wage an unprovoked war, destroy social security and now with the upcoming 'tax simplification' being drafted behind closed doors, you will either "support it in it's entirety or you're with the terrorists", placing the costs of paying for the protection services to the rich squarely upon the lower classes....

Reagan was "Bush lite"...

What's next? Those outdated worker safety regulations...

Welcome back to the 1880's...

Your friend is advising you wrongly, because there is no contest between Bush's evil and Reagan's... well, ineptitude.

Elected either times, and Reagan was....I find to be much more dangerous to our democracy and to the world.

Reagan was chosen by the people, regardless of how terrible he was.

Bush wasn't chosen by the people, and doesn't care how terrible he is.

That's the difference......a deep and profound one, if you ask me.

In the eyes of the world, and any intelligent person, this admin now takes the top prize. And we may not get through this one at all.