The first draft of history: Juan Cole has an excellent recounting of Ronald Reagan's legacy, here. For all the talk of how Reagan, unlike the current occupant of the White House, was an optimist who could unite the public, not enough has been said this weekend about what a small, narrowminded hack he could be at times. His civil rights record, in particular, was dreadful; not only did he oppose the major legislation Congress passed during the 1960's, he infamously fought the extension of the Voting Rights Act during his Presidency, and attempted to extend tax breaks to segregated colleges such as Bob Jones U. His campaign for the Presidency in 1976 was based largely on attacking a fictitious "welfare queen" (wink, wink), an issue which encapsulated wedge politics during that era. The riots that ensued from the Rodney King trial in 1992 were an indirect result of Reagan's policies.

Perhaps his most significant political legacy was that the Republican Party became an unapologetically white movement during his administration, a triumph of Kevin Phillips' "Southern Strategy". When asked about the perception among many African-Americans that he was a bigot, he would defensively reply that, far from being a racist, he had always been a supporter of civil rights: in fact, back in the day when he recreated baseball games in Iowa, he claimed that he frequently pontificated against the color line from the broadcasting booth. It was perhaps a symptom of how obsequious the media was during that period that no one believed him, yet no one called him on that laughable assertion. He deserves enormous credit for joining with Gorbachev to end the Cold War; by treating the Soviet leader as a man that the West could do business with, he went against his own party, as well as many of the neo-conservatives that now dominate the current regime. But his domestic policies damaged the country irreparably, leading to the divisions that afflict us today.