Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday is coming up, says Gawker. I grew up in the Reagan 80s, so I knew Reagan sucked. Every punk song said so. Oh, sure, he did preside over economic good times and suffuse America with a breezy optimism that was sorely lacking under Carter. He was even fortunate enough to preside over the fall of the Soviet Union (by outspending them). But there were a lot of negatives.

  • His union busting made things hard for working people.
  • He dawdled on AIDS, and his flunkeys treated it like some kind of joke.
  • His checkbook diplomacy made life into a hell for South Americans, and ended up funding dictators that we’d end up fighting later.
  • His ramped-up militarism turned America into Sparta II, and not having that money for schools impoverished America’s education.
  • His public piety paved the way for the religious right.
  • He refined image manipulation to an art. Prior presidents were thinkers and decision-makers — Reagan was just some kind of totem that we held aloft to show ourselves our national identity. There wasn’t the same kind of identity politics before Reagan.

And that’s just the things I can think of off the top of my head.

But there’s one thing that he’s responsible for that towers over all those other things for me.

He championed a reflexively anti-government philosophy that has pervaded American thought to an extent that we’re not even aware of. In saying

government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem

he harnessed a counter-productive cynicism about government disguised as liberty. With this view came privatisation and free-market cultism. Lack of regulation over the financial sector has caused untold economic hardship. And now we have a new generation of poorly-educated citizens who don’t know that they are the least taxed of any developed nation, and complain loudly about having to pay their share.

For someone in government to undermine the very fabric of government was unconscionable. Other presidents did it worse, but Reagan started it rolling. And that’s why he was a bad president.