Eulogies for Ronald Reagan’s legacy are premature. A recent study from Pew shows that Reagan still enjoys the highest rating of any president among Republicans. Among all Americans, he still claims the second highest rating of any president, trailing only Barack Obama. A 2023 Gallup poll also has Reagan at number two in approval rating, trailing only John F. Kennedy, while improving by 15 percentage points since 1990 and outpacing Donald Trump by 23 percentage points. The Reagan National Defense Survey has consistently shown that Americans see Ronald Reagan as the top-performing president of the last 50 years. Since 2007, Reagan’s legacy has been more than an intellectual lodestar; it’s also become a physical presence as a new cohort of Republicans journey to center-stage of the Reagan Presidential Library to proclaim themselves heir to the Reagan revolution each presidential primary season.
What do premature predictions miss about the decline of Reagan’s legacy? The answer lies in how Reagan is remembered, as a principled or pragmatic president.
In Getting Right with Reagan, the historian Marcus Witcher reminds us that since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, his record has been the featured battleground in the struggle for the soul of conservatism. Even the intellectual godfather of modern conservatism, Irving Kristol, claimed the Reagan revolution “never was.” Ronald Reagan, according to Kristol and Witcher, was pragmatic, not ideological, and it is that very pragmatism that has made his legacy such a rich ground for the continued evolution of conservative thinking. George Nash, the renowned historian of conservative intellectual thought, contends that it is the discontinuities in Ronald Reagan’s life—his progression from New Deal Democrat to Republican prophet of limited government—that make Ronald Reagan’s ideas so compelling.
Searching for the true Ronald Reagan is not just a pastime of the press and political class, historians have declared him the “elusive president” and equated the task of understanding his true influences and intentions to “an impossible mission.” Much of the challenge stems from archival issues, nearly 50 percent of the records housed at the Reagan Library remain unprocessed and inaccessible to researchers. In the records that are available, many historians lament Reagan’s “absence from the documents,” due to his hands-off managerial style that encouraged heated disagreements among top advisors and his tendency to let the speechwriting process dictate policymaking. Despite these challenges, and perhaps because of them, the “Reagan Moment,” has clearly taken hold in the academy, led by a new generation of historians, such as Simon Miles and Jonathan Hunt, who argue that the 40th president “defies caricature.” This cohort of Reagan revisionists increasingly frame Reagan as a pragmatic coalition-builder.
