Historians such as John Ganz and Nicole Hemmer have argued that the roots of MAGA can be found in the detritus of the 1980s and 1990s. Its origins are in those elements of the far right that crept back into public life once the pressures of the Cold War and anti-communism dissipated. Racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism could once more be used as potent political tools, defining a sinister enemy threatening the virtuous United States. People living in small towns that were emptying out and in midsize cities where the jobs had dried up were eager for someone to blame. The erosion of labor unions, stable work, and local institutions has created fertile ground for the flourishing of the right. So has a growing population of veterans of the war on terrorism who come back to a nation that has little use or respect for them—but who have military skills and who have grown used to seeing themselves as warriors for the nation, as scholar Kathleen Belew has suggested. And the very people who won most dramatically in the economy remade by Reagan—the tech billionaires, the finance bros, the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels—could embrace the sheer asociality of Trump’s politics, the way that it divides the world starkly between winners and losers, the strong and the weak. One could go on, but there are many ways that American society today might seem more open to a far-right mobilization than it did when Reagan built his career on the GE speaker circuit.
The victories of Reagan’s style of conservatism opened the way for these changes, by creating the conditions for the relentless accumulation of wealth and acceleration of the economic divide that are so critical to the reservoir of support for the far right. They helped, too, to build the military up again, in ways that would help to spur the Iraq War and the war on terrorism. Despite the obvious programmatic differences between Reagan and Trump on matters such as free trade and immigration, their politics share a veneration of business, of entrepreneurialism, a celebration of the market, a contempt for civil servants and bureaucrats, for the entire ideal of collective action. Although Reagan is praised now for his optimism and good cheer, he often leaned into melodramatic warnings of impending doom. Certainly, Trump brings out a crudeness and violence that was anathema to the propriety of the midcentury right—but the call to arms was certainly present for the earlier conservatism, too, even in its more “respectable” corners.
