Chapter Fifteen - The Legacy That Ate Its Father

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Legacy That Ate Its Father

BY THE TIME Reagan left office in 1989, he was canonized.

Even by people who hated him.

He didn’t just shift the Overton window, he tore it off the hinges and hung it in the Oval Office.

What started as a backlash became the blueprint.
And every president after him whether left, right, or squirming lived in his shadow.

George H. W. Bush once called Reagan’s economics “voodoo.”
Then he inherited them.

He kept the tax-cut gospel alive.
He launched a war.
He promised a “kinder, gentler” version of the same machine.

He raised taxes once, then got destroyed for it.
Lesson learned: Never break character.

Bill Clinton didn’t fight Reaganism.
He adapted to it.

“The era of big government is over.”
NAFTA.
Welfare reform.
Mass incarceration.
Wall Street deregulation.

He talked like a liberal.
He governed like a Reagan tribute act.

By the 2000s, Reaganomics wasn’t Republican policy.
It was American dogma.

Deregulate everything.
Tax cuts = growth.
Government = bad.
Corporations = holy.

Nobody questioned it.
Not seriously.

Because questioning it felt like heresy.

Even Obama, a supposed progressive messiah, kept Bush’s tax cuts for years.

Reagan died in 2004.
But the system he built?

It didn’t.

It automated itself.
In media. In finance. In law. In memory.

And it stopped needing a pilot.
It just needed nostalgia.