The return of power to communities that Reagan promised never happened. On the contrary, the world that his supposedly conservative presidency left behind was more indulgent of the anti-conservative impulse to “cut the past away,” provided the cutting were done heedlessly by businessmen rather than purposefully by bureaucrats. American conservatism was something Reagan tapped rather than embodied. His version of it was oratorical, not constitutional. And conservatism’s lack of a worked-out constitutional dimension would create the crisis out of which, decades later, a harder-edged “Tea Party”
...more
