… is from page 264 of of Matthew Continetti’s 2022 book, The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism:
In his [1980] campaign announcement speech, Reagan proposed an “open border project” that would join the United States, Mexico, and Canada in a free trade zone. He welcomed additional Mexican immigrants. His campaign ads exhorted the viewer, “Let’s make America great again.”
DBx: I regret, so much, that I failed at the age of 22 to appreciate that which I would now warmly embrace in a politician at the age of 66.
I was, age 22 when Reagan first won election to the White House, pleased that he defeated Carter. Reagan was clearly the better of the two candidates. But I nevertheless thought Reagan to be insufficiently committed to the liberal values of free markets and individual freedom that I cherished and cherish still.
Part of my problem then was failure to appreciate the inescapability of political constraints – odd, I confess, for someone already then quite steeped in public-choice economics. (Another part of my problem was the immaturity that 22 year olds escape only by eventually becoming 32, then 42, then 52, then 62 year olds.) Despite having become, in many ways, more radical by the age of 66 than I was at the age of 22, I now look back with much fondness, from this ‘modern’ era of MAGA and ‘woke’ derangement, to the age of Reagan. (I readily admit that also at work here is no small measure of simple human nostalgia. Oh, to again be 22!)
In no way do I believe that Reagan was ideal, and I certainly still disapprove of some of his policies. But everything is relative. Compared to the offerings now on the national scene in America, Reagan and Carter were intellectual and moral giants.
