Reagan Burned Down the American Dream — Can We Still Save What’s Left?

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]My my op-ed today, my daily take over harperreport.com is titled Reagan burned down the American dream. Can we still save what's left?

[00:00:09]And you know, it's pretty straightforward stuff. There's this new national survey that just came out this week.

[00:00:15]And they found that almost half of us, 48% say that our lives are lacking in fun.

[00:00:21]With fully 12% saying they can't remember, literally can't remember the last time they had a whole day just to themselves to enjoy.

[00:00:29]More than half, 57% said this is because they can't afford to have fun.

[00:00:35]Which makes perfect sense when you consider how 45 years of Reaganomics have destroyed the union movement and progressive taxation and thus gutted the American middle class.

[00:00:45]You know, like idiots, we bought Reagan's sales pitch back in 1980. It was actually the the Heritage Foundation's sales pitch. It was the billionaire's sales pitch.

[00:00:55]They told us press prosperity would just trickle down if we just, you know, abandon the largely non-profit health insurance system we had nationwide. Most states required health insurance companies and the hospitals to be non-profits.

[00:01:08]If we just abandoned that, if we abandoned the unions that fought for us to have good pay and benefits, if we abandoned enforcement of the anti-monopoly laws, if we did away with free college, and if we ended subsidized housing.

[00:01:20]Reagan put in this into place actually in 1981. It sometimes referred to as the neoliberal agenda. I wrote a book about this called The Hidden History of American of neoliberalism or Reaganism gutted America.

[00:01:34]And no president, democratic or republican, has repealed it. We still have taxes below 50% income taxes, low taxes on billionaires, low taxes on corporations. We still have privatized health care. In fact, Obama expanded it.

[00:01:48]We still have privatized education.

[00:01:50]Uh Biden tried to do something about student debt and the Supreme Court stopped him at the request of Republicans.

[00:01:56]And we still have stagnant wages for working class people.

[00:02:00]So, you know, what happened?

[00:02:04]Well, first off, Republicans told us that if we just cut the tax top tax rate from 74% down to 27% then prosperity would trickle down.

[00:02:13]Uh no, instead over 70 trillion dollars, according to the Rand Corporation, 70 trillion dollars has been transferred from our homes, savings, pensions, paychecks into the money bins of the top 1/10 of 1%.

[00:02:31]Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted, whenever they wanted, wherever they wanted, that it would put the fear of God into our politicians and solve our crime problem. Remember the the bumper sticker from the '80s, an armed society is a polite society, with the NRA logo? Yeah.

[00:02:50]Not so much. I mean, you know, five corrupt in the NRA's pocket Republicans on the Supreme Court, uh you know, got into the act and instead of a polite society we have school children being traumatized on a on a you know, semi-monthly basis.

[00:03:05]And and many of them being actually killed.

[00:03:08]Republicans told us if we just ended sex education in our schools and outlawed abortion that we'd return to the good old days when every marriage was happy and every child was wanted. But instead, we've ended up with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and now that abortion is illegal in most red states, we're seeing a return to back alley abortions and women literally dying because doctors in those states are afraid to even treat miscarriages for fear of going to prison.

[00:03:38]Republicans told us if we just killed off civics and history classes in our schools, we'd liberate our young people to focus instead on STEM, on science and math.

[00:03:47]Instead, we've raised two generations of Americans who can't even identify the three branches of government, much less understand what the founders meant when they wrote in the Constitution that it was that our government was created to promote the general welfare.

[00:04:00]Republicans told us if we cut state and federal aid to higher education, back in 1980 when Reagan came into office, 80% of the cost of tuition in college was paid for by government, by state, federal, and and sometimes even local governments.

[00:04:15]Today, Reagan said, "You do away with that so that the students are paying the tuition and they'll have skin in the game. They'll value their education."

[00:04:26]Instead, we ended up with $2 trillion of student debt because now 80% of the cost of education is paid for by individual tuitions and only 20% is paid for by the government.

[00:04:36]Republicans told us if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly, anti-trust laws that uh you know, that protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there'd be an explosion of innovation as companies got bigger and better.

[00:04:49]Right? Instead, what we've got is price gouging, uh profiteering, and basically it's impossible for small businesses, for family businesses to to start or thrive any longer.

[00:04:59]Republicans told us if we just changed the laws to court to let corporations pay their executives in stock and do stock buybacks that businesses would become more competitive. Instead, every time they do a stock buyback, it hurts the company, it hurts the public, it raises the prices, and who benefits? The executives and the stockholders. They get rich.

[00:05:21]Republicans told us if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy our media that a thousand flowers would grow. We'd have the most diverse media ecosystem around.

[00:05:31]In the '90s, when the internet was booming, they even claimed it was happening.

[00:05:35]Now we've got a small group of right-wing companies who own our major media companies.

[00:05:40]Um one nepo baby MAGA billionaire now owns or will soon own or influences, as Bernie Sanders noted, quote, this is you know, David Ellison, quote, "TikTok, CBS, CNN, HBO, Discovery Channel, Black Entertainment Television, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, DC Studios, Fandango, Miramax, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, Pluto TV, Showtime, TBS, The CW, TNT, Warner Brothers, and more."

[00:06:06]Republicans said if we just handed our healthcare decisions away from our doctors and gave them to bureaucrats at health insurance companies that it would lower costs and improve care. Yeah, right. Instead, we get 500,000 medical bankruptcies every year.

[00:06:20]Republicans told us to just get rid of our unions and the companies would pay us well.

[00:06:24]As everybody can see, that worked out real well. They said, "Just sign that trade agreement that Reagan and and Bush senior worked out, NAFTA, and and we've seen an explosion of jobs." Well, there was an explosion.

[00:06:36]60,000 factories got blown up and 15 million good-paying jobs went overseas.

[00:06:42]They told us global warming was a hoax and therefore we shouldn't shouldn't do anything about it.

[00:06:46]You know, and we can see right now how the damage that's doing.

[00:06:50]Then of course there's the biggest GOP lie of all, money is the same thing as free speech. This came from five corrupt on the take Republicans on the US Supreme Court.

[00:07:01]The bottom line is that we as a nation, voluntarily or involuntarily, have now had for 45 years the full Republican experience.

[00:07:11]We now know what the Republican governance brings us.

[00:07:15]And frankly, I don't want to hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits that they themselves caused, or our welfare system that they themselves damaged and then exploited, or whatever it is they're calling faith these days.

[00:07:27]You know, be it the death panel or forcing raped women to give birth at the barrel of a gun or burning books.

[00:07:32]We're over it, Republicans. We want fun and meaning back in our lives rather than just working ourselves to death so the Bezos and Zuckerberg can buy new yachts.

[00:07:42]America, a new America is being birthed from this disaster.

[00:07:47]And and frankly, [music] the zoomers are bringing the energy and the boomers, millennials, and Gen Xers [music] are bringing the institutional memory and rage.

[00:07:57]Republicans, you can't stop [music] us much longer.

[00:08:01]I'm telling you, a new America is coming.