He's dead. Time to move on.

Conservative US politics is Faulknerian: the past isn't over. It's not even the past yet.


Thus the tedium of all kinds of ideologues all but exhuming The Gipper's corpse to trudge it from campaign stop to campaign stop, a holy relic to prove the candidate's True Reaganism.


The problem, of course, is it's thirty years come November since Reagan was elected president.


Things, as a Newsweek story notes, have changed. A lot. The trick for the conservative movement is to define Reagan's principles and apply them to modern issues, not just argue from the Reagan playbook of the 1980s as though it is inerrant and incapable of interpretation.


Here's an example. A Waldo reader of my critique of a hardline conservative op-ed in Human Events, responded:

As a hispanic, I was raised to be a Conservative Republican. As I reached adulthood and had the painful experience of "growing a brain of my own" I have moved steadily to the left and am now a Progressive Democrat. One of the main factors that played into this change is the simple fact that I feel, unquestionably, a target for Republicans because I am hispanic. It seems odd that this pretentious fool would attempt to use a history in which both parties were hand in hand racist to justify their own racist actions today that is leading to the GOP alienating what would otherwise typically be a perfect fit. The GOP is blind and foolish if they think the hispanic population, which represents a gold mine in potential future votes, will ignore their blatant racism and all out attack on those of us that are proud to be American hispanics.

Here's how Newsweek imagines Reagan would have addressed the issue today (emphasis added):

Today, Reagan’s mythologizers cite these failures as evidence that a contemporary Reagan would focus solely on border security while opposing any pathways to citizenship. But that’s misleading. As Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson recently noted in The Wall Street Journal, “Reagan dismissed ‘the illegal alien fuss’ ” and “again and again declared that a basic, even radical, openness to immigration represents a defining aspect of our national identity.” A canny politician, he would’ve sought to woo “the children and grandchildren of immigrants who entered the country from Mexico,” according to Robinson—both “as a matter of principle” and because he “recognized that Republicans face a[n electoral] math problem” without Latino support. Today, Reagan would probably aim to rectify the failures of 1986 with stricter border security while also promising the sort of reform—a long but explicit path to citizenship; a guest-worker program—that George W. Bush and John McCain first proposed in 2004–05. The start of the second stage might be contingent on the success of the first. But it would remain part of the plan.