Afternoon Must-Read: Rick Perlstein: Ronald Reagan’s Brand of Leadership

Rick Perlstein: “To me, Reagan’s brand of leadership was what I call ‘a liturgy of absolution’….

…Who wouldn’t want that? But the consequences of that absolution are all around us today. The inability to contend with climate change. The inability to call elites to account who wrecked the economy in 2008. The inability to reckon with the times when we fall short…. When Samantha Power is chosen to be ambassador to the U.N.; she’d written a magazine article in 2003 in which she wrote American foreign policy needed a ‘historical reckoning’ for crimes ‘committed or sponsored’. That’s the kind of reckoning we were having in the 1970s, with the Church committee. Marco Rubio brought this up in her confirmation hearing and asked her for examples of the crimes, and the response was that America is the greatest country in the world and has nothing to apologize for. So that’s where we’re at today…. He believed strongly that moderates had no place in the Republican Party…. Pundits then and now believed the problem for Republicans was an inability to broaden their base. Reagan always insisted on the opposite…”