Ronald Reagan: Flights of Fantasy and Brutal Social Realities

A PBS documentary on President Ronald Reagan---the person and the presidency---presents him as a person of great faith, politically and religiously.  But Reagan was a deeply flawed person who became a deeply flawed president.

Reagan saw himself as the lifeguard for America---the one called by God to rescue America from decline.  This Messiah complex apparently goes back to his youth when he was a real lifeguard; he claims that he saved the lives of 77 persons.  This was likely an exaggeration, part of his life of fantasy.  But like the many B movies he acted in, his political and economic ideology was both fantasy and reality.  Operationalized, it became pro-rich and anti-poor, pro-white and anti-black.  Or ethnically ethnocentric and economically oppressive; a no-no, according to the Scriptures.

Instead of a promised balanced budget, Reagan created the largest budget deficit in history up to that time.  He combined the prohibition-like War on Drugs with racial profiling; result: the unjust mass incarceration of young black and Latino males.  He replaced the War on Poverty with a War on the Poor.  The Reagan counterrevolution gutted many of the accomplishments of the civil rights movement.  For documentation, see these two books:  The Politics of Rich and Poor and The New Jim Crow.

The war on drugs became a war against blacks; the war on the poor doubled the wealth gap.  Worst of all, these fantasies that became evil social realities, were institutionalized and continued on into the Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama presidencies.

This so-called man of faith, of destiny, pursued destructive public policy---pro-oppression and anti-justice.  He not only neglected justice and the love of God as the Pharisees did; he opened the door to the greed of the rich which ran rampant during his 8 years as president.  He himself may not have been the anti-Christ, but he ruled like one as far as the American poor and American blacks were concerned.

Now Donald Trump wants to "make America great again," echoing Ronald Reagan; but making America great again for WASPs, for the rich, white, male elite, echoing R.R means making America bad again for the poor, women  and ethnic minorities, echoing both R.R. and the founding fathers.  Both R. R. and D. T. seem to have similar fantasies, Messiah complexes.  Are we in for another B movie rerun?  Even some Republicans such as David Brooks are scared to death?  Will the American masses follow another fantasy political Messiah?

Why did large number of white evangelicals buy into the flawed Reagan fantasies?  Why are large numbers of white evangelicals gullibly buying into the flawed Trump fantasies?  Something missing in their theology?