It ain't gonna happen so long as MSM outlets like Time prop up the fantasy that Ronald Reagan was an admirable president. Americans who buy into this fantasy fail to understand that the mess we're in now is the direct result of movement conservatives in the Reagan mold having taken over the levers of power in 2000. It's not that things have gone wrong because of the screwup of a couple of Bush administration incompetents; they have gone predictably wrong based on the very premises of the philosophy and worldview of the American right today.
Krugman makes the point:
Why is there such a strong family resemblance between the Reagan years and recent events? Mr. Reagan’s administration, like Mr. Bush’s, was run by movement conservatives — people who built their careers by serving the alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. And both cronyism and abuse of power are part of the movement conservative package.
In part this is because people whose ideology says that government is always the problem, never the solution, see no point in governing well. So they use political power to reward their friends, rather than find people who will actually do their jobs.
If expertise is irrelevant, who gets the jobs? No problem: the interlocking, lavishly financed institutions of movement conservatism, which range from K Street to Fox News, create a vast class of apparatchiks who can be counted on to be “loyal Bushies.”
The movement’s apparatchik culture, in turn, explains much of its contempt for the rule of law. Someone who has risen through the ranks of a movement that prizes political loyalty above all isn’t likely to balk at, say, using bogus claims of voter fraud to disenfranchise Democrats, or suppressing potentially damaging investigations of Republicans. As Franklin Foer of The New Republic has pointed out, in College Republican elections, dirty tricks and double crosses are considered acceptable, even praiseworthy.
The idea that movement conservatism is a for small government is a hoot. Whatever the beliefs of its more naive proponents, the practical effect of movement conservatism is to bloat the government while subordinating it to corporate demands. Bush administration is the reductio ad absurdum of the movement for which Reagan was the herald. Bush is what Reagan would have become if he had both houses of Congress, the judiciary, and no Soviet Union to hold him in check. What we see now in this disastrous administration is exactly what we should have expected, and it's what we should expect after 2008 if Americans allow themselves to be conned into electing another Republican president and Congress.
We Americans are naive if we think that what we are witnessing now is just about the individual failure of one man--George Bush. It's not about the indivdual; it's about the underlying power constellation for which Bush and Reagan are simply front men. And regardless of the mess the elements that compose this constellation have made and the price we Americans will pay for it in the decades to come, these groups retain enormous power and influence, and they are not going away.
There is no splitting the difference with this movement. It must be repudiated root and branch. The cultural values debate is a smokescreen to hide the power alignments that are coalescing behind it. The cultural sphere is where we should be having debates about cultural values; the political sphere is where we should be concerned about power alignments. The single greatest threat we face as a nation is the alliance between corporate power and the power of big government. And the degree to which the Democrats are also implicated in this power system is profoundly troubling.
So it's getting to the point that it won't matter if most people disapprove of what this coalition of power interests wants to do. The issue is not about whether the American people approve or disapprove of its agenda, but about whether the American people, even if they mustered the will, have the power to stop it.