The Reagans

It is awful how the Reagans were to poor families while they spent money on themselves. It's INSANE that they gutted the New Deal and believed in Trickle Down economics. Obviously they were both spokespeople for evangelicals and corporations. It's also nuts they had so many gay friends and let AIDS just go unattended for so long. Or how he really felt he had not sold arms for hostages - when he had? It was good Reagan tried to deescalate nuclear tensions. The story comes off like a tragedy of a man who believed in the myth of America and the corporations who used him to hijack our political system.

I'm not a Reagan-fan by any mean, I watched the documentary from a liberal minded European view. But I'm also a historian and value a balanced effort and fact-based telling of things. Because Reagan is such a mythical being it's good to be critical of that myth and most of the criticism in this documentary is based on reality.

Still, you cannot just push the narrative, you have to base it on facts and numbers which are not shown to us in the documentary. If you talk about economy or poverty, show the numbers! There are good moments in this mini-series but it's frustrating and too one-sided to be considered a great documentary.

My Senior year in high school PBS aired it's American Experience special on Reagan. It a fairly nuanced, maybe even somewhat sympathetic documentary. This, however, is not. I don't think anyone can deny this is a critique of the Reagan's almost exclusively from a Left Wing point of view. That being said, it's not bad. It's fairly interesting, but as a mentioned just know going in it's not a puff piece.

Watch it yourself ignore the scores of 1 by right wingers, bringing the score down.

A well done documentary marrying video of the Reagans with contemporary accounts of people who knew them and worked with them, including their son.

Reagan was a B actor, a mediocre actor and someone who had very limited success in life until he was 60+ and he became the front man for powerful and wealthy interests who wanted a right wing government in California and later in America.

He went from being the head of a union (the Screen Actors Guild) to being anti union over night because the pay was better. He apparently never had any political or ideological views of his own and just aped the things that he was fed.

He was an actor. He made his living delivering the lines he was told to deliver, acting the way he was paid to act. In the documentary, you can see his non existent understanding of what he was fronting and you can hear people pick apart his positions, including the people he worked with.

His own son is very critical of him and is on record elsewhere saying that he doesn't think his father ever read a book. A single book. In his lifetime.

Reagan was a disastrous President and the decline of the country can certainly be connected to the things he did while President that were disastrous. And he created the lowered expectations that lead to the election of George W Moron and Trump.

A good example of a disastrous policy - eliminating the fairness doctrine in news which allowed the rise of Fox and others and the 7/24 disinformation age that we live in. Another example is the deregulation of the savings and loan industry which lead to enormous frauds in that industry and its collapse.

If you want a good summary of Reagan and his time in office, watch the documentary. Ignore the negative reviews. The people writing those are apologists for Reagan and Trump and the current brain dead GOP.