How Iran Helped Bring Ronald Reagan to Power |
If war with Iran becomes the issue that fractures the MAGA coalition, the historical irony would be considerable.
Iran’s central role in Republican politics is nothing new. The modern Republican coalition—forged by Ronald Reagan with the 1980 presidential election, when he defeated President Jimmy Carter—was defined by antipathy toward Iran and coincided precisely with the rise of the current regime in Tehran.
If war with Iran becomes the issue that fractures the MAGA coalition, the historical irony would be considerable.
Iran’s central role in Republican politics is nothing new. The modern Republican coalition—forged by Ronald Reagan with the 1980 presidential election, when he defeated President Jimmy Carter—was defined by antipathy toward Iran and coincided precisely with the rise of the current regime in Tehran.
What followed were decades that shaped the political worldview of millions of Americans, including Donald Trump. Now they are in their senior years, watching to see whether the regime that took hold in that era finally collapses, and at what cost to the United States and its allies.
Ironically, the war against Iran that every president since Reagan avoided may prove to be what breaks that MAGA coalition apart—and opens the door to a Democratic resurgence.
The 1970s were a difficult decade for Americans. Vietnam’s shadow lingered long after the last troops came home. A deep skepticism toward elected officials took hold and there was little appetite for another ground war, even a limited one. The world’s most awesome military force, the very same one that had defeated global fascism in the 1940s, had failed to prevent Vietnam’s unification under communist rule, and the United States’ sense of its own place on the world stage had shifted accordingly. At home, the nation was fracturing along social and cultural lines. And stagflation—the punishing combination of high unemployment and inflation—had shattered the economic expectations that postwar prosperity had made to seem permanent.
As if all of that were not enough, an energy crisis that spiked twice, in 1973 and again in 1979, made the country feel economically hostage to far smaller and weaker governments in the Middle East, as the oil-producing cartel OPEC squeezed U.S. prices and supplies.
The modern conservative movement that gained strength during this period, a coalition of Evangelical Christians, New Right intellectuals, Wall Street and business interests, neoconservative Democrats, and traditional anti-government Republicans, laid the blame for all of it squarely on the Democratic Party. The Democrats had controlled Congress since 1955, and conservatives charged that together with Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter—as well as middle-of-the-road Republicans Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—they had........