Reagan was Harsh for Working Families

The Reagan administration marked the beginning of the end of my hope for a decent paying job with benefits. I managed to work in transportation and logistics most of my life, but there was never a pension, the retirement programs were chintzy, and no better jobs that I could identify were on offer. I knew I would be eligible for a Social Security pension. I had not planned to rely solely on it. I wrote about my life in 1981: “The chance of long-term employment with decent benefits had already begun to fade from American society as Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president that year.”

The Reagan presidency was particularly harsh for working families like ours. A recession, high unemployment, and a sequestered president had set his agenda and accomplished much of what he intended during his first year in office. When something went wrong, like when the country was caught trading arms for hostages, the criticism seemed not to stick to the popular president. When we examine what Reagan did for businesses and took away from plain folks like us, I can see why it took courage to get through those days. It helps explain why I felt stress during the time we were starting our family.

The Reagan years changed American politics in a way we are feeling today. Heather Cox Richardson explained:

(A) reactionary mindset came to dominate the Republican Party after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Republicans began to insist that anyone who embraced the liberal consensus of the past several decades was un-American and had no right to govern, no matter how many Americans supported that ideology. And now, forty-five years later, we are watching as a group of reactionaries dismantle the government that serves the needs of ordinary Americans and work, once again, to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of an elite. (Letters From an American, Heather Cox Richardson, Feb. 11, 2025).

It is easy to see Republicans today, throughout the country, embrace this ideology. On Monday, at a State House subcommittee hearing, someone called the American Library Association “Marxist.” Another person described a “grooming barrage” of unacceptable books in libraries. One dumped a load of books on the committee’s table. What that meant I can only guess as I’m not caught up in whatever media bubble they were. The chair of the meeting asked her to remove the books and cautioned the attendees there would be decorum. These are crazy times.

Some in politics revere the work Reagan did while he was president and seek to bring back his approach to policy and governance. Plain folks like us do not. We remember Reagan and the impact of his policies. I saw the layoffs in Buick City and across the rust belt when I worked in those communities. I saw the internationalization of corporations and the way they sought low labor costs like water finding a gully. I saw the degradation of the environment and poisoning of our rivers and streams. None of this benefited regular folks like me.

My grandmother lived in the Vail apartments in Davenport, which had been converted to senior living. Reagan had lived there too, early in his career when he worked as broadcaster in Davenport. People like my grandmother were left behind in more ways than one. Reagan was neither of the people nor for them. There seemed little connection to what went on in Washington, D.C. and the power of the electorate was diminished. In 1981, I felt we had lost an ability to influence the direction of our country.

Don’t get me wrong. Democratic administrations following Reagan did their best to reverse the slide of money from folks like me toward the richest Americans and corporations. Long term, it didn’t work. The thing is, the wealthy can afford to play the long game and if it were not Trump today, it would be somebody else dismantling our government.

I probably need to let go of the Reagan stuff, even though it played a role in my life ever since he was elected. The good part of the Reagan years was they had me withdrawing into family. There was some solace in that.