The Heritage Foundation needs a better class of propagandist, since this is embarrassing:
At home, liberal intellectuals lauded the economic accomplishments of the Soviet Union. Reagan was not so easily seduced. In late 1981 and all of 1982, when his tax cuts had not yet kicked in and the U.S. economy still lagged, President Reagan reassured his worried aides and counseled them to stay the course. He had faith in the American people who, if they could be “liberated from the restraints imposed on them by government,” would pull “the country out of its tailspin.” Reagan told the British Parliament that a “global campaign for freedom” would prevail over the forces of tyranny and that “the Soviet Union itself is not immune to this reality.” By the end of the decade, as he predicted, Marxism-Leninism was dumped on the ash heap of history. America, though, experienced the longest peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history, with 17 million new jobs created during the Reagan years.
This is absurd. Even in the 1930s -- at the zenith of American communism -- few leftists would have "lauded the economic accomplishments of the Soviet Union." Indeed, the New Deal was a liberal project to save capitalism from the collapse of the global economy. There was literally no point in the 20th century when communism was fashionable in American liberalism, and if there was, it certainly wouldn't have been the 1980s, when anti-communism was the default position for everyone of influence in political life.
But this is only the beginning of the bizarro history! Not only was Reagan single-handedly responsible for the end of communism and the global flowering of freedom (sorry Solidarity), but somehow, the economic boom of the 1990s went back in time to begin at the precise moment Reagan took office. Any jobs created under Bill Clinton -- approximately 22 million -- were simply the aftershocks of Reagan's cosmic greatness.
Seriously Heritage, it's one thing to be conservative, it's a different thing entirely to make up alternate realities. I don't begrudge you your liberal-hate, but you should look into hiring better hacks.
-- Jamelle Bouie
