For a president dubbed the “Great Communicator,” it is remarkable how little consensus exists concerning Ronald Reagan’s record. Two new entries into the Reagan imaginary, Max Boot’s weighty biography of the 40th president and the new Ronald Reagan biopic starring Dennis Quaid, have reminded readers and filmgoers of the enduring Reagan enigma that continues to occupy a place of debate in conservative politics and American culture.

　　They each present a vastly different interpretation of Reagan: Boot styles the Gipper as a pragmatic governor and president, who rhetorically promoted extreme political views as he moved from a New Deal Democrat interested in a one-world government to rid the world of nuclear weapons to a staunch anti-communist conservative intent on revolutionizing the US economy to manifest supply-side ideas. Quaid’s cinematic portrayal shows Reagan as a hero in a fallen world, deeply committed to values rooted in his midwestern upbringing that would ultimately win the Cold War for the United States and restore American morale and economic vitality. While Boot’s account overemphasizes the complexities of Reagan’s record and misunderstands the workings of his mind, the new Reagan film glosses over Reagan’s internal struggles to formulate key ideas and thus flattens the hero’s journey. Both remain aloof from the wave of studies over the last decade that have reset the scholarly consensus concerning Reagan’s presidency.

　　Hollywood’s and the historian’s conflicting depiction of the 40th president nevertheless underlines a trend of Reagan’s resurgence in the American psyche; a resurgence that’s caught political pundits and news media off-guard. Since Donald Trump’s emergence as the leader of the Republican Party many in the press have suggested that Ronald Reagan’s legacy no longer shapes American politics.

　　According to media coverage, the 2024 election season put the Reagan legacy into terminal decline. Earlier this fall, a column in this very paper claimed: “Reagan’s Library Still Attracts GOP Candidates. His Ideas Don’t.” NPR recently asked: “Is Ronald Reagan’s long shadow on the GOP fading away?” The New York Times Magazine boldly pronounced, “Mike Johnson’s Election Marks the End of Reagan’s GOP.” Even the Heritage Foundation, the institution most closely associated with the Reagan revolution, has been accused of walking away from Reagan’s legacy.

　　Eulogies for Ronald Reagan’s legacy are premature. A recent study from Pew shows that Reagan still enjoys the highest rating of any president among Republicans. Among all Americans, he still claims the second highest rating of any president, trailing only Barack Obama. A 2023 Gallup poll also has Reagan at number two in approval rating, trailing only John F. Kennedy, while improving by 15 percentage points since 1990 and outpacing Donald Trump by 23 percentage points. The Reagan National Defense Survey has consistently shown that Americans see Ronald Reagan as the top-performing president of the last 50 years. Since 2007, Reagan’s legacy has been more than an intellectual lodestar; it’s also become a physical presence as a new cohort of Republicans journey to center-stage of the Reagan Presidential Library to proclaim themselves heir to the Reagan revolution each presidential primary season.

　　What do premature predictions miss about the decline of Reagan’s legacy? The answer lies in how Reagan is remembered, as a principled or pragmatic president.

　　In Getting Right with Reagan, the historian Marcus Witcher reminds us that since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, his record has been the featured battleground in the struggle for the soul of conservatism. Even the intellectual godfather of modern conservatism, Irving Kristol, claimed the Reagan revolution “never was.” Ronald Reagan, according to Kristol and Witcher, was pragmatic, not ideological, and it is that very pragmatism that has made his legacy such a rich ground for the continued evolution of conservative thinking. George Nash, the renowned historian of conservative intellectual thought, contends that it is the discontinuities in Ronald Reagan’s life—his progression from New Deal Democrat to Republican prophet of limited government—that make Ronald Reagan’s ideas so compelling.

　　Searching for the true Ronald Reagan is not just a pastime of the press and political class, historians have declared him the “elusive president” and equated the task of understanding his true influences and intentions to “an impossible mission.” Much of the challenge stems from archival issues, nearly 50 percent of the records housed at the Reagan Library remain unprocessed and inaccessible to researchers. In the records that are available, many historians lament Reagan’s “absence from the documents,” due to his hands-off managerial style that encouraged heated disagreements among top advisors and his tendency to let the speechwriting process dictate policymaking. Despite these challenges, and perhaps because of them, the “Reagan Moment,” has clearly taken hold in the academy, led by a new generation of historians, such as Simon Miles and Jonathan Hunt, who argue that the 40th president “defies caricature.” This cohort of Reagan revisionists increasingly frame Reagan as a pragmatic coalition-builder.

　　Ronald Reagan viewed pragmatism—or rather good faith engagement with those he disagreed with—as a principle worth defending in its own right.

　　The new picture of a pragmatic and complex Reagan is revealed in recent studies of Reagan’s foreign policy. Scholars are downright bullish that the 40th president’s foreign policy record offers important lessons for managing developments around the globe today that echo those of the 1980s, including Moscow’s march to expand its sphere of influence, Iranian involvement in the violent resurgence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the crisis in arms control and intensifying nuclear arms race, and the attempts of a communist superpower to probe the durability of the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America.

　　Two recent big-picture accounts of Reagan’s foreign policy—one from William Inboden and the other from Philip Taubman—give the president high marks for managing a tumultuous world, but for altogether different reasons. Inboden has rehabilitated the triumphalist argument formerly derided in the academy that Reagan executed a principled grand strategy to win the Cold War, while Taubman re-emphasizes the Reagan reversal thesis that the president was a pragmatist who learned in office and leaned on his staff to transform the dynamics of superpower competition and end the Cold War. Inboden and Taubman are not necessarily at odds, what they prove is that Reagan was principled in his view of geopolitical priorities—foremost the need to relegate Marxism-Leninism to the “ash heap of history”—but pragmatic in his choice of interlocutors, be it Tip O’Neil, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II, or even anti-communist dictators in Latin America under the guidance of the Kirkpatrick doctrine.

　　Reagan’s legacy continues to fascinate because of his ability to persuade Americans, allies, and even adversaries to see the world as he saw it. Participants in C-SPAN’s presidential historians survey awarded Reagan the top mark for public persuasion of any president in the post-World War II era. Here again, the picture of a pragmatic Reagan comes into view. In the 1970s, Reagan’s daily radio show, Viewpoint, which reached 20-30 million listeners, was central to his ability to popularize the new philosophy of fusionism that bridged the previously contentious factions of traditionalist conservatives, anti-communists, and libertarians into a modern and dynamic conservatism. The popularization of fusionism via Viewpoint, Paul Matzko contends, launched the campaign apparatus and voter coalition that won Reagan the White House. In newspapers, Reagan’s outreach to Catholics and evangelicals re-established a religious context for American exceptionalism and a suite of policy issues ranging from welfare to warfare.

　　If foreign policy and rhetorical prowess are the first two pillars of Reagan’s legacy, economics is the third and most controversial. Scholars—most notably the sociologist Monica Prasad—claim that Reagan’s 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act and free market advocacy that evolved into NAFTA have dominated recollections of Reaganomics and subsequently have served as the north star of GOP economic policy up until 2016. But this principled view, Prasad suggests, overlooks Reagan’s record of economic pragmatism, which included the largest tax increase in American history, the imposition of tariffs to protect the American semiconductor industry from Japanese competition, and compromises with congressional Democrats to reform and save Social Security. Larry Kudlow and leading supply-side historian Brian Domitrovic frame the Reagan tax-cut revolution in a bipartisan and pragmatic tradition in which Reagan explicitly drew on the Kennedy “rising tide” model to win majority support in Congress for the signature 1981 and 1986 tax cut packages.

　　Regarding Reagan’s frequently mischaracterized record on race and labor, scholars again point to a record of pragmatism. Breaking past the standard race-based analysis of Reagan’s Southern strategy, Jonathan Bartho brings forward a fresh argument, showing—that despite Reagan’s attachment to free trade principles—his anti-statism and political pragmatism proved to be a winning combination in the South because it appealed to the region’s economic populism. Even Reagan’s response to the PATCO strike, which Republican politicians have relied on as a principled example of standing strong against renegade unions and Democrats have blamed for the collapse of organized labor, has been cast in a more pragmatic light by scholars who showed Reagan—the union man—first reached for genuine compromise before ordering a mass layoff.

　　The principled Ronald Reagan that headlines declared in decline has long dominated the political conversation, but the pragmatic Ronald Reagan is now ascendant within academic circles, bringing along a more favorable view of the 40th president among the literati who are not inclined to embrace the ideas of the new “new right.” In his own time, Ronald Reagan responded to those who criticized him for abandoning principles in the name of pragmatism. What those critics misunderstood was that Ronald Reagan viewed pragmatism—or rather good faith engagement with those he disagreed with—as a principle worth defending in its own right. In his words, “A half loaf is better than none.” A principled legacy shapes the soul of the standard-bearer’s party long after their time in the Oval Office; a pragmatic legacy can elicit a sense of admiration among a broader base of American citizens. To rise to the pantheon of the American presidency, a president’s legacy must be balanced between the principled and pragmatic.