Richard Viguerie, the cranky old school dean of the conservative movement who has obliterated George Bush and John McCain for their various apostasies, declared flatly this morning: “Sarah Palin is the next Ronald Reagan.” ~Tom Bevan

I’m sorry, but this is getting out of hand.  Whatever you think about the substance of Reagan’s speech in 1964, to which some drunken enthusiasts may want to compare Palin’s acceptance speech, there is no comparison between them.  Part of this is in the nature of the speeches.  Reagan’s speech was entirely focused on policy and the differences between the candidates, it was delivered in a different register, and he said next to nothing about himself, while Palin’s speech was necessarily part introduction and part apology.  There is certainly no comparison between Reagan at a similar time in his career, c. 1976, and Palin today.  Of course, the point of this statement about Palin is to use a comparison to Reagan to express approval and admiration.  Calling someone the next Reagan is a trope of Republican praise just as calling a foreign leader the next Hitler or Stalin is a trope of condemnation, and all this does is diminish the significance of both the famous person and shows the one compared to him to be unworthy of the comparison.  Reagan’s name has become almost entirely dissociated from the man, and it has simply become an identity marker to be trotted out to sanctify this or that person or proposal.  Reagan nostalgia has become an effort to cover up for the distortions and perversions of the last twenty years.  As Justin Raimondo said of the convention yesterday:

Now we are being treated to a video about … Ronald Reagan. There they go again — with that Soviet-lke iconography, the Great Helmsman’s visage displayed on the screen like an emblem of the Old Ideology, the one no one pays any attention to anymore. “Get government off our backs” exclaims Dutch, and the words ring hollow as the theme of the video, which is that McCain is the real inheritor of the Reaganite mantle. Just as Lenin’s successors, from Stalin to Gorbachev, claimed the mantle of an orthodox Marxism that was all form and no substance.