Would Ronald Reagan Still Be a Republican?

As I've noted before, I come from a family that with few exceptions considered ourselves Republicans and were not embarrassed to do so. But that was in the past when reason, intelligence, knowledge and reason were attributes that most members of the GOP admired. Today's GOP is a whole different ball game and indeed, the GOP base now rejects just about all of the foregoing values. If my entire family ceased to be Republicans - so-called Rockefeller Republicans, if you will - because the party morphed into something awful, the questions arises of who else would cease to be a Republican given what the party has become. In a Washington Post column Dana Milbank makes the case that Ronald Reagan would likewise now find himself a refugee from the GOP and back within the Democrat fold. His argument sets out a line of reasoning that I suspect more and more GOP moderates find themselves subscribing to more and more as the party lurches towards increased extremism. Here are some highlights:

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After he switched to the Republican Party in 1962, Ronald Reagan famously quipped: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.” Now, the Republican Party is doing the same thing to him — and Democrats are happy to take Reagan back.
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Nobody knows what Reagan, who died in 2004, would make of the current fight over the debt limit. But 100 years after Reagan’s birth, it’s clear that the Tea Party Republicans have little regard for the policies of the president they claim to venerate.
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Tea Party Republicans call a vote to raise the debt ceiling a threat to their very existence; Reagan presided over 18 increases in the debt ceiling during his presidency.
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Tea Party Republicans say they would sooner default on the national debt than raise taxes; Reagan agreed to raise taxes 11 times.
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Tea Party Republicans, in “cut, cap and balance” legislation on the House floor Tuesday, voted to cut government spending permanently to 18 percent of gross domestic product; under Reagan, spending was as high as 23.5 percent and never below 21.3 percent of GDP.
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That same legislation would take federal spending down to a level last seen in 1966, before Medicare was fully up and running; Reagan in 1988 signed a major expansion of Medicare. Under the Tea Party Republicans’ spending cap, Reagan’s military buildup, often credited with winning the Cold War, would have been impossible.
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No wonder Democrats on Tuesday were claiming the Republican icon as one of their own. After the caucus meeting with the Reagan clip, Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) began the day’s debate by reading from a 1983 Reagan letter to Congress warning that “the full consequences of a default — or even the serious prospect of default — by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate.”
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But while Reagan nostalgia endures, a number of Republicans have begun to admit the obvious: The Gipper would no longer be welcome on the GOP team. Most recently, Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr. (Calif.) called Reagan a “moderate former liberal . . . who would never be elected today in my opinion.” This spring, Mike Huckabee judged that “Ronald Reagan would have a very difficult, if not impossible time being nominated in this atmosphere,” pointing out that Reagan “raises taxes as governor, he made deals with Democrats, he compromised on things in order to move the ball down the field.”
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Half a century after he left the party, the Gipper is winning one for the Democrats.