As far as the New Left is concerned, ( young adults of the early 1960's) California's then-governor Ronald Regan was a bad guy.
Calling out the National Guard to pelt young students just sitting on the steps at the University of California, Berkeley was unnecessary. Just for printing the word 'f*ck' in a student newspaper. Or, maybe it was in the student newspaper's context of protest against the Vietnam conflict, drafting young Americans to go fight in the military and it not being officially, constitutionally a war.
Forgotten was that the man was the president of the Screen Actors Guild, who got the actors and actresses a residual for their movie replays on television. He proved it was good for the economy and the employed, whose jobs were not steady employment. But the circulation of goods rose and fell when these people worked or didn't have jobs. For the on again off again employment industry, he was a good guy.
He was able to justify taxation on those fortunate enough to have lots of money that could work for them rather than have people work for them; and those 'green employees' had to pay taxes as a psychological and sociological obligation to support the government proportionally to what they took out of circulation to actually put real employees on the tax rolls.
Somehow, as governor he showed us with his geeky pie charts the understanding of proportionment and apportionment. The proportion of tax contribution gave the government a budget to make an apportionment to run things.
Then, he got to the White House. And as President of the United States, he made one fatal flaw. He dolled out authority, assigned tasks to others, and never followed through on them.
He sided with banks, taking away regulations that slowed down their business activity, which doesn't count today because it's all electronic and always up-to-date; and proved that given the chance to steal, Americans will.
All in all, we of the center, mosquitoes to the right, buzzing off to the left might just end up calling Ronald Regan a Good, Bad guy.
Let's face it, he was a Republican.
