How Ronald Reagan Became a Republican

I’m writing this two-part series because to make any sense of American politics today, I think I need to better understand Ronald Reagan. He is so enshrined by so many Americans that it’s hard for me to separate the myth from the man Modern conservatism still speaks in his vocabulary, often without realizing how carefully constructed that language actually was.

What I didn’t know was he grew up a Democrat, and was one for much of his early life. To understand what Reagan did, I have to understand how Reagan was made. In this first post I explore Reagan’s evolution from a card-carrying New Deal Democrat into the defining conservative president of late twentieth century. In the next part I’ll examine Reagan’s actual governing record, and how those outcomes flowed directly from the ideological armor he built during this earlier transformation. My primary source is Iwan Morgan’s highly esteemed, balanced biography, Reagan: American Icon.

The Emotional Democrat

What I learned is that Reagan didn’t really leave liberalism, because he was never truly inside it. His loyalty to the New Deal was personal, not ideological, because FDR helped the Reagan family directly. Reagan’s father, Jack, found work through Roosevelt’s relief agencies, like the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Jack even stopped drinking for a while, and the family regained a sense of purpose. When Reagan argued with Republican critics at his radio job in Des Moines, he was really defending his family’s story, not liberal ideas.

Reagan’s well-known optimism was more than just a positive attitude, it also helped shield him from facing tougher realities. Even during the Dust Bowl years in Iowa, he barely noticed the deeper hardships happening around him. Since he never faced many barriers himself, it was easy for him later to believe that the free market could solve social inequalities. He never had to question that idea.

The first real fracture in his Democratic identity came from money.

The Fracture of Grievance

In 1945, Reagan’s Warner Bros. contract (he was an actor at the time) put him in the highest federal tax bracket. On top of that he was paying alimony after his divorce from Jane Wyman, which made him resentful of how much the government took from his earnings. When the Truman administration moved to close tax loopholes for movie stars in 1950, Reagan saw it as class warfare against the deserving rich. He started giving speeches about discriminatory taxation on Hollywood. This wasn’t really a philosophy, it was a grievance. But grievance is often where belief systems are born.

At the same time, Reagan’s post-war role as president of the Screen Actors Guild pushed him in a different direction. The Communist Party’s efforts to influence Hollywood unions felt to Reagan like a personal battle. Morgan points out that Reagan felt some shame about not having served in combat overseas, and the union strikes, threats, and even carrying a shoulder holster all added to the tension. By 1947, Reagan was carrying a loaded .32 Smith & Wesson and secretly working as an FBI informant. His first real experience with the political left was as an enemy.

He still identified as a Cold War liberal. He supported Truman in 1948, made radio ads for Democrats, and was even encouraged to run for Congress as a Democrat in 1952 and 1954. Looking back, this part of his story often gets oversimplified. I think. There was never a clear turning point, just a slow, unresolved shift where his feelings and experiences changed before his official political identity did.

A trip to Britain in 1949 to film The Hasty Heart gave Reagan another reason to dislike big government. He saw the postwar Labour welfare state and hated the production delays, rationing, and nationalized industries. He left believing he had seen firsthand how the welfare state sapped incentive to work. Reagan didn’t really seem capable of understanding that Britain was dealing with postwar reconstruction problems far more difficult than America’s. So his negative impression stuck with him.

The General Electric Years

By the early 1950s Reagan’s movie career hit the skids. Postwar Hollywood had moved away from his aging, wholesome persona, and his high-profile union leadership at SAG made studio executives see him as a confrontational negotiator. Warner Bros. dropped him in 1952. Saving his film career wasn’t realistic, so the GE Theater TV show contract that came along in 1954 was a financial rescue.

This is the part of the story I found most surprising. What he was missing was a way to connect his personal experiences and political ideas into a clear philosophy, and he found that during his years with General Electric.

Between 1954 and 1962 Reagan spent about two years visiting 139 GE plants all over the country, meeting around a quarter million employees. He kept hearing complaints about government red tape and high taxes from working Americans who reminded him of his neighbors in Dixon, Illinois—very different from the Hollywood liberals he had known. The GE VP’s program gave these ideas a structure for Reagan: smaller government, lower taxes, less union power, and strong Cold War policies. During his train rides Reagan read books like Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, works by Henry Hazlitt, and early issues of Buckley’s National Review. GE president Ralph Cordiner summed it up for him: “Get yourself a philosophy.”

The philosophy Reagan developed was simple and effective, and it’s the most important part of my whole post. He took FDR’s wartime idea of the free world fighting against slavery and applied it to domestic politics. Now, big government and communism were both seen as threats to American freedom. Reagan kept using Roosevelt’s language, but he gave it a completely new meaning. Freedom, which once meant the New Deal’s safety net, now stood for opposition to big government. It didn’t sound like rupture to people, it sounded like recovery.

The Social Infrastructure

While GE gave Reagan the ideas, his new wife Nancy helped build the support network he needed. Her social connections introduced him to wealthy California conservatives like Holmes Tuttle, Henry Salvatori, and Justin Dart, who later funded his political career. Her stepfather, Loyal Davis, introduced Reagan to Barry Goldwater and taught him about the dangers of socialized medicine. Nancy didn’t turn him into a conservative, but she made his conservatism viable.

By 1960 Reagan was campaigning for Nixon, even though he was still officially a Democrat. The Nixon team liked it that way, thinking his criticism of Kennedy would have more impact coming from a Democrat. In private, Reagan called Kennedy’s acceptance speech “old Karl Marx.” He officially registered Republican in 1962.

The Performance of a Conversion

Two years later, Reagan gave his “A Time for Choosing” speech to support Goldwater’s presidential campaign, which brought him national attention as a conservative leader. People often see this speech as how Ronald Reagan became a Republican, but it really wasn’t; it was the public expression of beliefs he had developed over the previous decade. The speech was powerful because it didn’t so much present a new Reagan as it showed the real one. He fully believed what he was saying, and that’s why it resonated.

This leads to the main irony that will be explored in Part 2. The anti-government ideas Reagan spent years developing quickly ran into real-world challenges. As governor of California he signed the largest tax increase in the state’s history, approved the Therapeutic Abortion Act, and passed environmental regulations that liberals would have supported. The Reagan who campaigned against government ended up relying on it much more than people expected.

That gap between the ideology he built and the record he actually ran is why part one is so important. In the next post I cover his achievements and his failures as President, and we need to know where Reagan was coming from to make sense of it.