When Reagan died, The Economist ran a cover story identifying him as the “winner of the Cold War.” I ripped that cover off, because I didn’t accept that proposition. I still don’t.
Ultimately, the claim for Reagan’s “indispensability” is that he completely transformed the American political landscape by changing the GOP from a modest pro-business party focusing on balanced budgets to the swaggering, tax cutting, socially reactionary party that it is today. It happened because most people associated the recovery of the early 1980’s with his tax cut, not with interest rate decreases engineered by the Fed. Whether they were right or not is beside the point; in this case, perception is reality.
None of that would have happened if George H.W. Bush had come up with a snappy retort when Reagan said he paid for the microphone in New Hampshire in 1980. The big tax cut wouldn’t have happened, the recovery would have occurred anyway, and the GOP and the nation would be completely different today.
In other words, while Reagan was a far more attractive figure than Donald Trump in virtually every respect, the road to Trumpism runs through him.