Reagan was pretty close to that kind of rebel. So was Jimmy Carter at the time come to think of it. Maybe not pure....in the sense of Trump....but not establishment - neither one of them.
>> Reagan was pretty close to that kind of rebel <<
Well, of course RWR appealed more directly to the “people” than he did to the establishment.
But as I remember events, he didn’t campaign as an “angry rebel” of any sort, and he didn’t go around raging against a real or imagined establishment.
In fact Reagan scarcely raged against anybody, even the commies and their fellow traveling Dhimmis. He just laid out his policies in a friendly and persuasive way, backed up by a deep intellectual understanding of the problems we were facing.
Bottom Line on Ron:
Good cheer and an attractive persona, combined with an intellectually serious conservative philosophy — a combination that’s hard to beat, IMHO.
>> So was Jimmy Carter at the time come to think of it <<
Carter as a rebel? Sorry, but I can’t quite buy the image. Call him insincere, vindictive, devious, incompetent, self-important, humorless — with all of these attributes behind the insincere smile of a sometime Sunday school teacher. But I just don’t see how “rebellion against the establishment” was an important element in his appeal to the voter.
(A rebel against Nixonism? Yeah, I’ll buy that one. And definitely he had a strong one-time-only appeal to his fellow Southerners. But I’d say those factors just ain’t the same as true anti-establishmentarianism. Not even close.)