While America had been rocked by riots and assassinations when I was a kid, the first big political development in America that shocked me was the election of Ronald Reagan. He was a boob, a Hollywood actor, not even a very good one. At the time, just out of college, I did not really understand the darker forces that were behind his election—the racism and greed, the anti-government ideology that was really just a formula to enable the richest among us to make more and the most racist states to chart their own course.