Geoff Russ: Ronald Reagan is gone, and it is time to act like it

The gatekeepers of the Canadian right have to move on from 1984.

(Photo credit to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.)

Ronald Reagan remains the towering leader of the Cold War. He stared down the Soviet Union, pushed the world towards free trade and freer economies, and inspired a generation on the political right around the world.

Nostalgia for that, conscious or unconscious, is not a plan. In 2025, the right is gripped by a domestic fight for cultural sovereignty and a functioning, ordered society. More reverence for the 1980s will not win it.

Americans last re-elected Reagan more than four decades ago. He passed away in 2004, before most youthful conservatives were old enough to care, and before many had even been born.

With Donald Trump leading the Republicans, Reagan’s vision that eschewed tariffs, championed smaller government, and embraced internationalism has disappeared from the party’s imagination. If the GOP has moved on, many powerful Canadian conservatives have not.

Doug Ford’s government in Ontario has begun a $75-million ad campaign aimed at American viewers, featuring vintage clips of Reagan criticising protectionism, in a bid to pressure Trump into lifting tariffs on Canadian goods.

Who in the GOP or the White House is going to be moved by those ads?

Praise for the 40th president is more likely to be heard from David Frum and Bill Kristol, the neoconservative outcasts associated with George W. Bush’s administration. California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, is more likely to invoke Reagan in a debate than a young man in a MAGA hat is.

For young conservatives, Canadians included, appealing to the memory of Reagan is like listening to dad’s playlist on Spotify. The quality is undeniable, but it is not music to dance to, or a soundtrack for the times.

Pierre Poilievre has moved past a purely libertarian appeal and attacked the Liberal government’s mass immigration regime, as well as its soft approaches to crime and addictions. Most of his provincial counterparts clearly have not.

Within the Conservative Party of British Columbia, the old guard from the former BC Liberal “free enterprise coalition” years is locked in a civil war with the more stridently right-wing activists who rebuilt the party. The former are far more moderate or uncaring regarding social and cultural issues, and have pushed out younger staffers who want to confront the left in the “culture war.”

Young Canadians on the right are not animated by Reagan’s speech warning of the “Evil Empire.” They are energised by anti-Canadian activists who slander their country as an evil colonial state with an equally villainous society. Their fight is a domestic one in the classrooms, city halls, and media corporations, and the antagonists are home-field institutions captured by ideological clerks.

The gatekeepers of the Canadian right can meet young people where they are, or risk losing them. Many on the right under age 40 simply desire the world that existed in their parents’ time, when things were seemingly normal and the basics of civilisation were taken for granted, not attacked unrelentingly.

Being told to ignore the culture war is infuriating when the Western left wages it as a hobby, hunting down street names to rename, statues to topple, and entire ethnicities and cultures to demonise. Telling people to look away from that is like advising them to ignore a house fire because the mortgage rate is favourable.

Unlike their older counterparts, people born in the 1990s or early 2000s have also grown up in a time of economic and social uncertainty sparked by the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

An open-minded tolerance for criticism of cultural and social norms has devolved into a full takeover of public institutions by radical activists and thinkers who undermine the moral basis of their country.

Immigration, once championed by the right in the 1980s, came to be used as a crutch for economic growth in G7 countries, creating competition for jobs and space with native-born citizens.

In Canada, the government of Justin Trudeau embarked on an ambitious campaign of top-down social and cultural change in 2015, just as the strength of the economy began to truly wither. Under his premiership, the scale and speed of change caused by modern migration were unprecedented, with Canada adding more than four million new residents since 2014.

Who wants to sustain high levels of mass immigration when entry-level jobs disappear, even as market fundamentalists insist it is for the greater good?

Housing affordability, public service delivery, and civic trust have been brutalised, and young voters have rightfully tied that to rapid population growth. Recent immigration is a top issue for voters across the West, whether they be native-born or newcomers themselves.

It is difficult to hold true to libertarianism when drug addicts are allowed to stay on the street until they die in the name of personal autonomy. It is harder still when open-air drug scenes sprawl faster than new subdivisions, public order erodes, and people feel unprotected.

Neighbourhoods where it was once unquestionably safe to walk at night feel more perilous.

A thriving economy can sink social and cultural tensions and delay their onset, but they rise to the top as the pleasant distraction of affluence declines. The classical liberal conception of society only works well if a people share a common culture and defer to common, unspoken rules.

If we are polarised and carved into political, cultural, and social tribes with radically different visions of what Canada must be, there are no conditions for a live-and-let-live mentality.

No serious young conservative will attack a hero like Reagan, but what likely pushed them into politics was not his speeches, least of all in Canada.

They want a government that will enforce safety and promote better social norms on the street, in schools, and on public transit. Their tax dollars are already being funnelled towards organisations and people who are fighting a culture war against them, and they want permission to fight back.

Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment. He is a contributor to a number of publications, including the National Post, Modern Age, and The Spectator Australia.

He is the proud owner of a vintage “Reagan-Bush ‘84” shirt and has two biographies of Ronald Reagan on his bookshelf.