"Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like"
About this Quote
Memory is Hitchens's chosen battleground, and he's warning you that the fight is already being lost. "Nothing could make me forget" sounds like stubborn personal testimony, but the real target is public amnesia: the soft-focus nostalgia that routinely settles over contested administrations once the moral dust has cleared and the cable-news highlight reels have been edited down to flags, jokes, and soundtrack-ready optimism.
The line works because it refuses the seduction of "the Reagan years" as a brand. Hitchens isn't debating tax policy on the merits; he's insisting on the lived record, the specifics that cheerleading retroactively turns into vibes. Coming from a writer who made a career of puncturing sanctimony, the sentence is a preemptive strike against the ritual of canonization: the bipartisan move where former combatants quietly agree to treat power as a personality rather than a set of consequences.
Its subtext is both political and autobiographical. Hitchens came out of the anti-war, anti-imperialist left, and his view of Reaganism was shaped by the era's harder edges: Cold War brinkmanship, the moral theater of anti-communism, and the bloody proxy politics that let Washington speak in the language of freedom while other countries paid in bodies. "Actually been like" is the tell; it's a jab at mythmaking, at people who weren't there (or were, but prefer not to remember) narrating the past as a simpler, cleaner story.
The intent isn't just to condemn Reagan. It's to indict a culture that keeps rewarding charisma with historical pardon.
The line works because it refuses the seduction of "the Reagan years" as a brand. Hitchens isn't debating tax policy on the merits; he's insisting on the lived record, the specifics that cheerleading retroactively turns into vibes. Coming from a writer who made a career of puncturing sanctimony, the sentence is a preemptive strike against the ritual of canonization: the bipartisan move where former combatants quietly agree to treat power as a personality rather than a set of consequences.
Its subtext is both political and autobiographical. Hitchens came out of the anti-war, anti-imperialist left, and his view of Reaganism was shaped by the era's harder edges: Cold War brinkmanship, the moral theater of anti-communism, and the bloody proxy politics that let Washington speak in the language of freedom while other countries paid in bodies. "Actually been like" is the tell; it's a jab at mythmaking, at people who weren't there (or were, but prefer not to remember) narrating the past as a simpler, cleaner story.
The intent isn't just to condemn Reagan. It's to indict a culture that keeps rewarding charisma with historical pardon.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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