Politics & Power Quote by Ron Reagan

"Now, ignorance is one thing, ignorance can be cured. But..". is a rhetorical trapdoor: Ron Reagan opens with an almost charitable diagnosis, then drops the moral weight where he wants it. The first clause offers a familiar civic comfort story, that disagreement is just a knowledge gap and education will fix it. That’s the bait. The pivot - "But many of the Republican leaders... know better" - turns the argument from misunderstanding to misconduct. He’s not debating policy; he’s assigning culpability.

The intent is surgical: separate ordinary voters (misinformed, persuadable) from party leadership (informed, strategically obstructive). It’s a classic move for a journalist-turned-commentator: preserve the possibility of public reason while indicting the people who shape the incentives. By framing ignorance as curable, Reagan implicitly flatters the audience as rational adults; by accusing leaders of acting against what they "know", he casts opposition as bad faith rather than values-based difference.

The subtext is about power and performance. If leaders "know better", then the resistance to "this research" isn’t principled skepticism; it’s coalition management - appeasing donors, religious constituencies, or culture-war gatekeepers. The line also smuggles in a standard of evidence: there is a "better" to know, a reality that competent actors have already encountered.

Context matters: Reagan’s public voice often trades on the friction between his family name and his politics, and this sentence uses that credibility to puncture a party’s self-mythology. It’s less a plea for bipartisanship than a warning that the real conflict isn’t ignorance vs. knowledge, but knowledge vs. expedience.