Politics & Power Quote by William L. Jenkins

Reagan nostalgia has reached the point where the memories risk collapsing into genre. Jenkins is doing two things at once: reaffirming his place inside the Reaganite in-group while quietly admitting that the movement’s greatest currency is now narrative, not policy. “Those of us who supported” draws a boundary line - this isn’t history, it’s a shared identity badge. The pronoun matters. It signals loyalty first, evidence second.

Calling the stories “told so often” gestures at repetition as both comfort and problem. Repetition turns political recollection into ritual: the same anecdotes, the same punchlines, the same moral lessons about optimism, toughness, American renewal. But Jenkins also smuggles in a warning. If the tales “seem mundane,” it’s not because they were trivial; it’s because the retelling has sanded off their strangeness and contingency. The past starts to feel inevitable, like a plot you already know.

The kicker is the comparison to “a fictional novel or a movie script.” That’s not just a throwaway metaphor; it’s an admission that the Reagan era was built to be remembered cinematically. Reagan’s Hollywood background, the administration’s mastery of televised symbolism, and the right’s long-running preference for anecdote over abstraction all sit behind that line. Jenkins is acknowledging the seduction of a tidy narrative arc - hero, crisis, comeback - while hinting at the danger: when politics becomes screenplay, complexity becomes a continuity error, and criticism can be dismissed as someone “ruining the story.”