America once again felt good about itself – except the poor who hunted game for food on payday, writes Tony Horwitz.

In this week of eulogies for Ronald Reagan, we often hear that he made America “feel good about itself”. No one asks whether boosting the nation’s self-esteem was a good thing.

Reagan’s unashamed wielding of US power and money may have hastened Soviet collapse. But at home, what he really made Americans feel good about was getting rich, no matter the social cost. This ethos still reigns in America. Increasingly, it seems to be Australia’s creed as well.

When Reagan won office in 1980, I’d just begun work as a union organiser in rural Mississippi. This wasn’t as doomed a career choice as it seems today. The ’70s, derided as a decade of bad music and worse fashion, were a time of deep social change.

Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford oversaw school integration, rises in minimum wages and pioneering environmental laws. The income gap narrowed between rich and poor, blacks and whites, men and women. When Jimmy Carter urged citizens to turn down their thermostats to save energy, most did. The US, humbled by Vietnam, Watergate and the oil shock, was taking baby steps towards living more equitably, and within its means.

But Carter, preachy and dour, didn’t make America feel good about itself. Buoyant Reagan did. He promised to free our inner Rockefellers by slashing taxes, busting unions and gutting social welfare – even attacking subsidies for school lunches by reclassifying tomato sauce as a vegetable when counting nutrients. Environmental standards fell; trees, Reagan said, caused pollution.

Wall Street soared (along with deficits), greed became good, and guilt was for wimps. Reagan’s economists insisted the riches flowing to those at the top would “trickle down” to the “deserving poor”, rather than being wasted on “welfare queens”.

I watched much of this from afar, having married an Australian and spent most of the ’80s away. Returning to the US, I sensed how much things had changed. Business schools were bursting. The Marxist mate I’d followed into union organising had taken a job at Fortune magazine. A small inheritance from my grandfather, invested in 1982, had grown into a sizeable nest egg. My future seemed secure through no real effort of my own.

Those without assets had to fend for themselves. With cuts to food stamps and other aid, and the minimum wage frozen during the boom, the ranks of working poor rose 44 per cent. Middle-class flight to suburbs and private schools deepened the divide, draining cities’ tax bases and sealing off the affluent. When I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal about factory workers who hunted game on payday because their wages didn’t cover food costs, readers asked if I’d invented the story. Many of the paper’s well-off subscribers had no idea such people existed.

Tellingly, the same readers raised $US60,000 to help the families I’d profiled. Americans have a strong social conscience, when it’s pricked. But Reagan’s electoral success created an enduring mantra in US politics: always make America feel good about itself. So the nation’s ego keeps super-sizing, along with its cars, tax breaks and waistlines. Much has changed since 1980, but the small-government, big-business dogma that Reagan championed still thrives.

The US, in a sense, was ever thus. Reagan reinvigorated stale nostrums from the Gilded Age and Roaring ’20s. The same can’t be said for Australia, which I’ve visited and lived in for two decades. Taken together, my annual stays form an album of time-lapse snapshots. The unscientific impression I’ve formed is that Australia feels more like Reagan’s America each year.

It’s evident in the drift from public to private education and medicine, the emphasis on work and money to feed ever-rising consumption, the meanness creeping into discussions of immigrants. Each time I land, there’s angst over an American excess that’s arisen here. This year it’s child obesity, though more obvious to me is the American-style bulge of Sydney vehicles.

Some see this as a triumph of globalisation and free market affluence. I enjoy luxuries such as Sunday shopping which used to be rare here. But we need to look at both sides of the ledger. So while others laud Reagan this week, I’m one who won’t mourn his departure. If only we could bury his legacy with him.