First, don't forget the decisive effect of sheer historical contingency. All kinds of things could have happened that would have made Reagan's popularity a non-issue. The rescue mission to free the Tehran hostages might have succeeded, for example, and Carter might then have been re-elected. Reagan would have faded into relative obscurity, another William McAdoo or Theodore Bilbo. There would have been no opportunity for the right to cement its political and cultural power, and we would be speculating about something else, let's say the cultural roots of Jimmy Carter's undying popularity with the American public.
The different versions of the "Americans are stupid and/or vicious" thesis (to the extent they're seriously meant) can be dismissed as lacking surface plausibility. There's no reason to think that such a large sample of the earth's population, 290 million or so, is any more or less stupid and/or vicious than any other sizeable group--Norwegians, Tibetans, Trobriand Islanders, take your pick.
One should also keep a sense of proportion. The press has temporarily promoted him in death to god-hero status, but that will quickly fade. Sure, propaganda, or marketing--"ideology"-- is also a big factor: anything loudly and confidently and frequently asserted will come to be widely believed. Many people adored him, but many others despised or ridiculed him, and still others were more or less indifferent to his appeal.
Nevertheless, something remains to be explained. Reagan _was_ popular with a large number of people who should have had every reason to oppose him. His reputation also survived a battering that would have sunk other politicians. I don't dismiss the role of propaganda and the acquiescence of the press here either, but when all that is accounted for, he still had a distinctive personal appeal that played a large role in his political success.
I think that gender is central to all this. Many people--men in particular--saw in him an idealized version of themselves made flesh. Reagan often reminded me of a certain type of middle-American man born before, oh, WW II or so, not just in his style and manner--patronizing, sentimental, at times weirdly childish, with a nastily authoritarian quality never far from the surface--but also in his seeming lack of an individuated inner life and apparent lack of self-doubt. His very shallowness represented an ideal of sorts. He seemed to so thoroughly inhabit a gender-defined social role that it became contiguous with, or even identical to, individual personality. This is perhaps the source of the phoniness that a lot of people perceived in Reagan, which is so often attributed to his profession as a movie actor. Reagan's acting ability and experience contributed to his ability to project such an image on the public stage, but I think its roots go deeper. What some saw as his phoniness, others, especially men raised in traditional environments who internalized the male character formation characteristic of those milieux, saw as a sign of his having achieved an ideal self. He was to that extent a representative man. An attack on him was an attack on a deeply held ideal, and in defending Reagan they were defending a certain self-image, already seen as under threat from the gradual long-term erosion of patriarchy. Reagan did express a certain "egalitarianism," but it was a narrow and exclusive egalitarianism that drew its solidarity from despising or at best patronizing outsiders.
He was able to conjoin this personal image to a powerful and resonant body of historical mythology. Reagan is sometimes associated with the Depression and WWII generations, but he was born in 1911, and grew to adulthood through the teens and the roaring twenties. His core political ideals would have been those bequeathed by the progressive era. The progressive legacy is a complicated one, and includes much that the US left of today can endorse, but has other aspects that we find archaic, or abhorrent, or at least problematic. Michael McGerr's recent book, _A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870 - 1920_ does a good job of bringing out the different strands that went into progressivism. In the broadest terms, progressivism can be seen as an effort to reconcile the pre-Civil War American ideals of "independence" (see Eric Foner on the meaning of "independence") and "liberty" with large-scale industrial capitalism and the class structure associated with it. A big part of this was asserting a unifying national mythology in order to tamp down social and political conflict, and to fit a fractious and divided population to the imperialist impulse then taking shape. It is this mythology that Reagan brought up to date and expressed to such great political effect.
Reagan and Reaganism, seen from the left, were the perfect historical storm that wrecked a lot of ships. His emotional appeal in the US worked on several different levels. During his interminable obsequies, we had NPR on at the office, playing in the background while my colleague and I rolled our eyes and cracked jokes. Much of the program was really quite ironic. They sang, of course, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." According to one version of history, Julia Ward Howe first thought of the words upon hearing, as she drifted off to sleep in her hotel room, the abolition regiments from Massachusetts singing "John Brown's Body" (the source of the melody) as they marched into Lincoln's Washington to garrison the city against what the men of those regiments would have called the "slave power." We hear in it the martial tone (they were after all at war) and the sickly Christianity ("In the beauty of the lilies etc."), but the people of the time would have experienced it quite differently. It's an attempt at a Yankee abolitionist "Internationale," spoiled for many of us by its appropriation for other, later, oft-times imperial purposes (How would a survivor of Stalin's camps hear the real "Internationale"?) Also on the funeral program were the familiar Quaker hymn "Amazing Grace," composed in remorse by a reformed slave trader, and John Winthrop's much-abused Arabella speech, the "City on a Hill" discourse. Not many years after it was spoken, the compatriots of Winthrop and his friends back in the old country--the place Winthrop had in mind when he delivered it--sent Charles I to the chopping block. The Quakers and Puritans, in a world so very different from ours, _were_ the "left" of their time, by something more than analogy, with whom the American left of today ought to feel at least some affinity across the centuries. (This admittedly takes a certain amount of informed archaeological imagination). There is, in any case, no reason in the world to allow the vicious, but unfortunately not stupid right, to appropriate and control national memory by asserting their "ownership" of the national past.
Jacob Conrad