Ramesh Ponnuru has a rather sad piece in today’s Times, urging Republicans to revitalize themselves by emulating Reagan’s spirit rather than his specifics. Actually, it’s sad on two fronts.

First, Ponnuru wants the GOP to recognize the reality of growing inequality that has eliminated the connection between economic growth and middle-class incomes, to shift its focus away from tax cuts for the rich, and to drop the fixation with inflation and hard money in favor of a pragmatic approach. Well, there’s a name for people willing to be flexible in this way: they’re called Democrats. Think of the known views of Paul Ryan, who is undoubtedly his party’s intellectual leader (a fact that in itself tells you a lot about the party), and ask how he could conceivably accept any of this without admitting that he has spent his entire career being wrong about everything.

But it’s also really sad to see the continuing dominance of Reaganolatry. It’s not just that Reaganomics was a long time in the past — his big tax cut was 33, count them, 33 years ago. It’s also that Reaganomics was not a success!

Look at median family income. The basic story of postwar America is one of big gains in the first generation, near-stagnation in the second and after, with fluctuation due to the business cycle. And Reagan did not break that pattern:

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If you want a better assessment, you can look at growth between business cycle peaks. (Peaks are much more similar than troughs; all happy economies are alike, each unhappy economy is unhappy in its own way.) Here’s what you get (treating the 1979-82 double dip as a single recession):

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These periods don’t match up neatly with presidential terms. Still, if Reaganomics had been such a spectacular success, you would have expected the results by 1990 to have been families doing better than in the horrible 1970s; actually, not. The only clear things we see here are that the Clinton era was pretty good, while the Bush era was lousy even before the crisis.

So as I said, it’s sad: Ponnuru hopes to get Republicans to accept policies they’ll never accept, and the only way he knows to make his case is to invoke the memories of a politician from the quite distant past whose policies weren’t all that successful in the first place.