One of Reagan's geniuses was to convince people to vote against their own self-interest. In the name of lower taxes and the Cold War, he expanded investment in "defense" systems, that benefited the oligarchs who brought him to power. Matt Tyrnauer, director of “The Reagans” on Showtime, joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news

Transcript edited for clarity

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis. Please don't forget there's a donate button at the top of the webpage.

In the documentary series, The Reagans, Grover Norquist, one of the leaders of the we don't want to pay any taxes movement, says

Excerpt from The Reagans

So you want to abolish government? No, I don't want to abolish government. I want to make it so small you could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. That small. Small as a bathtub. OK, very small. 

The leadership that I envision would be to take the lead in getting government off the backs of the people of the United States and turning you loose to do what you can do...

Paul Jay

Here's a clip from near the end of part three of the Reagans.

Excerpt from The Reagans

One of Reagan's geniuses was to convince people to vote against their own self-interest. The notion that if you supported Reaganomics, you would have a better life when it wasn't true, but you convince people to do it. Reagan realized something a lot of politicians were always afraid to admit. A lot of Americans are just selfish, and the best way to destroy a program is not just to tell people that it's inefficient, it's to tell them that they have to share it with somebody, especially if that means black and brown people in America.

Paul Jay

Now, joining me to continue our discussion about his Showtime documentary series The Reagans is Matt Tyrnauer, who's also the filmmaker of Valentino: The Last Emperor, which was shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and Where's My Roy Cohn? another must-see if you want to understand the political forces that gave us Donald Trump. Thanks for joining us, Matt.

Matt Tyrnauer

Thank you.

Paul Jay

So Reagan campaigns for smaller government, and one of the messages of smaller government is you're going to have tax cuts, more money in your pocket and all of this, and while, yeah, there was a smaller government, when it comes to social programs, there was a big expansion of government when it comes to militarization, and this contradiction between supposed  smaller government and expansion of militarization is just one of the big complete, what can I say, mindfucks that people get their head around that creates a completely false consciousness about how the world works.

So talk a bit about that contradiction between small government and big military and how he sells this to people.

Matt Tyrnauer

Well, Reagan was sent to Washington to do the bidding of a particular constituency, and that constituency was a group of oligarchs. He specifically came from California, where there were a lot of aerospace and oil industry people with whom he had become very close with. In fact, they really invented his political career. They were nicknamed the Kitchen Cabinet, and a big portion of them were from those sectors of the economy. They were also vehemently for low taxes, but they were also for great government largesse when it came to building defense systems because that was the business that the...