“I hadn’t really thought about this but, if Reagan were here today, who would he endorse? Who would the eternal optimist endorse? Reagan would be a Trumpkin all the way!”
Right.
And I remember seeing “Let’s make America Great Again” Reagan ads back in the day.
The similarities outweigh the differences.
My first presidential vote was for Reagan back in 1984. He did want America to be great again, substantially by returning to what he believed it used to be. But he didn't want America to be great at the expense of other countries, to defeat them in some kind of global contest between nation-states. (The Soviet Union conspicuously excepted.) He generally did not believe that international commerce, to take a current example, was a zero-sum game between nations. Instead he wanted our country to be an example to follow, a "shining city upon a hill." He wanted opportunity for all, with free markets its greatest friend and government economic mismanagement its greatest enemy. (Read both his writings and speeches, most notably his first inaugural address, to get some sense of this.)
There's very little of that kind of "conservatism" in evidence these days, although the elimination of the Soviet empire is vivid testimony to the power it once held in people's minds. Conservatism now seems to be more and more about disengagement from and commercial conflict with a hostile world, not about the dignity of the individual (emphatically including the unborn) and what he could do if government would just let him.