What if Ronald Reagan never became an actor or ended up in California?

What if he ended up staying in the midwest? I don't know how or why this would happen since I assume he wanted to be an actor but lets just say he ends up staying in the midwest in illinois and Iowa? Would he even be interested in politics? Would he still be super conservative?
 
Ronnie Reagan was a pretty special politician.

For starters, he was both optimistic and conservative. And he had other qualities as well.
 
if there's ever going to be an honest short history of Reagan . . . It's going to include that with bluster and a military build-up, he made for a dangerous 1983. He then made peace with the Soviets late in his presidency. And he supported a military regime in Guatemala which reached the level of genocide, including with military aid, including saying the Guatemalan president was getting a bum rap. All in the first paragraph. I mean, that would be the beginning of an honest biography.

Reagan has shades of, only Nixon could go to China. When he and Gorbachev negotiated the ban on intermediate range weapons in Europe around 1987(?), a lot of conservatives were against it. There's even a book called, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan.
 
The fall of the Soviet Union was based on the internal dynamics of the Soviet system. Reagan did not appoint Gorbachev, who was a product of those internal dynamics. The stuff about Reagan "winning" the Cold War is exaggerated. Gorbachev and the people around him set in motion processes that could have led to orderly change, but the hard liners, through their coup, ushered in chaotic change and the sidetracking of Gorbachev's aim for a "normal" society. The U.S. had nothing to do with this. Reagan handled the U.S. reaction to the changes in Soviet society quite well, but I think any president surrounded by mainstream advisors would have done pretty much the same. It's not rocket science to offer a hand to an enemy who professes a desire for peace and the building of a normal society, and who is visibly making changes in his own system that point in the desired direction.
 
should not have been rocket science, but there was a lot of opposition. And a conservative would be able to handle this better than a liberal.
 
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