WI: The Communists had accepted Reagan?

[lord caedus]

Hmmmmmmmmmm...one AH writer suggested (possibly jokingly) in a published AH that McCarthy could have been a communist plant. Perhaps Reagan may actually have been a Communist plant whose nudging America to the Right, so as to make Communism more palatable was too successful?
(Ironically, at least one obscure right-winger wrote at least two book lambasting Reagan as a liberal. One's title was "Here's the Rest of Him", a pun on Reagan's own autobiography...
Here's one reviewer's take on a later book on Reagan by that guy, entitled "The Counterfeit Candidate"...
http://www.pitch.com/content/printVersion/1126733/ )

Sadly, I think that the guy who wrote that would be a fixture on the Tea Party speaking circuit now.

 

[Twin City Lines]

According to the book Napoleon's Hemorrhoids: And Other Small Events That Changed The World, Ronald Reagan wanted to join the Communist Party in 1938, in part because a lot of his friends in Hollywood were members. The Communists, apparently thought Reagan was "a feather brain... a flake who couldn't be trusted with a political opinion for more than twenty minutes." so they didn't allow him to join.

WI they had allowed Reagan into the party? Would his political career be over before it started? Would the Great Communicator get caught up in the McCarthy-era Red Scare? And who, if anyone, would replace the Gipper as the person who reinvigorated/became a saint of American conservatism?

Could this be why he was so rabidly anti-Communist OTL?

Seriously, he probably wouldn't have lasted very long in the CPUSA. Joining because your friends are members doesn't really provide enough incentive to stick with it, especially through McCarthyism.

Let's say he joins the Party in 1938 and quits around 1948. I could see it going one of two ways:

1) Some of the ideology rubs off on him and he becomes a typical Hollywood leftoid. This is most likely if he quits the Party on his own.

2) If he's expelled (I could easily see Reagan taking Earl Browder's side in the controversy of 1945), he would likely turn to the right in disgust, but maybe more Nixonesque than the far-right position he took OTL.

 

[lord caedus]

Could this be why he was so rabidly anti-Communist OTL?

Seriously, he probably wouldn't have lasted very long in the CPUSA. Joining because your friends are members doesn't really provide enough incentive to stick with it, especially through McCarthyism.

The same book that I got the POD from said that Reagan felt strongly about wanting to join the Communists (or something to that effect). So I think he probably would've been an enthusiastic member of CPUSA (at least initially).