In light of the death of Ronald Reagan, I bought HST's Generation of Swine -- which turns out to be mostly a collection of his columns in the SF Examiner -- to get a feel for the era. I spent a lot of my early days on a commune, traveling like a gypsy, going to hippy elementary school, sequestered for some summers on a farm in Iowa, and I wasn't really politically conscious during the Reagan era, except to know that my mom didn't fancy him too much. I picked up enough backwash on my own during the tenure of Bush the elder to realize Dutch was probably not my cup of tea, but Hunter really brings the heat:

The legacy of Ronald Reagan will be different from those of the other three... Richard Nixon was a crook, Gerald Ford was a shameless fixer and Jimmy Carter was an awesome bungler who gave once-proud political values like "decency" and "honesty" a bad name.

But these things are small compared to the horrible stains and half-blotted failures that Ronald Reagan is going to leave on the lives and memories of this sad generation of the 1980s that he once presumed to lead and inspire, while that the same tiem telling a reporter from People magazine, "This generation may well be the one that sees the end of the world."

...

Reagan's children must be proud of him. With AIDS and acid rain, there is not much left in the way of life and love and possibilities for these shortchanged children of the '80s. In addition to the huge and terribly crippling national debt, and a shocking realization that your country has slipped to the status of a second-rate power, and that five American dollars will barely buy a cup of coffee in Tokyo, these poor buggers are being flogged every day of their lives with the knowledge that sex is death and rain kills fish and any politician they see on TV is a liar and a fool.

-- H.S.T June 22, 1987

Earlier in the book he noted that white males aged 18-30 voted for Reagan by a 71% margin in 1984. Given that's the generation in power right now (white males aged 38 - 50) it's not terribly surprising that the whitewash of history has come on so strong. Still; a shame that people can't admit they were wrong.