I’m a neocon, so I’m mostly favorable to a lot of his strong handling of foreign policy, but his domestic issues were mostly terrible.
His handling of the AIDS epidemic was almost criminal, and I’m actually surprised that he still has such a large following in modern day conservative circles, considering he is the most notorious president of my lifetime when it comes to anti-2nd amendment legislation. And on top of that his 1986 immigration act granting 3 million undocumented citizens amnesty could be argued as the root cause of why there’s such an issue with that still to this day. From a conservative perspective, that is.
To add to this:
In 1981, Air Traffic Controllers throughout the United States went on strike over contract negotiations, higher wages, and more benefits (like healthcare and retirement). Ronald Reagan unilaterally declared the strike illegal, and gave the strikers 48 hours to stop striking or face decisive action. What happened? 11,000 out of the 13,000 strikers were fired, and they never got their demands met. This killed collective bargaining for airport services, and it directly caused the swift death of pro-union sentiment among the middle class by the late 1990s.
He attacked the Democrats' prized and widely beloved social safety nets that kept the working class afloat during his Presidency when unemployment was at an all-time high in the country since the Depression. He cut welfare and education as a result.
He loosened stock bylaws and regulations, making it so Stock Buybacks were made legal after 1982, so companies could inflate their stock prices rather than investing money into the company itself. It's what has largely created the massive wage gap between CEOs and the average workers in the last few decades.
Finally, he made outsourcing and offshoring industrial work easier for companies to utilize, which is primarily what killed the auto industry in places like Detroit.
