Any assessment of Ronald Reagan's place in history will have to resolve a paradox.

Reagan voted four times for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and professed to love FDR even after he became a Republican. When he was president, Reagan's opponents charged that he aimed at nothing less than the complete undoing of New Deal. Reagan himself believed that he was the proper heir to FDR.

Reagan said it was liberalism, not himself, that had changed, but liberals thought Reagan practiced political larceny when he quoted FDR favorably. (One liberal who objected was Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who said of Reagan's use of FDR: "Anyone can quote him, but his words mean nothing out of context.")

There is a long argument to be made about the exact character of FDR's New Deal liberalism and its successor, the Great Society-style liberalism of the 1960s. Reagan, friends and critics noted, didn't seriously attack any of the pillars of the New Deal, such as Social Security. And even though Reagan may have said he was really after the Great Society, he wasn't able to trim much of that either, and now, under President George W. Bush, the Great Society's largest legacy-Medicare--has just grown dramatically larger. Government's share of the economy didn't shrink at all under Reagan, though it might have grown much larger had he not been president.

Rather than undoing the past, Reagan made his own unique legacy. His use of FDR's words on behalf of his own cause was a shrewd act of rhetorical jujitsu. For however little he may have undone the substance of the New Deal, he did derail the near-monopoly of New Deal liberalism in American politics.

Just as FDR cast a long shadow over the next generation of American political life, Reagan's shadow over our subsequent political course is proving to be similarly long and may still be lengthening. While he didn't turn back the welfare state as some of his more fervent supporters hoped, he did apply a much-needed brake to activist government, such that Clinton felt compelled, on the eve of his 1996 re-election campaign, to say that "the era of big government is over."

Meanwhile, Reagan's ideas of tax cuts and missile defense have proved to be durable staples of politics today. Reagan, it should be recalled, began as an insurgent in the Republican Party, battling the party establishment. Today the Republican establishment says, "We are all Reaganites now." Like FDR, he effected a wholesale transformation of his party.

But above all, Reagan reinvigorated the presidency after a period in which Americans were coming to doubt the institution itself, using it for large purposes. He was no Calvin Coolidge or even Dwight Eisenhower; FDR would have approved of the style of Reagan's governance.

There is a major irony to Reagan's achievement. Reagan's reinvigoration of the presidency led to an increase in the public confidence in government, and actually saved the New Deal. This is why the eminent presidential scholar Richard Neustadt once called Reagan "a New Deal Republican."

There were remarkable echoes of FDR's 1933 inaugural address in Reagan's own first inaugural address, especially the abiding faith in American democracy and the innate optimism that uplifted listeners. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. tells us at the outset of "The Age of Roosevelt" that, "The fog of despair hung over the land" as FDR assumed office in 1933. With FDR's inaugural address, "Across the land the fog began to lift."

Reagan seemed to strike much the same effect on a traumatized nation in 1981. He was exactly the right man for the moment, and he was fully conscious of FDR's precedent. The day after Reagan's inauguration, the Washington Post wrote, "By the time [Reagan] left the Capitol, America seemed a different place." The nation is still a different place today because of him, which is why future historians rank Reagan alongside FDR as the most consequential president of the 20th century, and why historians will refer to our time as the Age of Reagan.

Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at AEI.