The Reality-Based Reagan
Thanks to the folks at TPM for asking me participate this week in the TPM Book Club - and above all, thanks to Will Bunch for engaging in the long overdue process of unpacking the myth of Ronald Reagan.
One of the most surprising things about researching my book, Live from the Campaign Trail, is that I came away with a far greater appreciation for Reagan's basic political appeal. As Douglas Kmiec suggests, his 1980 campaign theme of "family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom" spoke to the values of millions of Americans who had grown wary of New Deal-style liberalism. But Reagan's appeal ran deeper - at the time when the country was mired in turmoil and "malaise" he articulated the basic desire of many Americans to feel pride in their country once again. (It was this element of Reagan's appeal that I think many liberals never truly understood; President Obama being a notable exception).
Reagan was the ultimate American exceptionalist.When he spoke, in his 1980 GOP convention address of his desire to unify the country and "renew the American spirit and sense of purpose" it resonated. (Yet at the same time, as Will and others have pointed out, there was a deeply cynical side to Reagan's politics, rooted in the white backlash of the late 1960s.)
Before Reagan, conservatives were seen as the national scold; the party of "no." Pessimism and opposition had become the defining characteristic of movement conservatism. Reagan was different. Where the father of modern conservatism, Barry Goldwater had been unrelenting and ideologically single-minded, Reagan's conservatism was welcoming and above all optimistic. He pilloried his political opponents; but with his great sense of humor and affability he wielded a rapier and not a sledgehammer.
What is fascinating about the current crop of humorless and unappealing conservatives - who seem so intent on imitating Reagan -- is that they understand none of this. They have bought lock, stock and barrel into the pernicious myth of "Reagan the Tax-Cutter," "Reagan the Cold Warrior," "Reagan, the Government-Shrinker" as if these elements were the root of his popular appeal. They seem incapable of understanding that these policy approaches resonated at a very specific moment in American history; and that the challenges facing the country today are quite different from those in 1980.
When you listen to Republicans today you hear the same small government, cut taxes mantra of the 80s and 90s, with little sense that the world around them has changed. It is near impossible to discern any sort of aspirational vision that the GOP has for America's future.
It's important to remember that Reagan conservatism was, in many respects, a response to the perceived (and occasionally real) excesses of Great Society liberalism. Democrats had run out of new ideas and had gone back to parroting the same sort of worn-out class warfare oriented rhetoric of FDR, Truman et al. In the late 1970s conservatism seemed like a political idea worth a try; it had a vitality that liberalism lacked.
The complete opposite is happening today - liberalism is full of vitality and conservatism has lost its way after the wreckage of the Bush years. But to listen to folks like Michael Steele, Jim Demint, Eric Cantor and other you would never guess that that in the last two elections the American people overwhelmingly rejected conservative principles. Just as Democrats in the 1980s thought they could trot out the same tired rhetoric that had won them elections in the past; conservatives seem to believe that what worked in 1984, 1994 will work today. It won't.
Republicans have bought into the myth of Reaganism at the same time that the country has begun to wash its hands of this sort of doctrinaire conservatism.
Will asks, "How do we ever get back to the reality-based Ronald Reagan?" That process is already beginning; via the American people and the ballot box. Perhaps I have more optimism than most, but I think as long as Republicans continue to buy into the misleading myths around Reagan - and ignore the elements of his political message that resonated so deeply - they will spend many years wandering in the political wilderness.
I find I have very little connection to the "need to have pride in their country" idea.
The country is what it is. I feel a need to have pride in myself, and a need to treat people well and to live a good life and all. I feel a need to speak up when I don't think the country is being well run (or when I do) but pride in it? Why? Am I supposed to feel proud when we win a war and ashamed when we lose? Is the country a big sports team that I'm supposed to be rooting for?
February 18, 2009 3:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your mouth to God's ear.
February 18, 2009 4:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Reagan made people feel good. I suppose that is a good thing. There were three areas that he fostered this feeling.
1) Carter made people feel bad because he stressed the finite nature of fossil fuel and urged restraint in auto transportation. Reagan convinced America that conservation was for sissies.
2) We didn't really lose the war in Vietnam, but rather our troops were betrayed by cautious liberals who prevented our military from winning. The MIA/POW myth was the vehicle for delivering that message.
3) Stop worrying about nuclear war. A nuclear shield will protect us.
He helped shield us in delusions. And that is supposed to be good?
February 18, 2009 5:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let's face it. Reagan came into office at a time when America had just been through what they were (deluded) into believing, that they and their country were invulnerable to foreign power plays - Iranians holding American hostages for over a year.
This delusional 'fear' lasted through most of Reagan's terms in office and he capitalized on it by being the 'guy in the white hat.' (He must have played that part in a few movies so he knew the script.) I remember hearing people say that they were voting for him because he was 'going to kick ass.'
So there it is - a delusional leader deluding a nation of equally delusional citizens.
February 19, 2009 12:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
The problem with conservatives is that they are always right and liberals are always wrong. Same is true for liberals. Regan did have some good ideas, just as W. had some good ideas and did some good things. As a country we should look to our Flag and feel proud of who we are, what our ideals are, and what our promise is. We have not always lived up to it, but it's not that we can't, and it's not a reason to look away either.
Destor23 you said you have a, "need to feel pride in yourself". Yes you do, and everyone should be able to be proud of themselves, proud of their life, and their families and friends. But that is also what makes us Americans. Our ability to pull ourselves up and to make things happen. It's part of what makes us what we are, and in fact it is part of our promise. The part that says if you are willing to work hard, you can do whatever you put your mind to. That is the promise that our Flag stands for! So in a way, I think your need to feel pride in yourself, is the same thing as feeling pride in America, because it is part of who you are.
In many parts of the world, people are discouraged from feeling pride in themselves. They are told that they are not important, that their opinion is of no value.
February 18, 2009 6:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Reagan's true mojo was that he was a genial killer, who could eviscerate his opponents directly, or by legislative fiat, both with a smile--concealing a forked tongue. The buy-in was to the myth of Morning in America, being the first Cowboy President, and sunny optimism. Life's great if you live in SoCal, have adult onset dementia, and somebody else is paying the bills, but that doesn't help the rest of the country.
The buy-in is much more difficult now, because of Republican scorched earth policies, and because they are all have more in common with Rush Limbaugh than Reagan. I will stretch myself to say that i'd much prefer the latter to the former.
February 18, 2009 9:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Reagan, as mentioned in Bunch's book, was not really tied to the Christian fundamentalists in the United States. Reagan gave lip service to his support of overturning Roe vs. Wade but really did not do much to promote their agenda. In fact Reagan appointed two moderate justices to the Supreme Court. This distance from the Christian Right allowed Reagan to have a more positive image of America that would appeal to Americans on both coasts. The GOP today is too tied to the Christian Right and its negative view of America. One can seen an example of what I would call religious right anti-Americanism in Palin's rhetoric about small towns being superior to urban areas. In order for the GOP to be a majority part again it must embrace Reagan's optimistic view of all America and ignore the negativity of the Christain Right.
February 18, 2009 11:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Another interesting book about American presidents and their involvement with religious issues, it's called American Presidents, Religion and Israel: the Heirs of Cyus . Difinitely worth reading.
February 19, 2009 8:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
The continuing need of liberals and "progressives" (a distinction that continues to mystify me but seems urgently important to some) to believe that Reagan was just a flim-flam man who did absolutely nothing that needed doing in the context of the economic and political circumstances of the 80s is closely akin to the continuing Republican delusion that their current problem is poor branding rather than an obsolete product.
In 1979, the top marginal tax rate was 70%. The regulatory apparatus of the federal government had a degree of involvement in the day to day life of ordinary Americans that is unimaginable today. To a similarly unimaginable extent, emergency measures imposed to deal with the exigencies of the Great Depression and WWII had never gone away. For decades, it was taken it as an article of faith that there was no distinction between the economic policies that are appropriate in times of economic downturn and times of economic recovery. In foreign affairs, unthinkable though it may seem today, there was a creeping, but growing, sense, that the U.S. was going to be eclipsed by the USSR as a military, economic and political power (there is, for example, good reason to believe that both Kissinger and Nixon doubted whether a democracy was capable of prevailing over a totalitarian state and thought a reasonably strong second was the best that could be hoped for). The Communist parties in both France and Italy were serious contenders for power and the possibility of a Finlandized Western Europe was very real.
The Reagan realignment, like (in my view, at least) all realignments, occurred as a direct result of the inability of the then-dominant party to recognize that the policy paradigm that had successfully dealt with the problems of the past was no longer capable of producing desirable policy outcomes when applied to currently-existing social, demographic and economic conditions. Jimmy Carter, to his credit, had recognized the problem and took steps to try to fix it by, e.g., limited deregulation of the transportation and energy sectors and initiating a limited re-armament program. However, he faced fierce, even bitter, resistance from his own party because it was institutionally incapable of facing the truth that the policy paradigm that had brought it electoral success for four decades was at the end of its useful life.
That resistance is what opened the door to Reagan and the "New Right." It is unsurprising that they went too far on almost every front. When you're trying to rectify the damage done by a dysfunctional policy paradigm, it is rarely clear where "too far" is. What is surprising--and the reason their realignment lasted half as long as the one before it--was that when the Reaganites passed the baton to the next generation, that generation proved itself to be utterly, fanatically blind to the concept that there even such a thing as "too far" in deregulating the economy, cutting taxes, or pursuing a militant (literally) foreign policy.
Roughly speaking, the people in the second generation of the Reagan realignment were to Reagan as Henry Wallace and his followers were to FDR. The difference was that the far left of the New Deal was passed over and, ultimately, marginalized by the Democrats in the late 40s and 50s, while the Far Right obtained complete control the Republican Party in 90s.
No doubt, there are Democrats and nonaligned "progressives" today who think that the country and the world would have been better off if Henry Wallace had been president from 1945-52, but I tend to think the result would have been an Iron Curtain that dropped rather further to the west and a rightward realignment some time n the 60s.
In any case, turning away from the imponderables of "what if" scenarios, I remain of the view that, by the late 70s, excessive regulation was, in fact, choking the life out of the economy and needed reform, that we did need to respond to the Soviet Union's growing taste for adventurism in the 70s, that some reduction and compression of the tax brackets was appropriate (though the reduction of the top bracket from 50% to 35% in the last 80s was the point when they started us down the road to the present catastrophe). Above all, I believe that liberal thought had stagnated in a way that only a series of humiliating defeats could reform.
Now we're at the start of another realignment. Whether this one lasts fifty years, like FDR's, or twenty-five, like Reagan's, depends upon whether Democrats are institutionally capable of recognizing that there is such a thing as "too far." The Republicans made two interrelated errors. First, they succombed to the ideological delusion--the belief that their preferred policies were transcendant such that the mere implementation of them would automatically produced desirable policy outcomes at all times and without regard to prevailing social, economic and demographic conditions. Second, they simultaneously embraced the entirely contradictory belief that social, economic and demographic changes meant that they had transcended history--that policies put into place in response to grave economic and social evils--economic depression and institutional racism, to name just two--could be unwound without those evils returning. Ultimately, these two delusions combined into one master delusion: the belief that whatever consequences resulted from policies that implemented their ideology were, in and of themselves, good and desirable and morally right simply by virtue of being the result of their ideology. If an Enron collapses as a result of of their eviceration of government oversight, that was a good thing because it incented other corporations to behave themselves. If the retirement savings of Enron's employees' vanish, that's a good thing because it teaches Americans a much needed lesson on diversification. If Iraq descends into chaos after we knock out its totalitarian government,they're better off because now they have freedom, no matter how many of them die, how many of them are displaced and impoverished and how many years it takes their economy to recover. If our entire banking and finance system collapses as a result of a multi-trillion dollar orgy of unregulated speculation, that's a good thing, too.
If we repeat the Republicans' mistake of believing that our ideas are transcendant and objectively correct at all times and in all places, and thus will produce desirable policy under all circumstances, it's going to be a vary short stay at the top. If, for example, we come to believe it is not possible to regulate ourselves back into economic stagnation--or, worse, begin to think stagnation is a desirable policy outcome to be actively pursued--the Obama realignment will be as short as Reagan's. The ultimate test is whether our policies make people think themselves better off, not whether we think they're better off and are just too dumb to know what's good for them.
February 19, 2009 12:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Commenter
Excellent analysis.
ABrod
February 19, 2009 1:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think not.
The Iron Curtain was where it was. The troops were on the ground, nobody was going to push west.
Had Wallace won, we might have had that realignment in the 1960s, but only because all the racists would have been upset that the Civil Rights Act got pushed in 1950 instead of 1964. But maybe an Obama would have been President in 1996. And we'd have universal health insurance instead of the crappy mess we have for healthcare.
February 20, 2009 1:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
And when we changed that, look at what happened to real median income. It flat-lined and has degraded ever since. The only "expansion" of the economy since then is consumer spending based on ever increasing unsustainable debt/credit, and the advent of the internet (a government initiated program).
The removal halving of those marginal top rates are the true root causes of economic disaster. The rest is just the mechanisms that forestalled it, and enabled the house of cards to grow so high it now threatens the world economy.
February 20, 2009 10:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
"that we did need to respond to the Soviet Union's growing taste for adventurism in the 70s"
Good lord. There was leftist government in Angola and we responded by supporting an egomanaical mass murderer named Jonas Savimbi (the Reaganites positively adored him). There were lefties in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala and we responded by supporting terrorists, death squads and genocidal dictators. There was a liberation movement in East Timor and we supported Indonesia's genocidal invasion. Credit on all this where credit was due--most of the responses to these various "threats" had bipartisan support and can't all be blamed on Reagan (especially not East Timor, when the invasion occurred in 1975).
So whatever threat there was from Soviet adventurism, we met it by helping to kill hundreds of thousands of people, and Reagan's particular contribution was to cheer enthusiastically for almost every killer in the world who claimed to be anti-communist. (I say "almost", because for reasons I've never understood he didn't support the Renamo movement in Mozambique, though it was not really much worse than Savimbi's group. But many Republicans thought Reagan was mistaken not to do so.)
February 19, 2009 1:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
The U.S. penchant for supporting torturing, murdering fiend regimes was, as you noted, a bipartisan project going back to the late forties. It was also, it should be noted, something both sides in the Cold War did, the main difference being that the Soviets and their main allies were themselves enthusiastic torturers and murderers.
Reagan's zeal for that tactic, and his reversal of Carter's significant and important steps away from it, was enabled, in no small part, by those who shrank away from confronting the Soviets generally in the wake of the Vietnam debacle. They created a power vacuum and it's unsurprising that the trash got sucked into it. That doesn't mitigate the guilt of Reagan and his cronies for their unconditional support of innumerable evil little dictatorships, but those whose only alternative looked an awful lot like disarmament and trust in the innate goodness of human nature to the voters bear a portion of the guilt as well for having failed to offer more responsible, and politically credible, alternatives.
But supporting those dictatorships was hardly the only way we responded to the threat in the 80s. Indeed, it was clear to me, at least, that it was the least important and most counterproductive thing we were doing. Aside from the horror they unleashed on their own people--and its hard to say "aside from," about that--supporting those dictatorships robbed us of moral authority to do the things we did need to do, such as, for example, rebuilding NATO and responding to the U.S.S.R.'s deployment of SS-25s against Western Europe. We managed to get those things done anyway, which was good, in my opinion, but we encountered mass resistance in Europe that would have been greatly diminished if we hadn't been visably and hypocritically undermining our own values across the Third World.
But unfortunately, most people on the left in those days--in contrast to liberals a generation before--were unable to distinguish between, say, resuming arms shipments to the homicidal ghouls who ran Guatamala, and replacing F-4's with F-15's. Both were of a piece and morally and poltically wrong, in their view. They thus failed to offer the voters a reasonable alternative to the guys wanted to support the ghouls because their ideology dictated the facts they were capable of perceiving. Granted, the Republicans weren't capable of perceiving that difference either, but they were for doing more rather than doing less and when the proffered choices for dealing with a real threat are between "do more" and "do less," the voters, unsurprisingly, tend to choose the side that's for doing more.
February 19, 2009 3:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Reality and Reagan go together like Fish and Bicycles.
As Alex Cockburn said, Reagan installed fantasy as the motor of national consciousness, and it has been pumping along disastrously ever since.
February 20, 2009 1:20 AM | Reply | Permalink