Historical Reagan

Off Topic Politics and World Issues
1

With all the good stuff being recalled right now about President Reagan, I wanted to posit the theory that it wasn’t so much because everyone loved Reagan when he was President insomuch as many people have changed their views on him with time and perspective – especially the perspective of the fact that his policies worked to achieve their stated goals.

I wanted to give this excerpt from one of my favorite columnists, James Lileks, who posted this on his weblog on Monday [Scroll down about half way, past all the personal stuff, if you follow the link]:

http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/04/0604/060704.html

Saturday: …I sat down and wrote the following.

It?s 1983; I?m working at the Minnesota Daily, in the editorial department. Smart friends, common purpose, and by God a paper to put out! It gets no better when you?re in your 20s.

We didn?t hate Reagan; we viewed him with indulgent contempt, since he was so obviously out of his depth. I mean, please: an actor? As president? (This from a generation that got its politics from ?All The President?s Men.? This from a generation that would later embrace Martin Sheen as the ne plus ultra of all things presidential.) He was in a movie with a talking monkey, for heaven?s sake. That was all you really needed to know. ?Bedtime for Bonzo,? you?d say with a smirk or a conspicuous rolling of the eyes, and everyone would nod. Idiot. Empty-headed grinning high-haired uberdad. Of course he was popular among the groundlings. It would be laughable if it weren?t so typical - he was just the sort of fool the voters could be trusted to elect.

Reagan was worse than stupid ? he was conspicuously indifferent to our futures. It was generally accepted that he either wanted a nuclear war or was too dim to understand the consequences. It went without saying that he didn?t read Schell?s ?Fate of the Earth.? It went without saying that he didn?t read anything at all.

Oh, it was a scary time. You have no idea. Reagan sent jets to attack Libya, for example. Something to do with a bombing of a nightclub in Germany ? that was bad, sure, but raising the stakes like this was madness. Sheer madness. If they were angry enough to bomb a nightclub, how angry would they be now? We put nuclear missiles in Europe. Nuclear missiles! Sure, they were put there to counter a Soviet deployment, but if the Soviets ever used them we could use our other missiles. Responding to a provocation was so . . . provocative. And then there was the whole Central American situation ? Vietnam, all over again. Grenada? Pathetic muscle-flexing just to make us feel good. We?re Number One! USA! USA!
Sometimes it all you could do was just put on ?The Wall? on the headphones and take a long hit and find cold hollow solace in the music.

The miserable, depressing, cynical, defeatist music.

Dark times. The world might actually end not with a whimper, but a bang. The scenarios were many, but you got the gist ? the Soviets made a move, and Reagan screwed everything up by pushing back. That?s how we saw it happening. He was just that stupid, just that stubborn. He?d blow up the world.

?The people have spoken, the idiots,? I wrote in my journal after he was elected in 1980. I was living in a boarding house a block from the Valli, an English major at the U, a college paper columnist taking all the usual brave stances: Republicans are repressed hypocrites, Playboy insults women, etc. (Interesting side note ? my ratio of happy-fun-ball essays and tiresome polarizing screeds was, as now, about 3:1.) But then Reagan got shot. I didn?t like the guy; no, not at all, but he was the president. And hence he was my president. And I was down in the Valli Pub, watching the news. Andrea, a flatfaced barfly who sat in the dark basement all day drinking coffee and smoking Marlboros and watching TV, was hideously pissed that she was missing her soaps. ?Why couldn?t they have shot him a few hours later?? she said. Grunts of amusement from the rest of the slugs.

I wrote a column with her quote as the title. If I remember correctly it was well-received. Because her sentiment was, to use an archaic work, indecent. We were better than that. He was our president, after all.

Those were the days.

  1. We all believe that Mondale will win, because Reagan?s stupidity and inadequacies are manifest to us. We are thrilled when Mondale announces he will raise taxes. Stern medicine, America! But Reagan wins. I repeat: Reagan wins in 1984. Somewhere Orwell is smiling, man. You can smell the karma curdling.

  2. The world has changed; Reagan and Gorbachev The Savior were photographed in a chummy moment in the New York harbor. The world feels less dangerous, for reasons that seem indistinct. The Times runs one last picture of the Gipper walking down an open-aired hallway in the Rose Garden; his head is down, but he looks tall and broad and strong and content. I thought: I?m going to miss him.

Stockholm Syndrome! Stockholm Syndrome!

Vote Dukakis! Now! Fast! Ahhhhh.

1990: Iraq invades Kuwait. I wasn?t aware of it at the time, but that?s when I started to turn.

2004, June 5: I am reminded of the thrill I got when I heard the words ?Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.? Because you can sum up Reagan?s legacy by polling any random high-schooler and reading that line.

?What wall?? they?d probably ask.

The wall, kid. You know: The Wall. The fortified gash. The thin lethal line that stood between tyranny and freedom. I mean, we lived in a time when there was a literal wall between those concepts, and we still didn?t get it.

What you don?t know when you?re 22 could fill a book. If you write that book when you?re 44, you haven?t learned a thing.

2

Since that other thread honoring Reagan has gotten off-track, I wanted to post a few tribute article to Reagan on this thread. Hope you enjoy reading them.

The Opportunities of Freedom

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Ronald Reagan’s great contribution to American conservatism was to shift its emphasis from the dangers of action to the opportunities of freedom. Reagan’s optimism has been much though vaguely praised this week. But conservatives could stand to think about the specific political content of that optimism.

Consider the way that Reagan up-ended the national political debates about the budget and about foreign policy. On the budget, pre-Reagan conservatives were stuck in an unwinnable position. Liberals would offer voters a new benefit, and conservatives would say no-or, worse, counter-offer a stingier benefit. Taxes could not be cut until spending was reduced: Pre-Reagan conservatives thought that would be irresponsible. Indeed, taxes might have to be increased to pay for new benefits. Republicans were, as Newt Gingrich put it, “tax collectors for the welfare state.” Republicans were the party of painful medicine: perhaps a noble role, but not exactly one that voters were likely to reward.

Reagan’s supply-side revolution, considered as a political strategy, was a way out of the austerity trap. Economic growth was not an independent variable; it was something that policy could change. If that was the case, the zero-sum fiscal debate could be transcended. If Democrats wanted to reject that model, they could become the party of pain, congratulate themselves on their superior fiscal virtue, and watch themselves lose election after election.

The pre-Reagan Republican position on the Cold War was also a recipe for long-term failure. The Republican establishment was committed, for the most part, to containment, which was curiously compatible with the Brezhnev doctrine. (They tried to expand; we tried to contain them.) As implemented by Republicans in a divided country, containment and realism became a kind of managed decline.

Conservatives wanted something bolder than containment: rollback. But they were able to come up with dozens of reasons the West could not prevail. And they joined the Republican establishment in subscribing to doctrines of nuclear deterrence and mutual assured destruction. It was not an attractive position, or one that Western publics could be expected to embrace indefinitely. The will for John F. Kennedy’s “long twilight struggle” was flagging.

Again, Reagan transformed the debate. In place of containment, there was economic subversion of the Soviets (Reagan’s energy policy and defense build-up) and a rhetorical and sometimes an operational commitment to rollback. In place of mutual assured destruction, there was missile defense – a defensive system that Reagan was quite prepared to extend to the rest of the world. Idealism was reclaimed for the Cold Warriors. Confidence in freedom, and the technological achievements of a free people, could lead not just to survival but victory. It was a remarkably bold stance: Who, besides Reagan, imagined that the Soviet Union would collapse? (Who can imagine a non-pathological Middle East now?) Bold, and to his critics reckless. If Democrats wanted to embrace the peculiar realism of the balance of terror, they were free to – and many did.

Both of Reagan’s moves put the Democrats in the position Republicans had occupied: as scolds for prudence, denouncers of visionaries, counselors of fatalism. And there were more realignments to come.

On welfare, post-Reagan conservatives would break free from the zero-sum mentality. No longer would welfare be denounced primarily as a drain on the public coffers. The truly damning failure of the welfare system was that it hurt the people it was supposed to benefit. Defenders of the liberal status quo lost the moral high ground, and the status quo changed.

Conservatives are in the process of transforming the Social Security debate on Reaganite lines. The conservative position on entitlements has been a long-running failure: holding out against new benefits, trying to cut benefits, sometimes hiking taxes to pay for benefits, getting crushed at elections. That pattern held even through the Reagan years. But Reagan also unleashed the 401(k), and rising public participation in capital markets had by the mid-1990s made the idea of mass individual investment of Social Security funds thinkable. Supply-side economics had come to Social Security: instead of asking for benefit cuts, conservatives could go for growth – and point out that the liberal alternative would be more painful.

Conservatives have not yet, however, realized the opportunities of freedom for the environment. For the most part, they continue either to say me too, but less to liberal proposals for regulation, or oppose such proposals because of their cost. Think tanks and intellectuals have sketched an alternative, conservative environmentalism, but conservative politicians have been slow to pick it up. If they find a way to attack the regulatory status quo not just because it is inefficient but because it does not serve environmental goals, they may effect the shift in politics and policy that they did on welfare.

What I have been describing here as a Reaganite conservatism is not the whole of conservatism. Sometimes a harmony of interests cannot be found. Sometimes painful things must be done. Private accounts for Social Security will not obviate the need for cuts in future benefit levels (although they will reduce them). The dangers of rash action, especially by the state, will always be an important conservative theme. But thanks to Reagan, the opportunities of freedom will be at least as important – because those opportunities have not been exhausted.

The writer is senior editor at National Review.

3

His Convictions, America’s Convictions

By Ilya Shapiro

“Recession is when your neighbor loses his job; depression is when you lose yours; recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.” With those prophetic words, America turned the corner. The long national nightmare of Johnson-to-Nixon-to-Ford-to-Carter was over, and we finally had a serious, emotionally mature, and competent man in the White House. Most importantly, Ronald Wilson Reagan lived and breathed the American Creed, and understood that optimism and confidence were half the battle.

For President Reagan, beyond the partisan squabbles over this or that success or scandal, gave America the courage of his convictions – which were its convictions. Setting aside for one moment the practical expediency of the tax cuts and regulatory reforms, the reinvigorated stance toward the Soviet Union and the proxy wars in Central America, Reagan both shaped and echoed the desires and interests of the vast majority of Americans. When Bill Clinton was still a swash-buckling law professor and George W. Bush a washed-up oilman, Reagan was both the man from hope and the original compassionate conservative.

There is a reason, after all, that “morning in America” and “the shining city upon a hill” have become not just clich? but lauding (and accurate) descriptions of Reagan’s presidency. It was a halcyon time when more Americans moved into the top two income quintiles than stayed in the bottom one, when the 20-something “misery index” of unemployment plus inflation of the '70s disappeared to the point where we now worry about five percent unemployment and two percent inflation. It was an age when all Americans, liberal and conservative, black and white, old and young, were proud of their country and of their own part in this great republican experiment in democracy.

Moreover, for any child of Communism, Ronald Reagan was the white-Stetsoned cowboy who finally called the Evil Empire’s bluff. For the first time in a generation, the leader of the free world demonstrated unequivocally that he knew about the horrors being painted “with a human face” in the captive nations of Eastern Europe. For the first time ever, an American president told his Soviet counterparts that that particular gig was up.

And he did all this with such self-effacing style, such panache, such ?lan, that it was easy to underestimate his intellect or undervalue his achievements. So easy that his ideological opponents – particularly in the media and on the elite cocktail party circuit – did it time and again, and continue it even after his passing.

“How did that simpleton get re-elected in a landslide?” the Upper West Side doyenne would ask, “I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”

“Whatever you thought of his politics, he sure had a way with words,” intones the network anchor with a smirk that lets you know what he thought of Reagan’s politics and that he was not fooled by the President’s devilishly clever turn of phrase.

Still, whatever you did think of his politics, you have to acknowledge that the man was larger than life in so many ways, and that ultimately the shock was not that an actor became president, but that Ronald Reagan was the first actor to do so. Reagan told Americans that they could have it all and that they should not apologize for that remarkable ability.

That is why so many of us will remember where we were when we heard Saturday’s sad news. Unlike Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion (which provided one of his most memorable speeches), or 9/11, there was no violence to this occasion, and we had steeled ourselves for it to a certain extent. Yet when I saw the update flash on the big-screen during the hockey game I was watching at a nondescript pub in Shreveport, La., I shed tears for a man who left office before I was even a teenager. Though my fellow 20- and 30-somethings were oblivious as they went about their jocular conversations punctuated by flirtatious laughter – more an indication of hockey’s popularity in the Deep South than any political or civic statement

– I was comforted by the thought that President Reagan would not have had it any other way.

As the greatest president of the 20th century wrote in his last public missive to the nation he loved, “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”

Ilya Shapiro, whose family fled Russia in 1981, last wrote for TCS about Purple America.

4

June 08, 2004, 12:51 p.m.
Lucky Dimwit?
Reagan’s leadership.

by John O’Sullivan

In Summer 1987 I was invited to a dinner party while vacationing in Rome. The other guests, some American, some European, were mainly diplomats and international civil servants. Before long the conversation had veered round to Ronald Reagan. Those present were almost all either hostile or contemptuous towards the President ? “an amiable dimwit…sleepwalking through crises…out-of-control deficits…reckless warmonger…prisoner of his own prejudices…waging an unwinnable arms race with the Soviets.?” And so on and so forth.

Before long, largely because I was then working in Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street, I found myself cast as chief counsel for the defense. Patiently I responded by pointing out that Reaganomics had led to “the longest peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history.” That was dismissed as the calm before the Slump.

But it was a defense of Reagan’s foreign policy that aroused the most derisive and bitter opposition. The Soviet empire, I was told, was stable and increasingly prosperous. Reagan’s “confrontational” approach was doomed to fail while risking a nuclear war. His arms build-up, including “Star Wars,” would bankrupt America before it even inconvenienced the Soviets.

Only one other person at the party seemed unsure of these verities. He sat looking more and more uncomfortable as the other guests hooted at the claim that Reagan’s economic, military, and ideological competition with the Soviets was undermining their power in Europe. Eventually, he intervened with obvious reluctance:

“Well, I don’t think much of Reagan either. But I have just come back from a tour of Eastern Europe. And everyone there says exactly what our Downing Street friend is saying. They all think Reagan is a hero and a great statesman. And they predict he will bring down the Soviet Union.”

For a moment it was the Perfect Squelch. The guests went quiet. Several looked uneasy and downcast. One or two people made as if to respond ? but stopped before actually speaking. An uncomfortable silence reigned.

And then the rationalizations, tentative at first but growing in confidence as one followed another, began to pour forth: “Yes, doubtless some East Europeans did believe such things…that was understandable since they had only very limited information about the West…they had an exaggerated view of Reagan because the Kremlin’s attacks had exaggerated his importance…the East’s growing prosperity would gradually erase such discontent…hadn’t some survey shown that East Germany was now more prosperous than Britain?.. Gorbachev’s reforms would soon undercut Reagan…yes, Gorbachev, Gorbachev, he offered real hope.”

Even at the time, these dismissals of Reagan and Reaganism should have struck well-informed people as transparently false. Only one year previously dissident intellectuals from every East European country, inspired by Reagan, had signed a joint declaration calling for freedom and independence. It was an unprecedented act of defiance against Moscow.

Even the Communists were preparing their escape from the coming collapse. Over a breakfast in London in 1986 an Hungarian Communist apparatchik described how the party intended to maneuver its own hard-liners into accepting multi-party elections ? and then to form a new post-Communist social democrat party to fight the free elections.

In Poland a Western academic visitor was told the following joke: The Polish Communist party is launching a recruitment drive ? with valuable prizes. If you recruit one person to join the party, you win a two-week vacation in New York. If you get five people to join, you are allowed to resign from the party yourself. And if you bring in ten new recruits, you get a certificate stating that you had never been a member of it.

What is even more significant is that the man telling the joke was a senior member of the Polish politburo. By summer 1987 the signs of Communist decay were all around ? and two years later they would bring the entire empire crashing down.

Reagan sensed all this. He could repeat anti-Communist jokes by the bushel ? and he knew that jokes in a totalitarian society were the only permissible form of truth-telling. He even told such jokes to keep Gorbachev off balance in negotiations.

Yet these sophisticated diplomats in Rome, who were paid to think about such matters, could not see what was in front of their noses. They were “amiable dimwits…sleepwalking through crises.” No ? that’s not quite right. They were the “prisoners of their own prejudices.”

In their case the prejudice that animated them was anti-anti-Communism which transformed itself effortlessly into anti-Reaganism when the occasion warranted. They did not want to believe that Communism was both oppressive and declining since that would have made their policies of appeasement needless and shameful. They did not want Reagan to be right since that would mean they had been outsmarted by a dimwit and an icon to the great unwashed. And they seized on Gorbachev as a way of denying Reagan or the West any credit for the liberation of half a continent ? not grasping, of course, that Gorbachev’s reforms were made necessary by Reagan’s ruthless military and economic competition. (In shorthand, without Reagan, no Gorbachev.)

My dinner-party companions were not alone in these opinions. They were merely voicing the conventional wisdom of the foreign-policy establishments, the political class, and the media elites on both sides of the Atlantic. Some in those circles went a great deal farther than merely sneering at Reagan. Vladimir Bukovsky, the great anti-Soviet dissident, later discovered in the archives of the Soviet Communist party that a delegation of German social democrats had appealed to the Kremlin to crack down on Eastern Europe on the grounds that a Soviet collapse would weaken the Left everywhere. (A false prediction, alas.)

Reagan did not stand entirely alone against these chic appeasers. Even an abbreviated list of his allies would have to include the Pope, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, some politicians whose staunch role is unappreciated outside their own countries such as Italy’s Francesco Cossiga, dissidents of great courage such as Vaclav Havel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Western sovietologists like Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes, and the enslaved peoples of the Soviet bloc.

But Reagan was the leader of the free world. His leadership of this freedom coalition made all the difference. It meant that the power of the United States stood behind the striking shipbuilders of Gdansk, the “velvet revolutionaries” of Charter 88, and brave individuals like Andrei Sakharov in the very shadow of the Kremlin. And that ultimately enabled them to win.

In what will remain his best epitaph, Lady Thatcher said: “President Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.” He did so because he knew that the people on the other side of the barricades were his friends ? and ours. The diplomats have been calling him a lucky dimwit ever since.

5

One more, just 'cause it’s so good:

In Solidarity
The Polish people, hungry for justice, preferred “cowboys” over Communists.

BY LECH WALESA
Friday, June 11, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

GDANSK, Poland–When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can’t be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989.

Poles fought for their freedom for so many years that they hold in special esteem those who backed them in their struggle. Support was the test of friendship. President Reagan was such a friend. His policy of aiding democratic movements in Central and Eastern Europe in the dark days of the Cold War meant a lot to us. We knew he believed in a few simple principles such as human rights, democracy and civil society. He was someone who was convinced that the citizen is not for the state, but vice-versa, and that freedom is an innate right.

I often wondered why Ronald Reagan did this, taking the risks he did, in supporting us at Solidarity, as well as dissident movements in other countries behind the Iron Curtain, while pushing a defense buildup that pushed the Soviet economy over the brink. Let’s remember that it was a time of recession in the U.S. and a time when the American public was more interested in their own domestic affairs. It took a leader with a vision to convince them that there are greater things worth fighting for. Did he seek any profit in such a policy? Though our freedom movements were in line with the foreign policy of the United States, I doubt it.

I distinguish between two kinds of politicians. There are those who view politics as a tactical game, a game in which they do not reveal any individuality, in which they lose their own face. There are, however, leaders for whom politics is a means of defending and furthering values. For them, it is a moral pursuit. They do so because the values they cherish are endangered. They’re convinced that there are values worth living for, and even values worth dying for. Otherwise they would consider their life and work pointless. Only such politicians are great politicians and Ronald Reagan was one of them.

The 1980s were a curious time–a time of realization that a new age was upon us. Communism was coming to an end. It had used up its means and possibilities. The ground was set for change. But this change needed the cooperation, or unspoken understanding, of different political players. Now, from the perspective of our time, it is obvious that like the pieces of a global chain of events, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and even Mikhail Gorbachev helped bring about this new age in Europe. We at Solidarity like to claim more than a little credit, too, for bringing about the end of the Cold War.

In the Europe of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan presented a vision. For us in Central and Eastern Europe, that meant freedom from the Soviets. Mr. Reagan was no ostrich who hoped that problems might just go away. He thought that problems are there to be faced. This is exactly what he did.

Every time I met President Reagan, at his private estate in California or at the Lenin shipyard here in Gdansk, I was amazed by his modesty and even temper. He didn’t fit the stereotype of the world leader that he was. Privately, we were like opposite sides of a magnet: He was always composed; I was a raging tower of emotions eager to act. We were so different yet we never had a problem with understanding one another. I respected his honesty and good humor. It gave me confidence in his policies and his resolve. He supported my struggle, but what unified us, unmistakably, were our similar values and shared goals.

I have often been asked in the United States to sign the poster that many Americans consider very significant. Prepared for the first almost-free parliamentary elections in Poland in 1989, the poster shows Gary Cooper as the lonely sheriff in the American Western, “High Noon.” Under the headline “At High Noon” runs the red Solidarity banner and the date–June 4, 1989–of the poll. It was a simple but effective gimmick that, at the time, was misunderstood by the Communists. They, in fact, tried to ridicule the freedom movement in Poland as an invention of the “Wild” West, especially the U.S.
But the poster had the opposite impact: Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles. Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual. Solidarity trounced the Communists in that election, paving the way for a democratic government in Poland. It is always so touching when people bring this poster up to me to autograph it. They have cherished it for so many years and it has become the emblem of the battle that we all fought together.

As I say repeatedly, we owe so much to all those who supported us. Perhaps in the early years, we didn’t express enough gratitude. We were so busy introducing all the necessary economic and political reforms in our reborn country. Yet President Ronald Reagan must have realized what remarkable changes he brought to Poland, and indeed the rest of the world. And I hope he felt gratified. He should have.

Mr. Walesa, winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, was president of Poland from 1990 to 1995.

6

Not sure how I feel as a whole toward Reagan but through a long chain of associations, I actually own one of those solidat posters with Gary Cooper modelled after “High Noon.”

We should remember that in much of the Western world, Ronald Reagan was derided as the original “cowboy president.”

7

Thanks Mr Barrister. Got to agree that the Gipper brought steak to the barbecue.