Sunday, June 06, 2004
Reagan's Liberal Legacy
Joshua Green wrote an article several months ago in the Washington Monthly on Governor Reagan. In it he discusses the differences between the hagiographic portrait of Mr. Reagan that is being touted by the Right, and his actual policies and actions in office.
Despite the fact that the whole article should be read by anyone interested in Mr. Reagan, here is an interesting excerpt from the end of the article:
What strikes me about Mr. Reagan is that the 'compromises' with the Left, as Mr. Green calls them, are now considered part of what the Right is. Look at President Bush's attempts to advance democracy in the middle east--such hearkens back to the foreign policy of Mr. Reagan that talked tough against the Soviet Union, but at its heart had peace in mind (of course, terrorists are something of a fundamentally different nature than the government of the Soviet Union under Gorbechev).
Mr. Reagan helped to redefine the right in a way that gave it the potential to establish a coalition with which it could govern for a very long time, just as FDR did 50 years earlier.
Despite the fact that the whole article should be read by anyone interested in Mr. Reagan, here is an interesting excerpt from the end of the article:
Many of Reagan's actions that wound up furthering liberal ends were to some extent the result of the normal compromises of political office. The fact that his conservative biographers don't see fit to acknowledge these deviations is a clue that their aim is something besides an accurate depiction of the life and achievements of the 40th president. When conservatives mythologize the Reagan presidency as the golden era of conservatism, it's not Reagan that they're mythologizing, but conservatism.
The great success of Reagan's 1980 campaign was that it united the disparate strands of the conservative movement: supply-siders, libertarians, religious conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and big business. The fact that Reagan's presidency didn't accomplish anything approaching its seismic promise--the size of government grew, abortion remained legal, and entitlements still abounded--is one that his partisan biographers elide by focusing on what Reagan believed and said rather than on what he actually did. The imaginary Reagan who inhabits these books embodies the ideas on which all these groups can agree. His shining example helps maintain the coalition while putting pressure on current GOP politicians to hew to the hard-right ideal.
The real Reagan, on the other hand, would bring discord to the current conservative agenda. If you believe, as conservatives now do, that raising taxes is always wrong, then it's hard to admit that Reagan himself did so repeatedly. If you argue that the relative tax burden on low-income workers is too light, as the Bush administration does, then it does not pay to dwell on the fact that Reagan himself helped lighten that burden. If you insist, as many hardliners now do, that America is dangerously soft on communist China, then it is best to ignore Reagan's own softening toward the Soviet Union. As with other conservative media efforts--Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, The Washington Times--the purpose of the Reagan legacy project is not to deliver accuracy, but enhance political leverage.
But, as Reagan himself liked to cite from John Adams, facts are stubborn things. And the fact is that Reagan, whether out of wisdom or because he was forced, made significant compromises with the left. Had he not saved Social Security, relented on his tax cut, and negotiated with the Soviets, he'd have been a less popular, and lesser, president. An honest portrait of Reagan's presidency would not diminish his memory, but enlarge it.
What strikes me about Mr. Reagan is that the 'compromises' with the Left, as Mr. Green calls them, are now considered part of what the Right is. Look at President Bush's attempts to advance democracy in the middle east--such hearkens back to the foreign policy of Mr. Reagan that talked tough against the Soviet Union, but at its heart had peace in mind (of course, terrorists are something of a fundamentally different nature than the government of the Soviet Union under Gorbechev).
Mr. Reagan helped to redefine the right in a way that gave it the potential to establish a coalition with which it could govern for a very long time, just as FDR did 50 years earlier.
Comments:
Post a Comment
