muckefuck | RIP Ronald Reagan

RIP Ronald Reagan

I'm still keeping my exposure to news (particularly television news) low, so I haven't seen anything of the "flood" of eulogies that many on my Friends list are complaining about. I did do a Google search on "Reagan achievements", hoping to jog my memory with a solid, concise list. Out of the first twenty hits, only three seem positive enough to be considered encomia and one of these is over six years old. (The author laments the lack of a true successor and the eclipse of the Reaganite legacy among conservatives; it left me truly curious how he would evaluate Shrub, whose few good qualities--chief among them hawkish moral conviction--are among those he most admired in Reagan.) Most speak, at best, of a "mixed legacy". I'm guessing that this eulogy deluge is mostly a televised thing.

Some of you have mentioned that you hope there's this much of a fuss when Carter kicks it. Now, by contrast to the last four presidents, there's someone with an unmixed legacy: I can't name a single good thing he did while in office. Admittedly, I was very young at the time, but I'm hardly alone in conceiving of the late 70's as a time of stagnation and malaise. He's a good man and all, but, then, so was Neville Chamberlain, I'm sure. Should he also have a motorway named for him?

I've also heard several people deny that Reagan won us the Cold War. Or they grudgingly admit that he did only to point out that the USSR would've collapsed anyway. Yes, but when? In two years? In fifty? At what additional cost in suffering? Again, to reach for a WWII analogy, the Nazi regime in Germany was unsustainable in the long term and would've collapsed eventually, too. Does that mean that FDR's offensive in Europe wasn't necessary? And does anyone--even paleolithic bedrock conservatives--deny that he won WWII for the Allies? (Not in the sense that he did it alone, of course, but in the sense that victory wouldn't have occurred without his leadership.)

princeofcairo has mentioned to me how he's forced to grit his teeth and admit that a president whose social policies he abhors was the only candidate who would've made the morally correct choices and saved the world from barbarism. He's hoping for the day when American liberals will come to view Reagan in the same way he views FDR. After a decade of resistence, I'm willing to. I won't be shedding any tears for the Gipper, but I'm not about to join in the singing and dancing on his grave either.

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I was five years old when Reagan was first elected. I've skipped the television news as well, but have had to reconcile my memories of hating him with my older political sentiments of today.

I read an article on Marketwatch before he died wherein one economist said, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." I remain unconvinced. And how long was it before Reagan used the word "AIDS" in public? Etc. etc. etc., and the same arguments you've heard elsewhere, I'm sure. (Although I would argue that Mikhail Gorbachev is probably more to be praised for the fall of the Soviet Union than Reagan.)

But at the same time, he is more than the sum effect of his policies. He's an icon. Carter won't get the love because he committed the gravest of American sins: he lost. Reagan vs. Mondale in '84 made Barry Goldwater look like William the Conqueror. Liberals gnashed their teeth, but couldn't articulate an alternative until Iran/Contra started to go down.

Which is what makes me sigh now, twenty years later -- the lack of a concrete alternative. That "hawkish moral conviction" is more catchy to many voters than the decline of governmental transparency.

But if you believe the market is always efficient, this, then, is the way it should be.

I don't think it was Reagan's intention to prove that deficits don't matter. That some some people (Cheney prominent among them) drew that conclusion from the economic facts of his term can't be blamed on him.

Reagan's record on AIDS would be an example of one of those "social policies I abhor".

I don't see how Gorbachev deserves credit for the fall of the Soviet Union. He introduced glasnost and perestroika in order to preserve it, not dismantle it. I give him a lot of credit for managing its demise so well--I'm still amazed it was such a relatively bloodless affair--but I don't think he ever would've been pushed to do that without Reagan. (Would he even have come to power if the USSR hadn't been in the crisis it was?) In fact, I think Reagan deserves a great deal of credit for recongising Gorbachev as someone we could work with (back in the early years when many old-line anti-communists considered him another slick deceiver) and changing his tack in order to do just that.

Shackled markets aren't especially efficient and the political one strikes me as particularly unfree. There are all kinds of barriers to entry and restrictions on competition, not to mention perverse incentives and lack of transparency.

I think you and I may have seen Colin Powell giving the same interview.

I do not want to give the impression that I believe Reagan was neutral about communism , only that -- I'm a lib'ral, I ain't dumb -- just to say there's another key player who deserves to be named.

I was talking with a Russian friend a while back, and Gorby's legacy in Russia is not very positive. He is believed to have torn down an oppressive system without anything to replace it. This from a girl who is now a huge capitalist, and spent her sixteenth birthday in a mob of people in Moscow standing in the way of the abortive military coup once Gorbachev began making plans for the demise of the USSR.

To be sure, the man wasn't the antichrist (contrary to the views of hyperlefties) and his legacy has successes and failures as much as the modern liberal equivalent, Bill Clinton's. King George, for all we pinkoes despise him, unseated the Taliban and, for right or wrong, Saddam Hussein, and the people of those nations and much of the world will be better off for it.

I've said it before: I'd be much more likely to vote Republican if they'd get out of bed with the religious right.

A German writer--I want to say it was Achternbusch but I won't until I can find the article again--once wrote an article in praise of men like Jaruzelski and Modrow. He figured he'd be one of the only people to do so. To progressives, these were reluctant reformers at best, looking for a way to preserve a regressive system well past its due date, and to the old guard, they were simply traitors. They don't have the romance of true revolutionaries--but they didn't pile up the same body counts. They'd be remembered better if they tried to hang onto power until the bitter end--like Ceauşescu--but as vile monsters rather than dorky apparatchiks how happened to be in office during a critical turning point.

I think of Gorby as one of these men, but with much better international press. It's not surprising at all that most Russian despise him, more of a fluke that Americans think so highly of him. As with Reagan, I think this has a lot to do with his personal charisma.

(Although I would argue that Mikhail Gorbachev is probably more to be praised for the fall of the Soviet Union than Reagan.)

I'd note that Gorbachev had no intention of presiding over the end of the USSR or the end of Communist monopoly rule thereof. He believed it was possible to moderate the regime and allow enough partial openness to let them continue forever. (He also seems to have hoped that the Warsaw Pact nations would remain in the USSR's sphere of influence voluntarily, and ditto the internal Soviet republics-- though in the event, he wasn't unwilling to send tanks into Lithuania, for example.) For whatever it's worth, Reagan's vision seems to have been clearer on this point than Gorbachev's, and the pressure he placed on the regime seems to be a major reason for this. (There were certainly forces in the US that wanted to help the Soviets keep things together, in the name of the perpetual State Department goal of "stability". Fortunately, by the time George H.W. Bush was in place to actively try to implement this-- sticking with Gorbachev even after it was clear that Yeltsin was the future and telling the Ukrainians to sit tight-- it was too late.)

Now, maybe it was sheer coincidence that we got what Reagan wanted (and was talking about at least as early as 1981), and not what Gorbachev wanted (right up to the day that it was explained to him that since he'd never had popular support, the 1991 coup's demonstration that he also lacked military and KGB support meant his services were no longer necessary). But when someone sets a grand strategic goal, pursues policies aimed at that goal, sees that goal achieved, and finds both participants in and victims of the defeated regime crediting/blaming him for it, I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Someone like Gorbachev was certainly necessary (though Reagan had to wait through more Russian leaders than any other President before Gorbachev showed up). But with a detente-minded US President willing to perpetuate the 70's military establishment indefinitely (or to cut it further, in line with our lessened horizons), I see no reason the Soviets couldn't have held on. With no expensive military challenges, no loud demands for freedom, no fierce condemnations of the system-- all those provocative things that only a crazed or simpleminded warmonger would resort to in international diplomacy-- and with a general expectation that things would remain more or less as they had been, the people and governments of the Iron Curtain alike might well have muddled through the 80s much as they did the 70s, secure in the knowledge that any loss of confidence and capability on their part was being matched on ours. 1989 might simply have been another 1981, 1968, or 1956.

I know that's what I was expecting, right up through 1989. After all, as a friend noted, "It's not as if they're dancing on the Berlin Wall." Except that on November 11, 1989, two and a half years after Reagan had issued a widely derided challenge to Gorbachev to "tear down this wall"-- with the only Soviet response being a complaint that he'd given "an openly provocative, war-mongering speech"-- they were.

I don't dispute that a Gorbachev was necessary. But it would be hard, given Gorbachev's own statements, strategies, and actions, to show that a Gorbachev without a Reagan would have been sufficient.

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