RIP Ronald Reagan

[muckefuck]

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.

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

What-if games are always tricky; but I don't see a strong case that a President Mondale would have been unable to give Gorbachev the external security he needed to encourage perestroika.

The destruction of the Soviet Union didn't depend on external security, though, but its opposite. External security was what it wanted, so that it could reform in peace while hanging on to its empire and its global influence. That this didn't happen depended in large part on external challenges. Controlled challenges, certainly, but the willingness to respond to each concession with "and what about this?" rather than praise for allowing semi-independent thought on alternate Tuesdays and not putting nuclear missiles on Mars, while negotiating a detente that left the Warsaw Pact and USSR in place. I don't see a Mondale administration demonstrating effectively unlimited willingness to match and overmatch the Soviets' military military capabilities, forcing them to bleed resources trying to maintain parity. (Whatever you may think of SDI, the Russians themselves by their own testimony considered it not a hole into which we were throwing money, but a technological and economic challenge that they found they couldn't hope to equal.) I don't see a Mondale administration engaging in the wholesale rejection of the idea that the Soviets had any rights in eastern Europe that didn't come out of the barrel of a gun. I don't see a Mondale administration putting missiles in Europe and then proposing a zero-zero option to get them out (which, we all knew, was a wholly unrealistic provocation, just as the demand to tear down the Berlin Wall was just posturing).

By the testimony of the very dissidents who wound up in the forefront of the change, the crisis of rising expectations wrt democracy came largely because of Reagan, not because of Gorbachev. (Lech Walesa certainly seems to give Reagan the lion's share of the credit. So, apparently, do many Russians.) Of course, they're less sentimental about Gorbachev, who was, after all, a dictator who resisted elections and multiparty democracy to the very end. He was the best of the Soviet leaders, but that's pretty much up there with the best infielder in Uzbekistan. (Heck, as far as I can tell Boris Yeltsin was the best Russian leader in the country's entire history, and I'd rather have our worst President running things than him.) Gorbachev's government was still doing military maneuvers in the Baltics and killing democracy activists right up to the point in 1991 where he was sidelined.

But perhaps Reagan just accidentally got everything he predicted in 1981, while Gorbachev achieved no goal that he set for himself or his country. Maybe those freed by the fall of the Soviet empire are wrong to credit the man who expended resources and planning to end that empire, rather than the one who scrambled to preserve it. If so, then may we be blessed by many such accidents in the future.

[gopower.livejournal.com]

Let's not forget Reagan's "adventures" in the Third World. While the Soviets did not throw massive amounts of treasure to their Nicaraguan and El Salvadoran allies, they undoubtedly spent more than they wanted in the wake of Reagan's efforts (certainly more political capital). And while the Russians likely would have had problems in Afghanistan in any case, Reagan's vigorous support of the resistance escalated the conflict, turning it into both a foreign and domestic political disaster for the Soviets.

And yes, the blowback on that was eventually pretty bad for us too.

[zompist.livejournal.com]

OK, if Gorbachev was so unimportant, imagine Ligachev in his spot instead. Do you really see the same things happening?

As for external security, Kaplan's point is that Gorbachev was emboldened to undertake reforms precisely because he figured that Reagan wasn't going to attack the USSR. If he didn't have that assurance, it would have been safer to keep with the Brezhnev program of maintaining the current system at all costs.

With all due respect to Lech Walesa, what is his opinion supposed to prove? Is it a big surprise that Eastern Europeans were more inspired by Reagan than by Gorbachev? You might as well credit Frank Zappa for the fall of the Czech Communists.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

If you scroll halfway up the page, you'll see that I wrote "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."

Still, the economic disaster would have been there, and so would the military and political challenges posed by the US, and so would the military disaster in Afghanistan, and so would Chernobyl, and so would the restive satellites. Ligachev may not be Gorbachev, but he isn't Stalin-- he can't force a fundamentally broken system to function simply by terror and force of will. I don't know what happens to the USSR and its satellites in this scenario, but they're on the ropes and the other guy is pressing hard-- something has to give. (Though the results might well have been more violent, and the outcome less happy. I freely grant that Gorbachev's willingness to kill people retail, but not wholesale, to keep the empire together represents a dramatic improvement in Soviet leadership.)

As for external security, Kaplan's point is that Gorbachev was emboldened to undertake reforms precisely because he figured that Reagan wasn't going to attack the USSR.

Then why didn't he respond to our military buildup and SDI program with a shrug, massive military cutbacks, and an attempt to reroute those resources to the rest of his ailing economy? If Reagan's major contribution was to make the Soviets feel secure, they had an odd way of showing it.

Is it a big surprise that Eastern Europeans were more inspired by Reagan than by Gorbachev?

Not really. What surprises me is that anyone is more inspired by Gorbachev than by Reagan.