muckefuck | RIP Ronald Reagan

Skip to Main Content

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.

Threaded | Flat

I can't name a single good thing he did while in office.

I can.

How about negotiating a still-lasting peace accord between Egypt and Israel, who'd gone to war four times in the previous thirty years?

Also: Created the Cabinet-level Departments of Education and Energy. Expanded the National Parks designations, including hundreds of millions of acres of Alaskan wilderness (the same acreage that is a bone of contention between Bush/oil companies and environmentalists today) and passed other major environmental legislations. Created millions of jobs, reduced the national debt, restructured National Civil Service. Got the Panama Canal treaties signed to insure the ongiong neutrality of the canal after its return to Panama. Established full diplomatic relations with China.

Just off the top of my head.

"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. "

That wasn't the liberal line at the time... they were busy insisting that the USSR was strong and here-to-stay and we needed to accommodate them instead of antagonize them.

Nice reminder in this review:

http://www.reason.com/0311/cr.gg.the.shtml

Long quote from same: "In retrospect, Reagan’s point that the Soviet economy was on life support seems obvious to the point of banality. In fact, that’s one of the arguments his critics use against him: that the Soviet economy would have imploded anyway, even without Reagan’s defense buildup. But that’s not the way foreign policy intellectuals saw it in 1982.

"'It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable,' declared economist Lester Thurow, adding that the Soviet Union was 'a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States." (I wonder if Thurow had ever flown on a Soviet airliner?) John Kenneth Galbraith went further, insisting that in many respects the Soviet economy was superior to ours: 'In contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.'

"Arthur Schlesinger, just back from a trip to Moscow in 1982, said Reagan was delusional. 'I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street -- more of almost everything,' he said, adding his contempt for 'those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink.'"

(end quote)

I personally remember the derision handed down by liberals like NPR's Daniel Shorr when Reagan stood before the Brandenburg gate and urged Gorbachev to tear down the wall. What a dinosaur, they said, too stupid to realize that history had already spoken and communism was a durable reality that wiser heads had learned to accept.

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'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 >>

i've heard people mention on the much-maligned NPR that Reagan accelerated the collapse of the USSR by increasing military spending in Europe and other areas, thereby straining on the USSR's economy to the breaking point.

I just can't get past those abhorrent social policies and the deficit.

There's a nice article by Fred Kaplan in Slate on Reagan and Gorbachev.

Kaplan emphasizes Gorbachev's role, but I'd go further: Gorbachev, quite despite himself, destroyed the USSR. As Alexis de Toqueville pointed out, "The most perilous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways. Only consummate statecraft can enable a king to save his throne when, after a long spell of oppression, he sets out to improve the lot of his subjects." The USSR was unreformable; attempting to do so only cracked it open.

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. On the other hand, if the Soviets had trotted out another leader of the vintage of Chernenko or Andropov, or if Yegor Ligachev were in power, it's unlikely that Reagan's arms buildup and nukes proposals would have had much effect.

Reagan's domestic legacy is appalling, however. His presidency was the signal to the business class that it need no longer share with the middle class. So far as I can see, if Reagan helped destroy the world's nastiest economic system, he also helped destroy its best one.

Threaded | Flat