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

[alfaboy.livejournal.com]

"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.