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

Re: Legacies

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Legacies

[febrile.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Legacies

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

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.