The one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan has been a moment for the celebration of a very popular president and conservative icon, but also for an assessment of the man and his legacy more than two decades after he left the White House.
Unlike the majority of Americans, and certainly the majority of Perry Countians, I had no great affection for Mr. Reagan, although I have, over time, come to admire his bullishness on the American dream and his firm hand in the negotiations that effectively ended the Soviet Union.
What puzzles me is the use that modern conservatives make of him, which seems to ignore, or utterly rewrite, the contradictions that made Mr. Reagan at once so fascinating and maddening.
This is the president, we’re told, who returned “family values” to the center of the national dialogue. Yet he was the only American president to have divorced.
One of his most famous lines — in a presidency that was chock-a-block with famous lines — was delivered in his first inaugural address: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Yet the size of government ballooned during his administrations.
Known as a great champion of open markets and a ferocious campaigner on behalf of the free enterprise system, Mr. Reagan is constantly invoked as the patron saint of fiscal responsibility in government. Yet he raised taxes many times during his presidency — even as he significantly lowered marginal income tax rates — and left office having nearly tripled the national debt.
When people talk about Mr. Reagan’s greatness, they tend to draw comparisons between him and Jimmy Carter, his predecessor in the White House, who, by broad consensus, was a “failed president.” America, they say, was suffering a great cultural malaise, a crisis of self-confidence that was reflected in both a terrible domestic economy and in huge embarrassments on the world stage. Just as Mr. Reagan campaigned on the slogan, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” his ardent supporters draw contrasts between the troubled days of 1979 and the “re-energized” America of 1989.
In retrospect, the Reagan years were a mixed bag, especially for the American middle class, which suffered one of the greatest transfers of wealth in American history from their pockets to the pockets of the wealthiest 2% of the country. “Deregulation” was the watchword, but the free market policies of the “go-go 80s,” based on the philosophy that markets are perfect and self-correcting, helped to create the preconditions for the Great Recession of 2008.
Trade unions, weakened by global competition in the 70s, were decimated in the 80s. Mr. Reagan led the charge himself by firing striking federal air traffic controllers in the early days of his presidency, essentially announcing an open season on unions.
Let’s not forget that “free markets” include labor markets. It’s no accident that the 1980s and 90s saw the gutting of America industry, as corporations, emboldened by signals from the very top, fled the U.S. to build factories where labor was much cheaper, and regulation even looser.
I remember the 1980s not as a time of revitalization, but as a time of polarization. The rich got richer. The poor got poorer. Those on the margins — like, for instance, the multitudes who died of AIDS while the government refused to acknowledge there was even a health crisis – were further marginalized. An administration that was constantly trumpeting the need for government to get off the backs of its people seemed to be sticking its beak further and further into my private affairs. The baby steps we’d taken as a nation on important issues like our addiction to foreign oil and the clean-up of our polluted air and water were triumphantly rolled back.
To some, Mr. Reagan remains an enigmatic figure. Edmund Morris, the official biographer who worked with him for fourteen years, was nearly undone by the unbridgeable gulf he saw between Mr. Reagan, the affable but seemingly absent politician, and Mr. Reagan, the world-changing statesman. In Morris’s Dutch, Mr. Reagan is painted as a great, but ultimately unknowable man, a view hauntingly echoed by his own son.
As a leader, Mr. Reagan was capable of focusing his considerable talents and energy on a handful of enormous problems, and then riding those problems to ground. His achievements were huge, and ought to be celebrated.
But let’s leave cults of personality where they belong: on the ash-heap of history.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 17 February 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
