Regan was lucky regarding the Sowjet Union, nevertheless he deserves credit for the dissolution of it. However in my book this is the only thing he did right. Among the many wrongheaded things he did the worst was to initiate the process of totally dismantling the oversight of greedy industry by government agencies, representing the interest of us, the people. This oversight is the essence of a functioning capitalist democracy. As we dismantled it, based on Reagan???s initiative and justifications, we came to the present sorry state of affairs where the drug industry, the banking/mortgage industry, the transportation industry, just to name a few, operate to the detriment of our society as a whole. And in the process we were made to believe that government is inherently ineffective and hence bad. Well, incompetent government, like the Bush government, is inherently ineffective and bad. But not government in general. Democrats who now ???re-examine??? and re-evaluate??? Reagan and forgetting the huge harm he caused to our democracy are either suffering terminal amnesia, or, like Obama, are pandering to a right of center crowd to get votes. We do not need another Reagan, or Reagan-like president. If Obama wants to be like Reagan he should run as a republican.
The Left Starts to Rethink Reagan
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
WILL: I think that's right. What makes Ronald Reagan hard to fit quite into the American or even conservative tradition is that he understood that you cannot govern this country if you're a pessimist. Pessimism has always been a strand of conservatism—pessimism about human nature, pessimism about government. Reagan simply understood when people said that Eisenhower's smile was his philosophy. In a way, that was Reagan's philosophy. He said that when the American people are happy, good things happen: they invest, they save, they have children. So he thought that getting America back to cheerfulness was an intensely practical program.
THOMAS: Sean, let me ask you this. We often talk about presidential eras. Now that we talk about the Reagan era, is it over?
WILENTZ: I do think there was a Reagan era and I think it's on its way out. Part of that is due to the success of Reagan's presidency and the success of the conservative movement, whether you like it or not. There are two things that, if you stood looking to the future in 1980, would have been amazing. One is, we don't have top marginal income tax [rates] at 70 percent. We are never, in our lifetimes, going to see that again. Secondly, the Soviet Union does not exist. If nothing else, those two changes have fundamentally reordered world politics and the instruments for reform and of government in America.
WILL: I think that's right. I think it's often the case that a really effective leader undercuts his or her reputation by their various successes of leadership. I'm thinking of Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher came into power when there was a question: Who governed England? Was it governed from Westminster or was it governed from Transport House, the headquarters of the labor movement in Britain? She broke the power of the unions over the Labour Party. Her vanquishing of these old problems was so successful that people wonder now, what was the big deal? What did she do? The same thing is true with Ronald Reagan. To listen to our politics, you have to listen with a third ear to hear what's not said. No one is talking today about 70 percent marginal tax rates. There's no real rival to the American model of how to run a modern industrial society.
WILENTZ: That's right.
THOMAS: Was Reaganism very dependent on his personality or his style of leadership or is there a coherent ideology that can exist without his personal qualities?
WILENTZ: I think there is an ideology but Reaganism ultimately was Reaganism. It wasn't conservatism or Republicanism, it was Reaganism. You couldn't find a successor, either on the right or in the old party establishment. When you did, members of the coalition began to eye each other very warily, which is what the situation is today in the Republican Party.
I don't think, though, that it was simply a matter of his personality. Ronald Reagan was much more serious than people have given him credit for. He understood that governing required compromise, unlike the current administration. He would be happy to go out and give a speech that made him sound like he was the greatest doctrinaire since Huey Long. But, in fact, he'd go to the back room and get done what he could get done.
Discuss