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
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WILL: The key is to understand the economy of leadership: you should have ideas, and they should be clear, but most of all they should be few—three at the most. Re-arm the country, cut the weight of government and win the cold war. After that we'll see. That's what Napoleon said: "You win and then you see."
THOMAS: Sean, for somebody who's associated with the liberal academic establishment, you're being very complimentary of Reagan. Surely there's something about him you don't like.
WILENTZ: Ronald Reagan made some very grave errors while in office. I think the Iran-contra affair showed that [the] care with which he'd protect the Constitution was not what it ought to have been. He was overcome in that case by his desire to get the hostages out of Lebanon and by those who said they could do it. I don't think the S&L [savings and loan] crisis was so much a matter of Reagan as his administration. There were plenty of warnings that something was going terribly wrong. Deregulation was an example where some things went right but a lot went wrong. On the issue of taxes, he brought things down to a point where things got way out of hand.
THOMAS: It seems one of his legacies in the political arena is never raising taxes, that that's a sin.
WILL: He raised them all the time.
WILENTZ: Yeah, he had the biggest tax raises in history practically.
WILL: He also, as governor of California, signed the most liberal abortion law in American history. He got away with that, too. Maybe that's something Sean should explore in his next volume. How do great leaders get away with it?
WILENTZ: But there's a difference that I think Reagan understood on the tax issue. There's a difference between raising taxes and lowering marginal rates. He put his emphasis on the first. He went public to say, "We can't do this anymore." But that is not what he'd gone to the mat for. And in fact, going to the mat for something else, he structurally changed things much more dramatically. Taxes can go up and down, but he understood that a change in the system is different than a change that happens year to year. So, I think that's part of his leadership style: "All right, I have to do this now to get something bigger down the line."
THOMAS: Sean, you talked about how the old Reagan coalition is splintering, but the Democrats are having trouble maintaining their base because there's such a thing as a Reagan Democrat who may vote Republican. Is that part of Reagan's legacy?
WILENTZ: The first Reagan Democrat was probably Ronald Reagan, who understood very well the legacy of the Democratic Party and how it had changed in 1968. What we're seeing is a fight that's been going in the Democratic Party for 40 years.
Discuss