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: I was at the Truman library in Independence, Mo., last week, and was looking at a black-and-white photograph of Harry Truman giving a speech in a stadium in Los Angeles during the '48 campaign. Seated next to the lectern, right next to Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, is a man who had introduced Truman, and it was a 37-year-old Ronald Reagan. That was probably the last time he voted for a Democrat. And so Sean's right, he was the first Reagan Democrat, but what really made Reagan Democrats were Democratic policies. One of the worst things that ever happened to American education but one of the best things that happened to American conservatism was busing of schoolchildren for racial balance. This just crystallized the sense of a lot of working-class Americans [that] policies were imposed on them by people who had no intention of ever being exposed to them themselves. All these people sending their kids to private schools were telling others which public school their kid should go to.
WILENTZ: To add to that, I would say that what made it fiercer and more passionate was the ways in which the liberal Democrats interpreted the resistance to their policies, which was always to blame the people who were resisting for being narrow-minded or racist, not up to their own enlightened idea of the way Americans ought to be. There was a contempt, there was an elitism that was not a part of the Democratic Party of Harry Truman that came into play in the aftermath of the black-power movement and Vietnam. It's not to say there wasn't racism in America or small-minded people. But you don't go about winning people's votes by saying, "You're a small-minded racist."
WILL: I'll just add, there's a wonderful book called "The Liberals' Moment," about [George] McGovern's 1972 campaign and about McGovern, who's become a friend of mine recently. It talks about what Sean was talking about, how '68 was one kind of fracturing of the Democratic Party, but in a way, less important than the fracturing of '72, because that set the precedent for the Obama-Clinton divide between the well-educated and affluent liberals and the others. What happened in '72 was the aggressive, conscious, tough, skillful disenfranchising of organized labor and of the big city machines, by George McGovern. McGovern was thought of as a soft prairie farmer. He was one tough cookie, a man who took a nonexistent Democratic Party in South Dakota and produced a senator—that was himself—not many years later. What happened in '72—that formalized, aggressive takeover of the Democratic Party by one faction at the expense of another—is what we're seeing playing out right now. It is no accident, comrade, that in '76 Reagan makes a strong run and in '80 he makes it into the White House over the remains of the badly divided Democratic Party.
© 2008
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