I don’t have much to add to what I have written before about Ronald Reagan. He was and is my hero, my political inspiration, the reason I was proud to call myself a “conservative,” when I first came into political consciousness. My first twenty years were spent in England and so he will always take second place to Margaret Thatcher in my understanding of what political courage means, but I was proud to wear a “Reagan ’80” button in my English high-school, an act that, at the time, was akin to admitting to being a mass-murderer. I was proud at Oxford to greet the arrival of Pershing missiles in Britain with a champagne party. And when I came to America in 1984, it was in the midst of his triumphant re-election campaign. I even got to go to a rally where he promised to raise our taxes. It was a gaffe. We didn’t care. We loved him. But it is insufficient, I think, to be nostalgic at this point in history. What does Reagan’s legacy demand of us now?
SAVING REPUBLICANISM: I have no doubt that Reagan would have endorsed the war to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq from theocrats and tyrants. As he put it of a previous liberation, “When our forces marched into Germany they came not to prey on a brave and defeated people, but to nurture the seeds of democracy among those who yearned to be free again.” He would have seen the attack of 9/11 as an atrocity that required the kind of leadership that George W. Bush and Tony Blair have provided. And there is much of Reagan’s optimism and faith in freedom in the president’s current speeches. But Reagan’s Republicanism was far more expansive, anti-government, generous and optimistic than today’s. He would never have presided over the massive increases in domestic spending that Bush has; he would not have signed onto a new entitlement for Medicare, a program he first opposed in its entirety; he would not have played the anti-gay card that Karl Rove has; and he would never have recast his party into one where only fundamentalist Christians are ultimately, fully at home. Unlike Bush, Reagan was a man of ideas, an intellectual, a man who had thought long and hard about the world and developed keen ideas about what was needed to fix its problems. So he was able to argue, to make a case, to concede a point, to embrace a synthesis. President Bush, alas, can only make a case – in words given him by others. I have never witnessed him in public acknowledge an opposing argument or think on his feet. Those aren’t his strengths. But they sure were Reagan’s.
THE UNITER: If Reagan has an inheritor, it isn’t George W. Bush, but, in a limited sense, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a self-deprecating, theatrical Californian who combines faith in freedom with stunning pragmatism in politics. That Reagan Republicanism, holding on in Sacramento, is now under siege, if not on the verge of being eclipsed in the GOP as a whole. The old man bears some responsibility, of course. He courted the South assiduously, unleashed Ed Meese on the porn industry, dropped the ball on AIDS, and exploited the religious right when it was an insurgency rather than the Republican establishment. But he also, unlike Bush, had a real sense of the MidWest and West – and had a vernacular that could speak to all Americans, not just a few. He embraced life and pleasure and humor and fun. A divorced man who campaigned against homophobia and rarely went to church, he also had an effortless sense of the Almighty that came through when needed, and so bridged some of the cultural gaps that his successors have failed to do. In some ways, this is a reflection of his immense talents and complex personality rather than his successors’ weaknesses. But it is a task that is more necessary today than ever – and one our current president, alas, is singularly incapable of. Reagan made me laugh often and well; he made me hope more than was warranted; I trusted him and saw the growth of freedom under his benign, chuckling steeliness. It is a long road from there to the dour cynicism of Karl Rove and joyless puritanism of John Ashcroft. There was always the old Democrat in Reagan’s new Republican, a deep sense of civility, a wry sense of humor, a faith leavened with skepticism, a conservatism informed by liberalism’s faith in the future. It is not too late to rescue this legacy from the clutches of today’s acidic, sectarian GOP. But time is running out.
The Dish 