EMAIL OF THE DAY

“Your essay in Time reminded me of who I was, and what the Republican Party was, in the 1980s.
In 1983, I slapped an ‘Another Student for Reagan Bush’ bumper sticker on my dorm room door, and wore Reagan buttons on my denim jacket, right next to the U2 and Black Flag pins (go figure). The three people I most wanted to meet were Reagan, the Pope, and Bruce Springsteen (again, go figure). I took a lot of heat for what my contemporaries viewed as ‘simplistic’ politics, and I learned then something that has held me in good stead since: when the sophisticates can’t defeat common sense, they resort to intellectual dishonesty and ad hominem attack. Take Clark Clifford’s ‘amiable dunce’ comment as an example. I’m sure at the time this consummate insider’s quip struck the cocktail crowd as dead on. Now, many years later, it seems incredibly mean spirited and, in light of the Reagan correspondence, wrong. The irony is that while Reagan will encompass chapters in history, the so-called intelligent critics won’t earn footnote status.
Reagan’s appeal can be summed up in one word: freedom. Freedom for enslaved peoples, freedom of the marketplace from government regulation, freedom from judicial tyranny and judges telling us how to live, freedom from oppressive taxes, and freedom from the intellectual imprisonment of government telling people that they cannot achieve anything without government help.
I miss Reagan already, and I feel like a part of me, and a part of the soul of the Republican Party, has passed away.”