Month: June 2004

“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.”

Arthur Schlesinger, who has racked up perhaps the most impressive series of completely wrong judgments about politics for decades, comes back to memory in this posting from Virginia Postrel’s blog:

Arthur Schlesinger, just back from a trip to Moscow in 1982, said Reagan was delusional. “I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street — more of almost everything,” he said, adding his contempt for “those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink.”

Yes, they really did think like that. They really thought that the Soviet Union wasn’t evil – even admirable in some respects – as late as 1982!

My take on Ronald Reagan, from Time.

Here are a few odd sentences in the Wall Street Journal, dealing with Reagan’s legacy of massive budget deficits:

Mr. Reagan’s unique contribution was to stick to his economic program, and to support Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, in the face of enormous political pressure to turn tail on both. Growth resumed as he expected, and tax revenues actually increased faster than GDP from the low point in 1983 through 1989. As for the deficits, they did finally vanish once defense spending fell after the Cold War ended and a GOP Congress slowed the growth in other spending for at least a couple of years in the mid-1990s.

What the Journal doesn’t mention is that Reagan, Bush and Clinton all had to raise taxes to accomplish this. Reagan, we should recall, raised taxes, after his initial cut. He was not an abolutist. He also helped reform the tax system in 1986, an idea now anathema to today’s Republican party, which is busy funneling as many tax breaks to interest groups as it can.

How Thatcher helped make Reagan possible, and vice-versa.

Yes, there were anti-American protests at the D-Day celebrations. Some German bloggers infiltrated.

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.

Just read this story about the Texas Republican Party. Their convention began with prayers and invocations, as any religious gathering might do. One pastor who spoke to the group said the following: “Give us Christians in America who are more wholehearted, more committed and more militant for you and your kingdom than any fanatical Islamic terrorists are for death and destruction. I want to be one of those Christians.” Then read the platform, proposing, among other things, “new restrictions on lawsuits brought over exposure to asbestos” and making it a felony for anyone to perform a marriage for a same-sex couple. If you want to know why someone who loved Ronald Reagan can no longer support the Republican Party, then the extremism of George W. Bush’s own party in his home state is Exhibit A. Republicans who say that these people do not represent the GOP as a whole can prove this by taking them on. But they won’t, will they? They never do.

BUSH HATRED WATCH: “[T]he hegemonic grim spirit of the age being incarnate in our thought-disordered bloody, greedy, little plutocrat-slash-soulless-theocrat of an unelected President,” – Tony Kushner, playwright, New York Times.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “No U.S. president, I expect, will ever appoint a Secretary of the Imagination. But if such a cabinet post ever were created, and Richard Foreman weren’t immediately appointed to it, you’d know that the Republicans were in power. Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.” – Michael Feingold, in the Village Voice.

“I think it is very interesting when you reread the history of the late Thirties and the Second World War, the degree to which there was a very big disagreement between people as to how to deal with the Nazi threat. Not disagreement that it was a threat, but how to deal with it. And it seems almost extraordinary to us now that there were people arguing throughout the 1930s that actually the way to deal with Hitler was to make a gesture of disarmament. Now we look back and say, ‘How on earth could anyone have thought that was sensible?’ But that was for a time in fact the predominant view.
The second thing is how big a gamble politically President Roosevelt was taking in committing America, first of all to helping, and then to committing forces. It is sometimes forgotten that in the prewar presidential elections each of the candidates had to line up and say, ‘on no account will we get drawn into any European conflict’. And that’s why this transatlantic alliance is felt so keenly on their side as well as ours.” – Tony Blair, understanding how the Anglo-American alliance is as critical to the survival of freedom today as it was sixty years ago.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: “The last war showed only too clearly that we can have no faith in imperialist crusades to bring freedom to any people. Our entry into the war, under the slogan “Stop Hitler!” would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here … The American people can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties.” – John Dewey, William Carlos Williams, Meyer Schapiro, and other leading American intellectuals, in Partisan Review, Fall 1939. (Thanks to David Gelernter in the Wall Street Journal.) Reads just like the New York Review of Books today, doesn’t it?

SACRED INSTITUTION WATCH: J-Lo gets hitched again. It’s her third exercise of her civil rights, and she’s only 34. Her husband just got a divorce from his previous wife last Monday. The heterosexual lifestyle is destroying marriage, isn’t it?

“I hope you will forgive this sentimental note. I have been greatly saddened by the death of President Reagan and felt the need to commemorate his passing by writing a few lines in his memory. Having grown up in communist Czechoslovakia, I have seen, first hand, the material and, more importantly, spiritual devastation that socialism brings. Generations of people in Eastern Europe were impoverished and their morality and sense of self-worth annihilated by a corrupt, inherently dishonest and tyrannical value system. Thanks to Reagan, people like me were set free at a young age. Untainted by socialism, we were allowed our most basic right – to pursue happiness in a place and manner of our choosing. But, it did not have to happen that way! Were the Soviet bloc allowed to continue in its miserable existence for another two decades, my generation would have morphed into that great-gray mass of people that the historians write off as ‘lost.’ It is not a hyperbole to say that Reagan gave us our freedom and for that I am eternally thankful.” – from a Czech friend. The battle against socialism continues, of course. In this country and around the world.