The Dish

My review of Tony Hendra’s ‘Father Joe’ and account of George Tenet’s resignation are now both posted to the left.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “In 1983, I was confined to an eight-by-ten-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan’s “provocation” quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth – a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.” – Natan Sharansky, in the Jersualem Post.

NOT SO FATUOUS: Ramesh Ponnuru dissents from my view that Ronald Reagan was more socially liberal than much of the Republican Party today. He writes that

Some people, eager for a Reagan in their own image, make it sound as though he were a social liberal – as though he had never written “Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation.” To compare Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger is fatuous.

Hmmm. I did not describe Reagan as a “social liberal.” (I wrote that “If Reagan has an inheritor, it isn’t George W. Bush, but, in a limited sense, Arnold Schwarzenegger…”) Reagan was opposed to abortion, and regarded Roe vs Wade (rightly, in my view) as terrible law. He did precious little to advance civil rights. But he was definitely more easy-going about modernity than the current Republican leadership. He barely mentioned abortion in his eight terms of office, and never addressed a pro-life rally in person. He rarely went to church as president and was the first president to have an openly gay couple sleep over in the White House. He and his wife were no strangers to male homosexual company. Reagan also appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court, and in Anthony Kennedy, gave birth to the judicial father of the gay rights revolution. His biographer, Lou Cannon, wrote that Reagan was “repelled by the aggressive public crusades against homosexual life styles which became a staple of right wing politics in the late 1970s.” In 1978, Reagan put his career on the line opposing the Briggs Initiative in California that would have barred gay teachers from working in the public high school system. In an op-ed at the time, Reagan wrote:

“Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.”

That was 1978 – a very enlightened position at the time. You might quibble with this analysis, but describing Reagan’s cultural and political similarities with Schwarzenegger is by no means “fatuous”. Both Schwarzenegger and Reagan hailed from California; both came from the socially liberal world of Hollywood; both were and are conservative pragmatists; both managed to reach across regional and cultural lines to win support. Bush, in contrast, is a Texan, culturally moored in the religious right, with limited ability to reach voters in socially liberal milieus. That’s my point. I think it stands.

I have been upbraided for not mentioning Ronald Reagan’s AIDS legacy in describing him as my hero. The basic argument from the gay left is that Reagan was single-handedly responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people by negligence. This, however, borders on loopy. Reagan should indeed be faulted for not doing more to warn people of the dangers of infection early enough (Thatcher was far better). But the truth is that it was pretty obvious very early on that something dangerous was afoot as AIDS first surfaced. Just read Larry Kramer at the time. Many people most at risk were aware – mostly too late, alas – that unprotected sex had become fatal in the late 1970s and still was. You can read Randy Shilts’ bracing “And The Band Played On,” to see how some of the resistance to those warnings came from within the gay movement itself. In the polarized atmosphere of the beleaguered gay ghettoes of the 1980s, one also wonders what an instruction from Ronald Reagan to wear condoms would have accomplished. As for research, we didn’t even know what HIV was until 1983. Nevertheless, the Reagan presidency spent some $5.7 billion on HIV in its two terms – not peanuts. The resources increased by 450 percent in 1983, 134 percent in 1984, 99 percent the next year and 148 percent the year after. Yes, the Congress was critical in this. But by 1986, Reagan had endorsed a large prevention and research effort and declared in his budget message that AIDS “remains the highest public health priority of the Department of Health and Human Services.” In September 1985, Reagan said:

“[I]ncluding what we have in the budget for ’86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS in addition to what I’m sure other medical groups are doing. And we have $100 million in the budget this year; it’ll be 126 million next year. So, this is a top priority with us. Yes, there’s no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer.”

But the sad truth is also that there was never going to be an easy answer to HIV in the Reagan years. Throwing even more money at research in those days would not have helped much. Anthony Fauci’s NIH, goaded by heroes like Larry Kramer, was already pushing for focus and resources; FDA red tape was loosened considerably; and the painfully slow scientific process continued. The fact that we got revolutionary drugs in trials by the early 1990s was itself an heroic scientific achievement – arguably the most miraculous progress in a medical emergency since the polio vaccine. Should Reagan have done more? Yes. Were people like Bill Bennett and Gary Bauer responsible for delaying a real prevention response because only gays were dying? You bet. But was Reagan ultimately responsible for so many tragic, early deaths? No. HIV was. Viruses happen. It’s a blemish on his record, but not as profound as some, with understandable grief, want to make it out to be.

AT LONG LAST: Three vital new websites: “Queers against Terror”, “Conservative Punks,” and a whole blog devoted to debunking Noam Chomsky. Yay!

This image put a catch in my throat.

“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.