Reagan's Pull on the U.S. Election

 
 
One day a couple of years ago, visiting in Berkeley, I discussed the ranking of American presidents with my host, an esteemed senior left wing figure in my field.  Some publication or other had been soliciting professional historians' rankings of the presidents, and we got into a heated argument about where to place Ronald Reagan.  We both detested him and his legacy--where we disagreed was on his importance and therefore his ranking.
 
My friend put him down on the bottom with Warren G. Harding and Ulysses S. Grant--as a man who had made a shambles of his office and harmed the nation with his incompetence.
 
While I cannot recall exactly where I ranked him in comparison to others--clearly below Lincoln, FDR, Washington, Jefferson, Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, but not that much further down the generally undistinguished list--I do remember arguing that Reagan's presidency was a watershed in American politics, one of the key turning points in American political history.
 
When he was in office, I tried very hard to overcome my gag impulse and to listen closely to his speeches--the one area in which he was truly expert. With simple cadences and ineffable optimism, Reagan managed to capture the great American hunger for simple solutions to complex questions, for a reassertion that the United States is a shining City on a Hill, destined for glory.  He launched an all out attack on big labour and big government--a cover for building a huge military while tearing down social programs and redistributing money to the rich through a fundamental shift in the tax regime. And he also went on an anti-Communist crusade.
 
The Great Deregulator
 
Now let me be clear about the man and the wider movement.  Reagan was a very limited person intellectually, with little grasp of economics or foreign policy.  But he inspired and sponsored a wider political movement by operatives who were acutely attuned to political machinations.  Reagan's legacy is Reaganism.  While the man in himself was limited, the movement has swept over American politics. And over this great shift he presided quite happily.
 
While it is not true that Reaganism destroyed the USSR through embarking on a huge arms race they could not match--the USSR collapsing instead for reasons of massive internal corruption, with the coup de grace supplied by an innocently misguided reformer, Mikiel Gorbechev--Reagan got the lion's share of the credit. In retrospect, the Cold War seems almost cheering--a big, but second rate external enemy not given to irrational terrorist campaigns, but at the time, the United States seemed to many to be rising to world preeminence, which Americans took as a great thing.
 
Domestically, Reaganism attacked the fundamental premises of a mixed economy and a welfare state.  He began his term my destroying the air traffic controller's union and by instigating a huge reduction on the income tax of the wealthy. And he kept up a steady barrage on the notion that government was vital to a modern economy, preaching instead of the infinite energy of capital, properly unleashed.  Thus he deregulated as much of the economy as he could, which led to the savings and loan scandal--wolves knowing how to devour lambs when the hunters are disarmed. Phone service has improved via the free market; airlines have disintegrated.
 
But a cost-benefit analysis of the actual results of Reaganism is not the point.  Rather, Reaganism became the dominant political configuration: his brand of conservatism still defines the American political mainstream.
 
Kerry can't defy Reaganism and win
 
One simple proof of this argument is that in order to compete for where most American voters have traveled, the Democratic opposition has moved smartly to the right.  Liberals like Walter Mondale and Howard Dean can no longer win Democratic nominations.  Bill Clinton ran and governed not from the left but from the new centre, which is really quite far to the right in comparison to Canadian or European centers of balance.  Indeed Clinton proved the victory of Reaganism by moving onto and co-opting Republican ground. 
 
And now John Kerry is moving rightward to capture those middle-ground-on-the-right voters. He will not make an antiwar, anti-imperialist contest out of the November election, but will argue that he can be tougher and more effective in extending American interests abroad.  And except for some talk about health care and taxes for the very, very rich, he will not offer to reverse Reaganism.
 
Do I wish this were so?  No.  Did I admire Reagan? No.  Do I think he changed American politics for the long haul and was thus important for his ism rather than himself?  Yes.
 
Roosevelt a political detour?
 
The post-Reagan Reaganites can over-reach themselves.  Newt Gingrich was one clear example.  Bill Clinton played him like a top, knocking over his naked power ambitions, which The Newt was unable to package in a warm, reassuring Reagan manner.  Similarly George Bush, Jr. is no Reagan.  He is a poor communicator, cut off from the voters, surrounded by an arrogant and snarling crew of adventurers who have taken American imperialism into an unacceptably expensive place while too clearly undercutting middle-class security.  The right can go too far.  But the corrective is also on the right, if less so, and in less threatening ways.  More like the original Ronald Reagan.
 
Franklin Roosevelt was the previous great political figure, a man whose New Deal defined welfareism and a mixed economy for the period 1933-1965 (though I would argue that WW II had more to do with redistribution downwards and the creation of a big state). Lyndon Johnson was the last of the New Dealers, but Richard Nixon, for all his conservative talk did not tear down the Roosevelt apparatus,
 
Beginning in 1980, Reaganism was the fundamentally new movement that defines our era.
 
Perhaps the Rooseveltian era was the aberration in American political history.  For many decades before 1933, the state has been controlled and limited in its impact by a rich and powerful elite, who serve themselves while talking populist from time to time.  In that sense Reaganism was restorationism-- powerful capitalist economy and a weak state, in a nation so naturally wealthy that sloppy wildfire development worked in acceptable ways for the majority of people, each of whom expected to rise on a naturally heightening tide of GNP.  It's always an illusion for most people, but packaged attractively it seems infinitely attractive. And Ronald Reagan knew with an actor's intuition how to sell the Great Dream.
 

Historian Michael Fellman, author of several books on the Civil War, including The Making of Robert E. Lee, is director of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Simon Fraser University. He writes an occasional column on the unfolding U.S. presidential election for The Tyee.