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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Martin Anderson, John Judis, Michael Lind and others weigh in on the Hollywood presidency, the end of communism, Iran-Contra and the paradoxes of Reagan's career.
Jun 9, 2004 | Michael Lind, Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and the author of "Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics":
The presidency of Ronald Reagan was the Thermidor of the conservative movement that had crystallized around William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review and found its first political champion in Barry Goldwater. The "movement conservatives" wanted to repeal the New Deal and to replace the Cold War liberal policy of containing the Soviet Union with a more aggressive strategy of "roll-back." On assuming office, Reagan quietly abandoned both goals. Reagan did not risk his popularity by attempting to repeal the major New Deal and Great Society entitlements for the middle class, and he adopted a strategy of containment that represented a continuation of the Truman-Kennedy-Johnson strategy, to which Eisenhower, Nixon and Carter in different ways had offered alternatives.
In vain the conservatives cried, "Let Reagan be Reagan!" But the Ronald Reagan who voted four times for Franklin D. Roosevelt and described FDR as his favorite president was the same man who left Roosevelt's domestic legacy untouched and brought the Cold War to a bloodless end by following Truman's containment policy.
In politics, too, Reagan represented an end, not a beginning. His political base consisted of transplanted Midwesterners like him in California, and he rode to power on the backlash against the Civil Rights Revolution and the counterculture by the white working class and middle class, many of them, like him, former Roosevelt Democrats.
Today's right is profoundly different from Goldwater-Reagan conservatism, though they share a common tactic: Unable to repeal popular liberal programs directly, each has cut taxes to create deficits that might inspire major spending cuts in the future. In this respect, George W. Bush is the heir of Ronald Reagan.
Martin Andersen, President Reagan's domestic and economic policy advisor, 1981-1982:
I think the way to look at Reagan's legacy is to make believe you are a historian 100 years from now, and look back at what happened in the 1980s, when the political dust has settled -- unlike the last 48 hours, when everybody is being nice to everybody. I can't be sure, but I think there will be three things in Reagan's legacy.
First, historians will look at the sweep of history when communism started, spread, and see that it ended on Reagan's watch. He didn't do it himself, but he was the political leader of the free world, and deserves a certain amount of credit.
Second, the threat of an all-out nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States went away, an extraordinary thing. Again, he was president of the United States, when the threat ended, the Berlin Wall came down, and he and Gorbachev became buddies, and Gorbachev is coming to the funeral now.
And third, he was president during a period of prosperity that began in 1982. There are a lot of reasons the economy kicked up then; one was tax cuts, and another was the threat of all-out nuclear war fading away. And the early 1980s was the beginning of the computer revolution, which has been an exploding galaxy. These are the three main things.
Things like Iran-Contra might not even be a footnote. All the complaints, they might not be big enough to be part of the Reagan legacy.
