Jacob Heilbrunn: The Struggle in the Republican Party Over Reagan's Soul

Jacob Heilbrunn, in the LAT (Aug. 29, 2004):

[Jacob Heilbrunn is a Los Angeles Times editorial writer.]

The Republican convention this week is certain to look like a lovefest of party unity. Republican moderates such as Rudolph W. Giuliani will be trotted out alongside social conservatives such as Rick Santorum.
They'll stand solidly united behind President Bush. And they'll also stand united in their reverence for another Republican president: Ronald Reagan.

What won't be on display is the pitched battle underway behind the scenes over which strain of contemporary Republicanism can most legitimately claim the Reagan mantle.

Depending on whom you listen to, Reagan was either the original neoconservative, with a bold vision to forge democracies around the world, or a cautious pragmatist, leery of involvements abroad, a man who would never have embarked upon Bush's ambitious crusade against terrorism.

The first camp, neoconservatives who champion active American involvement in democratizing the Middle East, cites the Reagan legacy of confronting communism and promoting democracy in Eastern Europe. In their view, Reagan would have applauded U.S. engagement in Iraq.

Indeed, in the the latest issue of Commentary magazine, neoconservative grandee Norman Podhoretz issues a 37-page blast titled "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win." In it, he notes approvingly that, again and again, Bush has demonstrated that he is "a fiery follower of Ronald Reagan."

In another move by neocons to claim the Reagan mantle, Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl (along with Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, who is the closest thing Democrats have to offer the neocon movement) has recently revived the Committee on Present Danger, which spearheaded the anti-Soviet drive in the 1950s and again in the 1970s, to warn about what it sees as the peril posed by Islamic totalitarianism to the West.

No less than Nazism or communism, Kyl and Lieberman argued in a recent Washington Post article, the U.S. and its Western allies face a global challenge that must be confronted whenever and wherever possible: "Too many people are insufficiently aware of our enemy's evil worldwide designs, which include waging jihad against all Americans and reestablishing a totalitarian religious empire in the Middle East."

But to traditional conservatives, with their more isolationist worldview, the neocon appropriation of the Reagan legacy is appalling. This camp holds that Reagan was always reluctant to use force and that he was a pragmatist who shunned ideology.

In their new book "America Alone," Stefan Halper, who served in the administrations of presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and Jonathan Clarke, a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, argue that "the neoconservative assertion of a line of descent from Reagan's foreign policy is far-fetched."
They maintain that Reagan did not conduct an open-ended campaign for democracy, and that he sought to avoid the direct use of U.S. force in any conflict, from Central America to Afghanistan....