Duncan Currie: Whose Reagan Is It, Anyway?
[Duncan Currie is managing editor of The American. Prior to joining the magazine in September 2007, he spent more than three years writing for The Weekly Standard. He has been a “Publius” fellow at the Claremont Institute and a Phillips Foundation journalism fellow. His essays have been featured in a number of publications, including The National Review. (Courtesy, The Journal of American Enterprise Institute).]
Ramesh has a smart piece in the latest NR on the right and wrong lessons to draw from Ronald Reagan. “When invoking Reagan,” he writes, “conservatives are prone to two characteristic vices: hero-worship and nostalgia. To hear some conservatives talk, you would forget that Reagan was a human being who made mistakes, including in office. You would certainly forget that movement conservatives were frequently exasperated with Reagan’s administration.”
Indeed, during Reagan’s final years in the White House, many conservatives became disillusioned with his embrace of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his pursuit of arms control. In January 1988, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article documenting this angst (titled “The Right Against Reagan”). “The president doesn’t need to discard the people who brought him to the dance,” grumbled North Carolina senator Jesse Helms. Conservative activist Howard Phillips labeled Reagan “a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.”
Shortly before the Gipper left office, columnist George Will lamented that he had “accelerated the moral disarmament of the West — actual disarmament will follow — by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.” Will also said that “in the Reagan years there has been what [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan calls a hemorrhaging of reality regarding the fiscal requirements for strength and prosperity. This is a consequence of the narcotic of cheerfulness.”
In recent years, both conservatives and liberals have used the 40th president as a cudgel to bash George W. Bush. Yet they have often misrepresented Reagan’s actual record. (Fred Barnes addressed this in a 2006 Wall Street Journal op-ed.)
The Reagan record includes lowering the top marginal income tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent; giving Fed chief Paul Volcker the political support he needed to squeeze the money supply and curb inflation; promoting free markets and limited government; spearheading trade liberalization; making a brief, failed effort to reduce Social Security benefits; putting a slew of judicial conservatives on the federal bench; introducing the pro-life Mexico City Policy on abortion; resisting calls for a nuclear freeze; deploying cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe; launching the Strategic Defense Initiative; invading Grenada; aiding anti-Communist rebels in the Third World; bombing Libya; and talking tough on the Soviet Union.
But it also includes raising various taxes; expanding Social Security; endorsing certain protectionist measures, such as tariffs and quotas on Japanese imports; approving an amnesty for illegal immigrants; appointing two of the three Supreme Court justices who would later author the 1992 Casey decision, which reaffirmed Roe v. Wade; withdrawing U.S. military forces from Beirut after 241 American servicemen were killed in a terrorist attack; trading arms for hostages in the Iran-Contra affair; favoring the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons, a desire he expressed at the Reykjavik summit with Gorbachev in 1986; signing a landmark arms-reduction pact (the INF Treaty) with the Soviet boss in 1987; and leaving behind a steep budget deficit....
Read entire article at National Review Online
Ramesh has a smart piece in the latest NR on the right and wrong lessons to draw from Ronald Reagan. “When invoking Reagan,” he writes, “conservatives are prone to two characteristic vices: hero-worship and nostalgia. To hear some conservatives talk, you would forget that Reagan was a human being who made mistakes, including in office. You would certainly forget that movement conservatives were frequently exasperated with Reagan’s administration.”
Indeed, during Reagan’s final years in the White House, many conservatives became disillusioned with his embrace of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his pursuit of arms control. In January 1988, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article documenting this angst (titled “The Right Against Reagan”). “The president doesn’t need to discard the people who brought him to the dance,” grumbled North Carolina senator Jesse Helms. Conservative activist Howard Phillips labeled Reagan “a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.”
Shortly before the Gipper left office, columnist George Will lamented that he had “accelerated the moral disarmament of the West — actual disarmament will follow — by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.” Will also said that “in the Reagan years there has been what [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan calls a hemorrhaging of reality regarding the fiscal requirements for strength and prosperity. This is a consequence of the narcotic of cheerfulness.”
In recent years, both conservatives and liberals have used the 40th president as a cudgel to bash George W. Bush. Yet they have often misrepresented Reagan’s actual record. (Fred Barnes addressed this in a 2006 Wall Street Journal op-ed.)
The Reagan record includes lowering the top marginal income tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent; giving Fed chief Paul Volcker the political support he needed to squeeze the money supply and curb inflation; promoting free markets and limited government; spearheading trade liberalization; making a brief, failed effort to reduce Social Security benefits; putting a slew of judicial conservatives on the federal bench; introducing the pro-life Mexico City Policy on abortion; resisting calls for a nuclear freeze; deploying cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe; launching the Strategic Defense Initiative; invading Grenada; aiding anti-Communist rebels in the Third World; bombing Libya; and talking tough on the Soviet Union.
But it also includes raising various taxes; expanding Social Security; endorsing certain protectionist measures, such as tariffs and quotas on Japanese imports; approving an amnesty for illegal immigrants; appointing two of the three Supreme Court justices who would later author the 1992 Casey decision, which reaffirmed Roe v. Wade; withdrawing U.S. military forces from Beirut after 241 American servicemen were killed in a terrorist attack; trading arms for hostages in the Iran-Contra affair; favoring the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons, a desire he expressed at the Reykjavik summit with Gorbachev in 1986; signing a landmark arms-reduction pact (the INF Treaty) with the Soviet boss in 1987; and leaving behind a steep budget deficit....