Ronald Reagan, the B-list actor turned A-list President, was a consistent conservative who transformed Goldwater's wisdom into a winning electoral landslide sixteen years later. His legacy is coming under attack lately.
Historians are revisiting his legacy of anti-Big Government rhetoric, free-market investitures, and military build-up against the Soviet Union. Libertarians like John Stossel charge that a cultural infiltration, not an arms race, helped bring down the USSR. Fiscal conservatives are striking out against the gargantuan debt devouring this country, which began to explode during Reagan's time in office. Critics are also reconsidering Reagan's foreign policy which invested the Mujahidin with arms so that American forces could beat back the Communists in Central America, then the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Crockumentary filmaker Michael Moore suggested in “Bowling for Columbine” that Osama bin Laden, trained as an operative by Reagan’s CIA, used his paramilitary skills to kill the three thousand people: 9-11. Of course, no one would argue with any logical or moral caliber that Ronald Reagan is directly, or even indirectly, responsible for the Islamic Radical attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. About his fiscal and domestic policies, we should applaud his effective rhetoric to permit pundits, politicians, and the people to discuss the unsightly and unconscionable growth of government.
Yet in light of the policies which directed this country from a crushing recession into extensive economic recovery in the 1980s, which repositioned this nation from a feckless policy of detente to confrontation unwavering against the Soviet Union, the United States today must craft different domestic and foreign policy for the current pressing issues, not simply mimic ape-like the moves of the 40th President, yet 2008 and 2012 Republican Presidential candidates did exactly that, like Modern Day Bedtime of Bonzo types!
About the Republican obsession with Reagan, erudite conservative columnist George Will (also an early cheer leader for the Reagan Revolution) ruefully remarked nearly twenty years later:
Reagan's popularity was largely the result of "his blaming government for problems that are inherent in democracy itself.
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Under Reagan, Americans could live off government and hate it at the same time. Americans blamed government for their dependence upon it.
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If the defining doctrine of the Republican Party is limited government, the party must move up from nostalgia and leaven its reverence for Reagan with respect for Madison. (Source, "Reagan's Conservatism", George Will quoting John Patrick Diggins)
From his training as an actor and his experience as General Electric spokesman/salesman, Reagan knew how to frame the argument against Big Government in such a way as to absolve the American people from their part in the gargantuan growth of the feds. The Tea Party movement, the current populist reaction swarming the country, wants to stop the spending, stop the growth of government, and stop the federal power grab of state authority and individual rights . . .not just talk about it.
Unless the voters face the current encroachment of state dependence in their lives and cut it off, certainly to their own immediate detriment, there will be no change in the way that government does business. Voters must tell themselves and their legislators, the same way that Ronald Reagan would scold Bonzo the chimpanzee under his tutelage in: Don’t touch and don’t take; don’t grow, and stop demanding.
Today, a committed class of politicians, because of the will of their like-minded states' rights constituents with red-blue libertarian leanings, are storming Congress, thwarting tax-and-spend wastrel legislation. They are unjustly bearing the brunt of strident mainstream media hostility as hostage takers and terrorists, only because their constituents back home demand that government start behaving itself and playing by the rules set down by Madison and Company during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, not merely the heated ant-government hot air of the Republican Conventions of 1964 and 1980.
If we are to despise the advancement of the state, which necessarily curbs our freedoms and limits our opportunities, then we the voters must acknowledge that the fault of Big Government is not in our stars, or in our politicians, but in ourselves, in that we for too long have expected the government to plug along providing for our imagined needs and wants now, and letting someone else pay later.
That "someone else" is us, that "later" is now, and no chiding the process of constitutional government or Reaganite resurrectionism will deter that. It's bedtime for Reagan, Republicans. Time to promote policies which cut taxes, curb spending, and limit government, not just lambaste it.
Arthur Christopher Schaper is a teacher-turned-writer on topics both timeless and timely; political, cultural, and eternal. A life-long Southern California resident, Arthur currently lives in Torrance.
