Posted on 06/06/2004 5:49:10 PM PDT by Pokey78
Ronald Reagan was a great American president - perhaps the greatest of the post-war epoch - who certainly deserves a stone-carved niche in that Olympus of commanders-in-chief atop Mount Rushmore.
Yet despite his intense Atlanticism, Reagan never really received his due in this country, both for substantive and for stylistic reasons. He was often denigrated by much of the British Establishment as either extreme or stupid. He proved himself to be neither, most notably in his highly prescient belief that the rotten Soviet system would implode rather than lash out if the United States finally stood up to it.
Nor was he the kind of obviously "sophisticated" and laconic East Coast American, after the fashion of a John Kennedy, whom Britons tend to like. His "aw shucks", often sentimental, Middle American ways did not travel well. In that sense, he was the very opposite of his close ideological soul-mate, Margaret Thatcher, who was more loved and admired abroad than at home (especially, but not only, in America).
Of course, Reagan was a product of his time and place. His ideological and geographical journey from Rooseveltian New Deal liberalism to "Sunbelt" conservatism was one made by millions of his fellow Americans, helping to turn the Republicans into the country's majority party for the first time since the Great Depression.
He could never have made it to either Governor of California or the White House but for the fracturing of the old Democratic coalition under the pressures of the Vietnam War, the New Left counter-culture and the racial disorders of the 1960s. Notwithstanding the circumstantial chasm that divides Britain in the 21st century from the America of the Reagan epoch, his career contains profound lessons that all our politicians, and especially Conservative parliamentarians, ignore at their peril.
Reagan vaulted to political prominence after making a speech in support of Senator Barry Goldwater's disastrous defeat in the 1964 presidential election. Although, in philosophical terms, little divided the super-conservative Arizonan from the Californian, they were light years apart stylistically.
Whereas Goldwater frightened, Reagan reassured. Instead of the Goldwater scowl, there was the Reagan smile. Reagan thus played a key part in "humanising" the conservative movement, seen as a bunch of penny-pinching, po-faced, Midwestern skin-flints, and making them not merely a part of the American mainstream but the predominant strain in American political life.
Whereas Goldwater was spokesman for a sectional interest - the South and the West - Reagan's appeal, even before he became president, was national.
A key part of attaining this objective was Reagan's utter lack of bigotry against any segment of society. Nor did he display rancour against his opponents. This is what proved so frustrating about him for Democratic and Republican liberals: however much they deplored his policies, they could not lay a glove on him personally.
This quality proved especially significant in internal party terms. One of his earliest sound bites was the so-called "Eleventh Commandment" - "thou shalt not speak ill of other Republicans". This "inclusivity" sometimes irritated his core conservative supporters, but it meant that all segments of the party, and especially its critical centre ground, understood that he would not behave in a factional way once he obtained the top job.
Reagan had a great eye for the "rising class" in any given situation and thus went looking for new constituencies. For much of the post-war era, the Republicans had been stuck in a rut as the party of the affluent and of small-town Protestants. Reagan built upon the initial inroads made by Richard Nixon, and turned it into the party of evangelical southerners and white Roman Catholic ethnics - notably the Irish and Italians.
Thus, the presidential election of 1984 was the first such contest in which the GOP won the same support from church-going Catholics as it did from their Protestant counterparts. But this willingness to embrace new constituencies also implied a willingness to forgo support in old constituencies when the price of their support became electorally and ideologically too high.
Likewise, Reagan understood that traditionally Democratic trade union leaders no longer necessarily spoke for their membership - and that he could win the grassroots' support by making a direct appeal over their representatives' heads. Reagan's success in this department was often attributed to his skills as "the great communicator", which he certainly was.
He grasped that the attention span of the modern electorate was much shorter than it used to be and conveyed his message through personal, folksy anecdote rather than by adumbrating grand themes. And he had an uncanny capacity to alight upon instantaneously graspable topics that incarnated a bigger picture, such as turning the relatively minor issue of the Panama Canal Treaty into a symbol of national decline.
But while Reagan was a "great communicator", he always communicated substance. He was "issues-oriented" and kept his eye on the big picture. His vision was that America's greatest days were still to come; that government should get off the people's backs, in terms of high taxation and regulation; and that America, as "a shining city on a hill", had to remain strong if freedom were to be safeguarded at home and abroad. In contrast to Republican "realists" and "moderates", Reagan believed in the moral rightness of the American way of life and, no less important, the need to proclaim it loud and clear.
Above all, Reagan focused on what was possible. He carefully selected the ground upon which he fought with uncanny intuition as well as first-rate polling advice. He knew that in 1966 a Republican could not make a successful appeal to the middle ground by pledging to revamp social security as Americans knew it or to terminate funding for such obsolescent but still revered public works projects as the Tennessee Valley Authority.
It was not a question of compromising principles. He knew he had a lot of principles; the key issue for him was the order in which to advance them. The political strategy of the old actor was thus as perfectly timed as the delivery of his speeches. Look at him and learn: we shall not see his kind again.
Technically, FDR did not see the end of WW II. But Alger Hiss did. And Hiss was working out of the back pocket of Stalin the whole time. Even when Hiss was fingered (by Whittaker Chambers), and the files of the KGB were finally made available after the fall of the Soviet Union, there are those who cannot or will not admit Hiss was a spy and agent working for the interests of the Soviets and Stalin.
And FYI, during the 1930's, "Dutch" Reagan was very much a New Deal Democrat, and an admirer of FDR. Said so himself. Check his biography, "Where's the Rest of Me?" Reagan did undergo a transformation sometime after the Second World War, so he probably fits the definition of "neo-con".
I'm with you. From what I have always heard, there is no way to put another president up there. Not unless there is now some new technology that would help.
I guess I'm not following your point.
I know FDR died before the end of the war. He also yielded post war Europe to Stalin because of, well, that is still a bone of contention, but yield it he did.
FDR's whole administration was shot through with communists. Hiss was one, Harry Hopkins was another. The left of the 30's was as rabid then as it is now and FDR larded his cabinet and administration with scads of them and their machinations. The New Deal was the entry of Federalism on a scale that the founders feared and socialists loved. In a very linear way, the ghetto crackhead is the stepchild of FDR.
I also am aware of Reagan's flirtation with a mildly pink leftism. Most of us go through a similar phase before the head catches up with the heart.
To recap, FDR sucked.
President Reagan was as important an advocate for human freedom as any public figure in American history. Freedom not only for Americans (of course), but freedom for people EVERYwhere.
And not merely an advocate, his actions as president produced results, as those in Eastern Europe and the [former] Soviet Union will attest.
Yet, no one has broached the subject of a Reagan Memorial of Freedom.
Am I the first?
- John
I'd like to see a special denomination of $40 for our 40th president, a commemorative $40 bill printed in glorious red white and blue.
Borglum had a very hard time finding a spot for the second version of the Jefferson face after he found a flaw in the rock in the middle of the first version of the face (to the right of Washington). The first version was dynamited off the mountain once they decide to place Jefferson to Washington's left. I don't think there is enough granite to add anyone else.
A great book, by the way is "The Carving of Mount Rushmore" by Rex Alan Smith.
Until we build a monument of stone, this one of steel will do for me:
"Reagan did undergo a transformation sometime after the Second World War, so he probably fits the definition of "neo-con"."
I think he deserves a great monument of his own. 1000' tall, him alone. Name me one other president that won a World War (if you consider the Cold War as WW III as I do.) without firering a shot.</p>
That is beautiful Smart A!!
25+ years ago one of my high school shop teachers screened an early 70s era film of the large scale construction projects that took place during the Depression. The title, I believe, was They Said It Couldn't Be Done, or something similar. Rushmore was featured along with the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam. It was a fascinating mix of vintage film footage and contemporary interviews with veteran workers. The 16mm version we saw even had the original commercials intact - Bell Telephone apparently sponsored it on television, and between segments there would be quick profiles of different areas of America. "Area code 202 - our nation's capital." I'd love to see it again.
You nailed that.
Reagan's two greatest achievements were in defeating the communism FDR appeased and reversing the tide of FDR's socialism.
FDR did a lot of damage for a guy so many seem to admire.
I'd love to have a Reagan dollar coin, but I'd most certainly save them. Don't you think most people would?
I'd certainly buy a Reagan proof direct from the mint each year. Here's hoping the US Mint issues a Reagan commemorative gold piece, too. I have the First Flight Centennial coin and it's a beauty:
PING
Of course he is.
He should have been put on the mount
a long while ago.
You know, that's not a bad idea at all. Perhaps a petition should start circulating about this.
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