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.
A Gary Larson scenario, but alas, the subjects are human. I am still hoping for a return. How long must we suffer?
No, I don't. FDR has a special place in Hell with Uncle Joe, where he can explain why, altho he knew about the SS trains rolling to Poland, never bothered to bomb them or the tracks.
I loved Gary Larson and Bill Watterson. Both are sorely missed, and it doesn't look as if they ever intend to return. At least they left at the top of their game. It's always a pity to think "You know, so-and-so should have retired years ago. I remember when he used to be funny."
But Clinton did, despite a complete absence of legislative achievement (substantive), and despite his oral servicings by am ugly fat chick in the Oval Office (stylistic).
Whether or not it would ruin the artistic integrity of the original is a different issue.
I like that idea Scott.
Thanks for the ping Mo1. A Very good read.
There existed the Communist Party back then too.
I think you are on to something.
The Reagan Monument at the Capitol.
A tribute to his resolve, his skills as a communicator, his personal relationship with God.
A celebration of his triumph over communism, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, and the freedom of tens of millions of central Europeans.
It would be something.
I'd support that!
(In all seriousness, your points are well-made, and I tend to agree.)
DITTO!!
'The presidents were selected on the basis of what each symbolized. George Washington represents the struggle for independence, Thomas Jefferson the idea of government by the people. Abraham Lincoln for his ideas on equality and the permanent union of the states, and Theodore Roosevelt for the 20th century role of the United States in world affairs. '< p>I found this in a search. I thought that I had been told by a guide there that each President was there for what they added to the country. Washington for the founding of the country, Jefferson for the Louisiana Purchase, Lincoln for maintaining the country, and Teddy for the Panama Canal.
You big government people are amusing.
Sadly they can not put anymore faces on Mt. Rushmore, there is not anymore suitable rock on the mountain for a scupture of this size.
Yes. The New Deal does make us conservatives a bit bitter.
On the other hand, I understand there is not enough stable rock remaining. I hope that's not true.
[giggle]
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