Reagan Revolution Plus 25

cbs ^ | 12-1-05 | dick meyer

[LouAvul]

As November turned to December in Washington 25 years ago, the officers and soldiers of the Reagan Revolution were taking their first orders from their president-elect as they prepared to occupy this enemy city.

Time flies. But to a large degree, the conservative conquest that began in November 1980 continues, as a president who resembles Ronald Reagan in so many ways – in both style and substance – struggles to govern in his second term.

Since 1980, no Democrat has won 50 percent of the popular vote in a presidential election.

Republicans seized the House of Representatives after six decades of nearly uninterrupted Democratic control. Republicans have run the Senate for 15 of the past 25 years. Those seem like adequate credentials for this the last quarter century to be dubbed a "conservative Republican era." Consider it dubbed.

On December 1, 1980, Washington was in what we might now call "shock and awe" over Reagan's triumph.

He'd just captured 91 percent of the electoral vote and had become the first Republican to oust an incumbent Democrat since Benjamin Harrison defeated Grover Cleveland in 1888. He also broke two decades of Democratic control of the Senate. And now the man who said government was the problem was forming a government.

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

That was when CBS realized they no longer had their power to influence america.

That entire article is reeling with the pain of the liberals.

[untenured]

It is interesting to go back and read the first Reagan inaugural address, and see what has changed and what has not. I get the excerpts below from http://www.reaganfoundation.org/reagan/speeches/first.asp:

Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.

Substantially achieved, although this is a weed that needs constant tending. The ongoing 25 years of boom only twice interrupted by mild recessions (despite what the media contemporaneously said) is impressive. The Reagan tax cuts, plus the (IMHO) underrated 1986 tax reform act, combined with the tech revolution, have led to a big increase in living standards that is the envy of the developed world.

We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.

Completely solved. The Fed obviously gets much of the credit for that, but Reagan too for being willing to take the heat of the 1980-2 recession.

You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we're not bound by that same limitation? We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding: We are going to begin to act, beginning today.

This IMHO misdiagnoses the problem, which is not deficits per se but federal spending. Here we can be somewhat disappointed, but that is not the fault of politicians so much as the electorate.

Well, this administration's objective will be a healthy, vigorous, growing economy that provides equal opportunities for all Americans, with no barriers born of bigotry or discrimination.

I think it's amazing, compared to other societies, how little bigotry and discrimination there is in the U.S., and how much less there is than in 1980. And this is despite, not because of, the affirmative-action agenda, which the GOP has been reluctant to confront and which has proven, under its new label of "diversity," almost impossible to combat. Such progress as has been made has come from people like Ward Connerly through his citizen initiatives, rather than through Congress.

It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.

Again, the federal goverment, measured by number of new regulations and federal spending to GDP, is not much smaller than in 1980 AFAIK, but that is because conservatives appear to have hit a political wall: the willingness of Americans to enact major trims in entitlement spending, farm subsidies, etc., is small. As for states' rights, the Rehnquist Court, clearly a product of the Reagan Revolution, has done more than I expected in this regard. As for the "to the people" part, well, that too will have to be won in the battleground of ideas before it can be won in the political arena.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem...

It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.

For me, this has been one of the greatest disappointments of the conservative takeover. I can't imagine any politician with national ambitions talking this way now, and that is too bad. Apparently things have to be terrible (and we forget how terrible they were in 1981) for Americans to seriously think about less government as the way to a better society. Again, that is a people problem and not a politician problem; we get the politicians we deserve.

There has also been almost no progress made on what later in his life became Reagan's primary goal of reining in abortion, although that is partly a function of the tendency of justices nowadays to stay on forever. I think the high-water mark of pro-life politics was Webster, when (IIRC) six justices agreed that Missouri could prohibit the involvement of public facilities and employees in abortion. Since then it has been downhill, I think, for the pro-life movement in politics if not necessarily in the public square.