Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004
We learned of the death of Ronald Reagan yesterday in an unusual and touching way: at the seventh inning stretch at Yankee Stadium. The announcer asked everyone to stand up, and then told us of the passing of Reagan. A large photo of him was displayed at the billboard, and, after a moment of silence, a recording of Kate Smith singing "God Bless America" was played.
This is a sad day for America. While I wouldn't say that Reagan had the stature to be called a great man, I believe he had true greatness. And a mark of his greatness was, he saw things and possibilities that other people did not see, and he led the world toward those possibilities. Unlike his supposed intellectual superiors, who thought the best we could do was adjust to Soviet Communism in an ever darkening world, Reagan, to his everlasting credit, never accepted détente. Because of his grasp of truth and principle, he knew that Communism was evil and, for that reason, unsustainable. He saw that if the Communist system was resisted and challenged instead of coddled and compromised with, it would collapse from its own falsities. He saw this, and he made it happen. He discredited not only Communism, but statism itself, and so helped give the world a new birth of freedom--direct freedom from Communism for hundreds of millions of people, and, in the West, abandonment of the faith in the softer forms of socialism as well. He pursued his goals with staunch determination and unfailing good cheer, despite the hate and contempt of much of the world. He was thus an enduring example of true leadership as well as the most important political figure in the second half of the twentieth century. Perhaps he was a great man, after all.
In seeing that the ascendancy of leftism is not inevitable, in seeing that leftism, despite all appearances to the contrary, can be not only delayed or contained but turned back and defeated, Reagan offers the greatest model of hope to us today as we look at an America and a Western world that, under the control of a seemingly unstoppable liberalism, is rapidly committing moral and cultural suicide.
Reagan's greatest failure, and it was the flaw of his virtues, was his uncritical embrace of open immigration as the symbol and proof of America's worth. In upholding American freedom as contrasted with Soviet tyranny, he advanced the neoconservative project of changing America from a specific historical country into the incarnation and agent of a universal ideology--an ideology of radical freedom that now threatens the very existence of our culture, our nation, and our civilization. He was not a neoconservative per se, because, unlike the neoconservatives, he loved America as a nation and not just as a set of abstract principles. But he was a neoconservative in significant part, and we are paying the cost of that today. And so, as is so often the case in history, the good brings the bad, the bad brings the good.
I don't consider him a failure. He is a hero...
