BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Tuesday, June 08, 2004
THE REAL RONALD REAGAN. Two
good against-the-grain pieces for your
consideration. The first, in Salon, by Barry Goldwater
biographer Rick Perlstein, is a useful reminder that Reagan was often
unpopular during his long political career, and that he was even the
object of a substantial recall effort when he was governor of
California.
Though Perlstein gives Reagan
credit for being more flexible and pragmatic than George W. Bush, he
warns against embracing the gauzy image that has increasingly
surrounded him during his long decline. Perlstein writes:
It is a quirk of American
culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the
right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then
chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as
sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater
pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the
1950s. When Reagan was president, liberals spoke fondly of sweet
old Goldwater.
Nowadays, as we grapple with the
malevolence of President Bush, it's Reagan we remember as the
sensible one. At the risk of speaking ill of the dead, let memory
at least acknowledge that there was much about Reagan that was not
so sensible.
The second, by Joshua Green,
appeared in the Washington Monthly in January 2003, but it
seems especially pertinent now. Green's take on Reagan is somewhat
different from Perlstein's: according to Green (now at the
Atlantic Monthly), Reagan really was something of a
closet moderate, especially after the bellicose first two years of
his presidency. Here's the heart
of Green's argument:
Reagan is, to be sure, one
of the most conservative presidents in U.S. history and will
certainly be remembered as such. His record on the environment,
defense, and economic policy is very much in line with its
portrayal. But he entered office as an ideologue who promised a
conservative revolution, vowing to slash the size of government,
radically scale back entitlements, and deploy the powers of the
presidency in pursuit of socially and culturally conservative
goals. That he essentially failed in this mission hasn't stopped
partisan biographers from pretending otherwise. (Noonan writes of
his 1980 campaign pledges: "Done, done, done, done, done, done,
and done. Every bit of it.")
A sober review of Reagan's
presidency doesn't yield the seamlessly conservative record being
peddled today. Federal government expanded on his watch. The
conservative desire to outlaw abortion was never seriously
pursued. Reagan broke with the hardliners in his administration
and compromised with the Soviets on arms control. His assault on
entitlements never materialized; instead he saved Social Security
in 1983. And he repeatedly ignored the fundamental conservative
dogma that taxes should never be raised.
Trouble is, Green continues,
Reagan's hagiographers on the right have airbrushed out the
non-conservative parts of his record in order to turn him into a
right-wing icon - and a weapon to use against the rest of us. He
writes: "As with other conservative media efforts - Rush Limbaugh,
Fox News Channel, The Washington Times - the purpose of the
Reagan legacy project is not to deliver accuracy, but enhance
political leverage."
posted at 11:33 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
