[It is the role of conservatism to] stand athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is
    inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who do.
        -William F. Buckley, Jr., (National Review, 1955, First Issue)

Ronald Reagan recently turned 90 (2/06/01) and the outpouring of praise from nearly every pundit and politician was downright stunning, even coming, as it did, in the midst of Bill Clinton's typically disgraceful departure from a sordid presidency.  Granted, the encomiums from even his ideological enemies must have been attributable in part to just Reagan's personal character, which benefits so greatly by comparison to Bill Clinton's, but not entirely.  Some of the praise of his opponents, and most of the hosannas from his supporters, were for the ideas that Reagan represented, and which still dominate our politics today.

To see how colossal a figure Reagan remains on the political landscape, we need only look at what George W. Bush is proposing to do as president in the first years of the 21st Century :  cut taxes, build Star Wars, balance the budget, privatize Social Security and education, limit abortion, allow religious groups to deliver social services, and restore dignity to the Oval Office.  Thirty six years after his first major national speech (for Goldwater in 1964), and twenty four years after his first all out bid for the presidency (against President Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican primaries), the national dialogue today is squarely centered on the ideas that Ronald Reagan introduced or advocated.  The only major elements that are missing are winning the Cold War, which he already won for us, and Welfare reform, which was enacted by the GOP class of '94 (his ideological children).  And what of the Party that he led ?  Ronald Reagan, it must be remembered, ran in the aftermath of Watergate, when the badly battered Republicans were a semi-permanent minority in Congress and on the state level.  Now the party controls both houses of Congress, and has for four consecutive elections, completely dominates the governorships and has achieved parity with Democrats in controlling state legislatures.  Regardless of what you think of him personally, or of his politics, the United States today is very much Ronald Reagan's America, and to a remarkable degree, we live in a world that he, nearly alone, envisioned.  The question for historians is why ?

In 1997, when the likelihood that Reagan would ever be granted this type of positive assessment was still very much in doubt, Dinesh D'Souza--in a book that is too breezy to be taken seriously as a biography or a presidential history, but too valuable as a corrective to misconceptions about its subject to be easily dismissed--set out to make the case for Reagan's greatness.  The book suffers from some serious problems of overreaching--like arguing that running up huge deficits was a savvy way of forcing fiscal discipline on a reluctant Congress--which seem to be the result of being too much on the defensive, but it is intermittently insightful, and it gets the big point--why Reagan mattered--right.

Considering the number of personal and political squabbles that D'Souza ends up taking Reagan's side on, it's surprising that he doesn't do a better job of defending him on the issues where he was clearly right.  For instance, though D'Souza does not stress the point enough, he notes that the much lamented Reagan era deficits were fairly typical for a nation in the midst of war.  It's surprising that the author drops this point so quickly because it really ties into the broader case that can be made for Reagan.  Taking office at a time when practically the entire intellectual/political class had decided that the USSR was a permanent rival, with which we would have to learn to co-exist, Ronald Reagan declared it instead to be the "focus of evil in the modern world" (a paraphrase which D'Souza reveals was taken from Whittaker Chamber's great memoir, Witness), and announced that we would leave them on the ash heap of history.  One of the presumable reasons that there has been some initial resistance to giving Reagan credit for things like victory in the Cold War is that in retrospect it all seems so inevitable.  And indeed, after the Fall we all realized just how weak the Soviet Union really was, but there was only one significant national figure who intuited that this was the case and who was willing to embark on the type of massive arms race that fully exposed those weaknesses.

The most revealing vignette in the book concerns an editorial board meeting that then candidate Reagan had with the Washington Post in June, 1980.  Journalist and three time Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, who had set up the meeting, recalled that the editors expressed dismay at the proposed build up, but Reagan assured them : "The Soviets can't compete with us."  Likewise, D'Souza relates in the early 80's Richard Nixon wrote to Reagan several times warning him that the USSR was more formidable than he realized and that détente was the only reasonable way to proceed, but that even Nixon, whose entire reputation rested by then on his supposed foreign policy acumen, acknowledged that he had been wrong and Reagan right.  It's inexplicable then that D'Souza does not hammer this point home : Reagan took the Cold War seriously, set out to win it, and did so.  The deficits were a small price to pay and were significantly smaller than those incurred during similar times of crisis--The Revolution, Civil War and WWII.  Have you ever read a negative word about the fiscal shortcomings of Washington, Lincoln, or FDR ?  Of course not, their deficits pale by comparison to the wars they won, and so does the Reagan deficit when we consider that it paid for freeing half of Europe from communism.

D'Souza also drops the ball when it comes to the single most underestimated action of Reagan's presidency on the economic side : firing the air traffic controllers.  I yield to no one in my faith in supply side economics; it is simply better to allow citizens to decide how to spend their money than to allow government to decide.  But it is difficult, even for us true believers, to explain the victory over inflation as a supply side phenomenon.   On the other hand, breaking the spiral of wages and prices, which by the late 70's seemed to destined to keep climbing ever higher, can be attributed at least in part to the relative hostility which Ronald Reagan displayed toward the institutional Labor movement, of which he had been a part as head of the Screen Actors Guild.  Unions have never recovered from the blow that Reagan struck when he fired the PATCO workers, which contributed immeasurably to the change in climate which made possible the corporate downsizing of the late 80's and early 90's, and the resulting efficiencies and productivity increases in the US economy.

Likewise, D'Souza broaches, but does not emphasize Reagan's willingness to allow Fed Chairman Paul Volcker to wring inflation out of the economy by driving interest rates to unheard of heights.  Throughout the devastating recession that resulted, Reagan continued to preach a gospel of optimism and to assure people that better days were ahead.  To understand how important Reagan's handling of this issue was you need only imagine for a moment how Bill Clinton would have behaved if a Fed Chairman from the other party had done something similar on his watch.  Yeah, not a pretty mental picture is it ?  One filled with blame casting, name calling, and self pity ?  The political courage that he displayed in accepting the need for Volcker's tightening, the confidence he showed that the actions would work, and the willingness to stay the course even when the going got tough, are themselves important parts of the Reagan legacy.

One of the things though that stands out about the group of accomplishments for which Reagan deserves unique credit is how amorphous they are in and of themselves : they are much more about changes in attitude and prevailing opinion than about concrete measures and laws passed.  This is what D'Souza misses somewhat in his desire to answer every charge against Reagan and to extol his every action.  He concentrates on policy prescriptions and legislative actions to a degree which Reagan himself would have found absurd ("Like Lincoln, Reagan had an unerring capacity to separate the things that mattered from the things that were peripheral.")  Reagan well understood that he could have little effect on the enormous and self-sustaining Federal bureaucracy and on the pork addicted Congress.  Reagan's real effect was in the realm of ideas.  This strikes commentators as especially odd because he was so manifestly not an intellectual.  But this was the source of his greatness.  Where the intellectual believes that, having thought deeply about many things, he has all the answers, Reagan understood the one big idea around which the American experiment is constructed : freedom.

If people would only learn to take this idea as seriously as Reagan took it they might understand him better.  He knew that the Soviet Union was evil because it denied its citizens freedom and sought to take away the freedom of neighbors.  He knew that the Great Society in particular and big government generally were a disaster because they took away our freedoms.  These twin realizations were expressed in one remarkably simple but quintessentially American mantra, which characterized his every public utterance for almost forty years : freedom, freedom, freedom.  In her review of this book for the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion criticizes Reagan for being a president who led by speech making.  She seems not to realize how fundamental Ronald Reagan's words were in changing the world.  This case has been made with great eloquence by two very different men, Andrew Sullivan, the gay English editor of The New Republic and Natan Sharansky, the dissident Jewish writer from the Soviet Union.  Both have them have written of how important it was to them when Reagan called the Soviet Union an Evil Empire.  This idea, so obvious now, seemed revolutionary when Reagan conveyed it, so inured had the West become to flagellating itself.  Younger folk can have no idea how inflammatory these words were considered at the time, how soundly he was rebuked by the nattering class for saying them aloud.  But they resounded in the hearts of most, touching upon truths that we mere common people had clung to, despite the conspicuous crisis of faith that made them ring hollow in the ears of the opinion makers.  And because they did resonate, because they were true, Reagan displaced the received wisdom of the Washington establishment and restored belief in our essential goodness and the faith that the West would eventually prevail.

On the domestic side, we well remember that it was Bill Clinton who declared that : "the era of big government is over," but he was just reading the eulogy.  Ronald Reagan had argued the case for the prosecution.  The Bush and Clinton budget deals essentially saw the previously unwilling Democrats make it a unanimous jury for conviction.  And the GOP landslide of 1994 brought in the executioners.  It is futile for Reagan's defenders, like D'Souza, to argue that Reagan himself reduced the size of government; he did not.  Instead he created the political climate which made such reductions inevitable and forced a classic big spending liberal like Bill Clinton to at least pay lip service to the idea of reducing government.

I suspect that Dinesh D'Souza would write a very different book if he returned to his topic today, and it would be a better book.  In this one he doth protest too much on issues where the case for Reagan is fairly weak (especially on matters like Reagan's dealings with family and staff) and it comes across as either a sign of uncertainty, that what he's saying is so, or as partisan unwillingness to yield an inch.  We Reaganauts--for I am one; I was eighteen in 1980 and I believed, and still do--would do ourselves and the former president a service by not trying to contest every picayune point that his opponents bring up; they are right in a lot of their criticisms.  Let them have the small points, Reagan wins the big ones and the game.  He came to office promising to revive the American spirit, restore the creative capacity of the American economy, reduce the influence of government on peoples lives, and topple the Soviet Union.  Encourage his critics to look at the world around us and determine for themselves whether he succeeded--not whether he was a good father or an adept administrator, not whether each of his actions succeeded or whether he deserves credit for everything that's happened in the past twenty years--just whether the world today looks like the world he described in his speeches, and which few others could envision, when he ran for office.  Of course it does, and for that, if for nothing else, he deserves a significant amount of credit.

Writing today, D'Souza could glide past the details of political minutiae and focus on the big picture, which he amply, though too often tangentially, demonstrates that he understands.    At one point, he offers a succinct assessment of Reagan that's as good as any you'll find :

    The main reason Reagan faced so many obstacles and generated so much controversy in his pursuit of
    public office was this : he was running against the twentieth century.  This is the real source of all
    the incredulity and scorn he provoked and the true message of the speech that he delivered on
    Goldwater's behalf.  The political history of the twentieth century can be summed up by the growth
    of the power of central government.  Communism and fascism were its two extreme versions, but
    throughout the industrialized world, the century has seen the growth and expansion of welfare states,
    reflecting the assumption that an engaged and powerful government is essential to promoting
    freedom, justice, and the general welfare.

    Reagan disagreed with the assumption.  His view was that a large, central government is an obstacle
    to freedom, a poor instrument to secure justice, and harmful to the common good.  For him, the
    lesson of the modern era is the danger of placing too much power in the hands of the coercive state.
    Reagan's political life was defined by opposition to collectivism.  Thus, for all the diverse issues on
    which he took positions over the years, there was a fundamental unity to his thought.  He opposed
    the concentration of power in Washington, DC, as counterproductive and inimical to freedom.  He
    believed that the more the government does for us, the less we are able to do for ourselves.  He
    opposed communism because he saw it as the logical conclusion of centralized state control, to the
    point where economic, religious, and civil liberties are completely extinguished.

But this passage, which should be the main point of the book and should be presented in the introduction, returned to in every chapter, and reiterated in the conclusion, is characteristically tucked away inside of Chapter Three.

The strengths of the book then, and they are considerable, lie in D'Souza's generous reassessment of the Reagan legacy, particularly coming, as it did, before the current lovefest with Reagan began.  The weakness, and it too is significant, lies in his failure to adopt the Reagan model in writing the book.  If D'Souza had structured the book around the larger theme of Reagan's emphasis on freedom, and then stooped to answer specific criticisms only in this context, it would have helped greatly, would have given it a unity that it sadly lacks.   The book is instead a defense of Ronald Reagan as Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton might have written it, absorbed by tiny matters to the detriment of great ones.  Ronald Reagan deserves, and hopefully will one day get, a biographer who is himself Reaganesque, who understands that it was the restoration of freedom that mattered, and that everything else--Iran Contra, tax hikes, budget deficits, etc.--important as each controversy may have appeared for a time, was just background noise.  But that book, unfortunately, remains to be written.

(Reviewed:18-Feb-01)

Grade: (B-) Orrin C. Judd

Tweet