The arrival of Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday will be
accompanied by a chorus of fond reminiscences and misty-eyed
appreciations.
In fact, the tributes are already underway. And, they are not
just coming from Dutch’s ideological descendants. President Barack
Obama, writing in USA Today, gushed about the 40th
president’s fondness for change and compromise.
There was a time when a love letter from a liberal leader to
Reagan would be surprising. No longer. Death, the hindsight of
history, a sympathetic public, and a handful of dedicated
historians and opportunistic politicians have turned this once
divisive and controversial leader into a bipartisan reminder of our
better angels.
This may cause Reaganites to rejoice, but as Gipper-appreciation
goes mainstream there is a real risk that his accomplishments,
beliefs, and importance will be obscured. And, perhaps worse,
appropriated.
The growing consensus on Reagan’s greatness, the direct result
of the fall of the Soviet Union and the lifting of the national
funk brought on by the painful sequence of Vietnam, Watergate, and
Jimmy Carter, is warranted.
And his apotheosis, seen in the proliferation of Ronald Reagan
fields, streets, boulevards, turnpikes, peace gardens, bridges, and
even a bust in a McDonald’s in Alabama, should be welcomed.
Formerly an amiable dunce, he has become a transcendent
visionary lauded by Republicans and Democrats alike.
It’s a not a singular transformation.
Abraham Lincoln, once the “Ape Baboon of the Prairie,” is now
the Great Emancipator; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, so-called traitor
to his class, is credited with carrying us through the Great
Depression; Harry Truman, the former “senator from Pendergast,” is
now every would-be president’s beau ideal of a statesman.
The problem with this type of posthumous approbation is that it
inevitably shears the prickly partisan edges from the object of
adoration and turns them into an all-purpose folk hero, open to
subjective interpretations.
Obama for example, constantly searching for a grand political
figure to define himself by, seems to have set his sights on
Reagan. A lengthy feature in Time laid out the President’s
Reaganesque blueprint for the remainder of his term — which of
course immodestly replaces the immodest Lincolnesque, and then
Rooseveltian ambitions he has already digressed through — while
pointing out the (tenuous) similarities between the two men.
Obama’s choice of Reagan as a role model is nothing new. During
the 2008 campaign he professed that it was Reagan, rather then Bill
Clinton, who matched his transformative vision. Around this time,
other Democrats were retrenching as well.
John Kerry and Al Gore positioned Reagan as a foil to the
detested George W. Bush by praising his diplomacy and
newly-discovered environmental record.Rahm Emanuel confessed to
Politico “I never thought I’d say this, but I long for the
pragmatism of Ronald Reagan.” Harry Reid told the same publication
“[Reagan’s] kind of leadership is missing today. That’s what the
American people want back.”
This new, warm and cuddly (and generally non-idelogical) Reagan
is not just the exclusive property of politicians. In Ronald
Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, the late
historian John Patrick Diggins’s postulated that Reagan was not
even a conservative. According to Diggins, “Far from being a
conservative, Reagan was the great liberating spirit of modern
American history.… Reagan’s relation to liberalism may illuminate
modern America more than his relation to conservatism…”
In these new narratives, Reagan is a hero and a great president,
but the emphasis is on his pragmatism, diplomacy, and generally
unconservative behavior. It’s increasingly difficult to find the
conservative who generated histrionic levels of disgust from
Democrats.
Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “A few years from now, I believe,
Reaganism will seem a weird and improbable memory, a strange
interlude of national hallucination, rather as the McCarthyism of
the early 1950s and the youth rebellion of the late 1960s appear to
us today.”
That was not a voice in the wilderness. It spoke for the
majority on the left. And it was wrong.
Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and told the Soviets to
tear down the Berlin Wall. It no longer stands. He predicted
communism would end up on the ash heap of history. Thanks to his
efforts, it did. And, in Edmund Morris’s words, ever the old
lifeguard, he rescued America from “a time of despair and… ‘carried
her breastward out of peril.’”
Naturally Reagan, like any successful president, was not
allergic to compromise in pursuit of his objectives. And he was a
far more complicated figure than many of his admirers admit. But
his triumphs were caused by his conservatism, not in spite of it.
And they were always underpinned by his belief in the American
people’s ability to govern themselves, the danger inherent in
Washington’s attempts to remedy all of society’s ills, and of
course, his country’s predestined greatness.
Despite the recent protestations otherwise, these things remain
anathema to Reagan’s new-found fans.
Obama, for example, may think he sees Reagan’s reflection in the
mirror, but the 40th president rose to power on a promise to
reverse the course of a government still running on the fumes of
the New Deal and Great Society. The 44th, however, has staked his
presidency on the endless paternalistic possibilities of an active
and expanded federal government.
This last point is especially relevant as Americans pause to
observe the coming centennial. The country is again at an
ideological fork in the road. Reagan would recognize the choice at
hand, and choose the road to the right.
Republicans need not always search for the next Reagan or insist
that all future standard bearers be made in his image. But they
should continue to remind themselves and the rest of the country
that his legacy, rather than monument to bipartisan pragmatism, is
a testament to the righteousness of American conservatism.
