Ronald Reagan's Pragmatic Streak
This Column from The New Republic was written by Jonathan Chait.
Conservatives have been elegizing Ronald Reagan for well over a decade, and his death this week, predictably, occasioned a climactic frenzy of adulation. The exaltations have grown so familiar by now that they have turned into a kind of mental reflex: It is as obvious that Reagan bore direct responsibility for the political transformation within the Soviet Union as it is that he bore no responsibility for the budget deficits within the United States. Having achieved total unanimity on the multitudinous aspects of Reagan's greatness, the conservative tributes could be distinguished from one another only by the poetic superlatives they chose. It was a contest of obsequiousness. You half-expect Peggy Noonan to build her hero a funeral pyre and hurl herself onto it.
What's most interesting about Reagan-worship is not so much that it overlooks his flaws but that it specifically overlooks his departures from conservative orthodoxy. Above all else Reagan's admirers extol his ideological certitude. The Gipper, they agree, held simple but profound views about restraining government and fighting communism, and he never wavered from them in the face of carping liberals. This narrative may be broadly true. But, although he was no liberal nor even a moderate, Reagan did repeatedly abandon conservative dogma. That he is nonetheless remembered as an unyielding conservative says less about Reagan than it does about the contemporary Republicans who lay claim to his cause.
Consider, first, Reagan's contribution to the demise of the Eastern bloc. Reagan's decision to rebuild the debilitated post-Vietnam military supposedly compelled the Soviets to reform themselves by forcing them into a costly arms race that put even more pressure on their teetering economy. "In the end, Reagan won the Cold War not by defeating the Soviets militarily, but by showing them that we had economic resources they could never hope to match," wrote Bruce Bartlett last year in National Review Online. "They simply couldn't afford to keep up."
Whatever you think of that explanation, it's hard to square with Reagan's 1987 agreement with the Soviets to ban medium- and short-range nuclear missiles. After all, if forcing the Soviets to deploy more weapons caused them to produce fewer consumer goods and weakened their leader's will, then letting them deploy fewer weapons, and divert the savings into the consumer economy, would have had the opposite effect. At the time, the right viewed the treaty as a betrayal. CONSERVATIVES CAMPAIGNING AGAINST MISSILE TREATY, read a New York Times headline; most candidates for the 1988 GOP presidential nomination opposed the treaty. Today conservatives simply gloss over that decision. This week's page-length Wall Street Journal editorial mourning Reagan made no mention at all of that highly significant treaty. Instead it praised his "willingness to walk away from Reykjavik and at other times from an arms control process that had become an article of blind faith among U.S. elites."
The missile treaty was no fluke. Alongside Reagan's (justly) celebrated steely revulsion toward communism sat a wooly-headed, almost peacenik, sensibility. Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon's 1991 biography of Reagan -- celebrated for its fairness by left and right alike -- revealed Reagan's attachment to anti-cold war movies like "The Day After" and "War Games," which inveighed against the horrors of nuclear war in the most syrupy way. He had a particular affinity for the 1951 science fiction film "The Day the Earth Stood Still," in which an alien arrived and forced the United States and Soviet Union to make peace. Reagan invoked this trope so frequently that Colin Powell, his national security adviser, would tell his staff, "Here come the little green men again." Reagan even brought up the movie in his 1988 summit with Gorbachev -- who, understandably, didn't know quite what to make of it -- in the course of proposing a deal by which both sides would destroy their entire nuclear arsenals. All in all, his view toward the cold war was far different than the "moral clarity" that is currently ascribed to him.
Conservatives likewise hail Reagan as an uber-supply sider. In a lengthy obituary, The Washington Times recalled, "Mr. Reagan resisted congressional attempts to raise taxes, despite a deficit exceeding $200 billion by 1986. 'Go ahead, make my day,' the president baited Congress." Curiously absent from this and other hagiographic accounts is the fact that Reagan signed two large tax increases in 1982 and 1983 (the former, it should be noted, in the midst of a severe recession).
Conservatives hail as Reagan's crowning achievement the tax reform he signed in 1986. Today, conservatives remember it as one sweeping movement. "He pushed down incomes taxes, too, from a high of 70 percent when he entered the White House to a new low of 28 percent," wrote Noonan in the "Journal." In fact, tax reform was a deliberate effort by the Reagan administration to scale back some of the abuses of its original 1981 tax cut, which allowed many businesses and wealthy individuals to escape taxation completely. (Treasury Secretary Don Regan, who spearheaded the plan, regaled the president with tales of how the wealthy could get away without paying taxes.)
It's true that the bill reduced the top marginal tax rate to 28 percent, but it did so only by eliminating loopholes and preferences for the rich. The bill raised taxes on corporations and ended (temporarily, alas) preferential treatment for capital gains income. And so, while it reduced nominal rates, Reagan's tax reform made the affluent pay a higher share of the tax burden. All this made it anathema to conservatives at the time. Newt Gingrich, Jack Kemp, and Dick Cheney led a revolt among House Republicans, who were backed by the business lobby, which stood to lose billions in tax preferences. It's inconceivable that a Republican president today would enact a progressive tax reform like that. Any Republican in good party standing would denounce such a thing as "class warfare."
It's also inconceivable that moderates like Donald Regan -- or Howard Baker, Richard Darman, David Stockman, or James Baker -- could be given decision-making authority over domestic policy in George W. Bush's Republican Party. That fact explains why Reagan would alter his policies and abandon conservative dogma when circumstances warranted. It's not that Reagan had a more supple ideology or greater command of the facts than Bush. It's that the ideological and political superstructure of the GOP has changed so much since then. Republican intellectual debates take place within a universe controlled entirely by the right. The party has built an ironclad alliance with the business lobby, from whom total loyalty is expected (GOP leaders police the lobbies to ensure that they don't hire, or give money, to Democrats) and to whom it is given in return. Reagan-worship constitutes an important element of that ideological edifice. That the reality of Reagan differed from the memory of Reagan is precisely the point: Myths are created in order to teach certain lessons. Republicans today agree that Reagan was America's greatest modern president, and that his greatness derived from his unswerving devotion to conservative principle. To violate Reagan's principles would not only insult his memory, it would contravene the laws of the political universe. The Reagan gospel, to be sure, is interpreted selectively. But then, so is the Bible.
Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at The New Republic
By Jonathan Chait
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