George F. Will is one of America’s smartest pundits. His column in the Sunday Washington Post provokes serious thought: “The Limits Of Sunniness.”
If the defining doctrine of the Republican Party is limited government, the party must move up from nostalgia and leaven its reverence for Reagan with respect for Madison. As Diggins says, Reaganism tells people comforting and flattering things that they want to hear; the Madisonian persuasion tells them sobering truths that they need to know.
I was in high school when Reagan was elected in office. At the time I was not aware or knew much about political thought. However, it seems to me now that the only significant thing that Reagan did was enlarge the military and defense spending. Which means enlarging the U.S. Government.
I grew up in Maryland, about 15 or so miles south of the nation’s capital. As an result from Reagan’s increased defense spending, more government jobs became available. To people at the time, it was an opportunity to apply for and get a job working for Uncle Sam. If anyone knows about the area, a federal job in the 80’s was a coveted and much sought after one. When government jobs became more available, Reagan received more favorable opinion across party lines from the newly federally employed middle-class, despite the disdain from the left wing elite.
What I am getting at is this. Reagan was a big government conservative just a couple of notches under G.W. Bush. The exception is the Iraq War.
I sincerely doubt, and I hope I am wrong, the US will ever see the limited federal government of the Madison version. This will be a tough road to travel. Big government has entrenched a lot of government employed voters in a very well to do lifestyle. And they are verociously fighting to keep it. For them, voting for limited government means voting themselves out of a job. Although, the fight for libertarianism should never cease.
The chances to minimize government are much more possible at the local or county level, and perhaps a state or two.
I guess I can understand why the conservative movement is full of Reagan-worshippers. He ushered in the longest peacetime boom in American history, he helped bring about the fall of the Soviet Union, blah blah blah.
What I can’t understand is why so many self-professed libertarians love the man. He happened upon the end of the Soviet Union which was in its death throes absent any massive build-up in American military power. He ushered in the anti-left, as opposed to anti-state, form of conservatism that rules the airwaves and the political discourse on the right today. He did virtually nothing to reign in the growth of government and, through his outrageous increases in military expenditures, helped greatly expand our its share of the GDP.
And he stepped up the War on Drugs. In short, he makes Carter look like a genius by comparison.
Alot of revisionism here.
The Soviet Union was *not* in its “death throes” when Reagan arrived at the White House. Quite the contrary, they were on the march the world over, and quite a threat. The establishment media was predicting a permanent detente. One could say that with stagflation, malaise, etc., not to mention Desert One and the fresh experience in Southeast Asia, it was this country, under Carter, that was in trouble.
Reagan defeated communism abroad and brought back a measure of capitalism at home. He was not a perfect president, certainly not by libertarian standards, but government was smaller, the world safer, and the economy freer in January, 1989, than it would have been had Reagan lost either of his elections.
The “anti-left” form of conservatism lamented here grew up as a reaction to the “culture wars” and the rise of PC in the early 90s. And, of course, the Clintons. Something about the Clintons just made the right very upset.
There was no Rush Limbaugh in the 1980s, no Sean Hannity. The left-right debates in the ’80s focused mainly on Reagan’s foreign policy, be it nuclear freeze v. deploying pershings in europe, star wars, iran-contra, sanctioning south africa, etc. Liberals blamed Reagan for homelessness, but Reagan didn’t really champion any of the sticky social issues that are being fought over these days. He paid lip-service to the pro-lifers, and that was about it.
While the book that is the subject of George Will’s article apparently raises interesting questions about Reagan’s alignment with political theorists, I don’t think it questions at all Reagan’s position as on of America’s greatest leaders. Indeed, the author ranks Reagan as one of America’s ‘3 or 4 greatest’ presidents.
To suggest that the Soviet Union collapsed because of its weak economy is somewhat ignorant of history. Both the Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire spent centuries in economic despair — far longer than the Soviet Union — yet both collapsed only after the onset of war or invasion. What external pressure, aside from Reagan, was placed upon the Soviet Union that would bring about its collapse in the 1980s that wasn’t present in the 1970s?
Regardless of the answer — and probably to the chagrin of his detractors — Reagan was bright enough to credit the collapse of Soviet communism to the lies of socialism far more than he credited himself or his policies.
To suggest he was a big-government conservative also ignores the fiscal efforts of his administration. Reagan cut top individual tax rates from 70 percent to 28 percent, corporate rates from 46 to 34 percent, and — regardless of military spending — under his reign the federal government as a portion of total economic output still shrank by about 5% from the time he took office.
As a ‘self-professed’ libertarian (I didn’t know there was a qualifying test — where do I take that, anyway?), I surely don’t think that 5% is enough.
But compared to every other adminstration in the last 100 years, I’ll take it.
The Will column is extremely thought-provoking. But rather than comment on this, I want to give a lukewarm defense of Reagan, and also knock down the idea that he brought down the USSR.
The lukewarm defense: Reagan (and his Fed) curbed America’s double digit inflation, cut high marginal tax rates, and cut regulation — all of which put the U.S. onto an economic growth path, instead of the previous stagflation. Those were major accomplishments. And arguably (according to Harvard economist Lawrence Kotlikoff) the “Reagan deficits” weren’t real — if you buy Kotlikoff’s intergenerational accounting (which takes into account the social security fix) the U.S. gov’t started onto a sound(er) financial footing. Furthermore, tax revenues as a share of the economy fell (good) even though tax revenues grew. There were all sorts of terrible things Reagan & his admin did wrong, and he should have done of the right things, but he got a number of things right that his successors have increasingly botched.
But he didn’t bring down the USSR. Alan & Sprock, you’re mistaken — the Soviet economy suffered declining GDP through the 1970’s and possibly the 1960’s. The Soviet leadership themselves recognized that they were approaching crisis, and there was fear that internal pressures would tear the country apart — which in essence is what happened. Gorbachev’s Restructuring (Perestroika) was supposed to turn things around, but actually worsened the economic problems, and hastened the breakup. Low oil prices were also a factor, since one of the few things that had been buying the Soviets more time was their status as world’s #1 oil exporter.
Reagan’s role may have helped at the margin; in particular, he reassured Gorbachev that if the Soviets began relinquishing control over Eastern Europe, he (Reagan) would not take advantage of G’s weakness. If any single person deserves credit for finally ending the Soviet Union, it’s Gorbachev… although the designers of its mishappen economic system, Marx-Lenin-Stalin really deserve the credit.
Sorry Charles. Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and a host of other nasty places have nosediving GDP, as did the Soviets for much of their history. As the Soviets themselves admitted, they simply could not keep up with SDI and the rest of the Reagan buildup.
When Reagan came in, the Soviets had knocked off Afghanistan and, by proxy, Angola, Nicaragua, southeast Asia, and were knocking on the door in El Salvador. The solidarity resistance in Poland was crushed with martial law. The Soviets were a destabalizing force in every corner of the globe.
It was the accepted wisdom of the day that we would never defeat communism, that communism was here to stay, that it was a valid and permanent alternative for nations. Pick up a Time or Newsweek from the early 80s. It was all about detente, nuclear freeze, co-existing with the Soviets. They were just peaceful people with fuzzy hats.
It was the external pressure applied by Reagan that ended the Soviet threat. It was inevitable that Reagan-bashers and liberals would credit splotch-top, that is oh-so-more fashionable. Reagan was a war-mongering dunce, after all. Crediting the success of his central policy would simply not do in polite society. But the Gorbachev autocrat-as-savior notion is just not the reality of what happened.
Reagan — not the editorial page at the NYT, not the faculty in Cambridge, not Walter Mondale, certainly not the last Soviet dictator — Reagan, ended the Soviet Union. He did it by rebuilding our military, by confronting them everywhere they went, be it support for the gov’t in El Salvador or the Contras in Nicaragua or Solidarity in Poland, or undoing the Marxist coup in Grenada, or funding the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. He condemned them as the evil empire they were, to “the ash heap of history.” He built the MX and the Pershing 2 and talked about SDI. Occasionally he would show the US would still use its military to respond to threats — sinking the Iranian Navy in Hormuz or bombing Khadaffi — so the Soviets knew he meant business. Reagan fought them, spent them into the ground, and made Soviet expansionism impossible. But for his presidency, the Soviets might still be around.
Sorry Charles. Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and a host of other nasty places have nosediving GDP, as did the Soviets for much of their history. As the Soviets themselves admitted, they simply could not keep up with SDI and the rest of the Reagan buildup.
Look, there are lots of reasons why the Soviets “admitted” that they could not keep up with… give me a break!… SDI and the Reagan military buildup, chief among them a reluctance to admit that their entire economic and political system was rotten to the core.
While you’re listing those other countries, you might consider why those countries also didn’t succumb to an American military build-up.
And, no, there is no libertarian litmus test. But since libertarian is a category, and certain people call themselves libertarians when they are not, the phrase “self-professed” libertarian isn’t so bizarre.
So Charles gives a more charitable and well-reasoned response to the canard that Reagan brought down the evil empire, but that’s more-or-less correct.
“Occasionally he would show the US would still use its military to respond to threats — sinking the Iranian Navy in Hormuz or bombing Khadaffi — so the Soviets knew he meant business. Reagan fought them, spent them into the ground, and made Soviet expansionism impossible. But for his presidency, the Soviets might still be around.”
That Reagan, what a man! Killed Khadafi’s kidm, and brought down the Evil Empire by talking nasty to it. I hear he could also end the war on drugs, balance the budget, cure cancer, and raise the dead.
Are you defending the man, or just trying to make me laugh. I gather many “libertarians” who came of age in the 1970s fondly recall the man because, after Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, he had some free-market sounding rhetoric. But that’s thin gruel, especially when one considers the what the man actually did. He can’t be blamed for GW Bush and the Sean Hannitys of the world entirely, but he did lay the ground work for a thoughtless, populist and dangerous conservatism that so far has gotten us into three major wars in the last 20 years in the Middle East.
Way to go Gipper!
Charles, yes, but…
While the Soviet economy was failing, Soviet foreign policy was successfully rolling back or at least undermining the progression of liberty throughout the much of the third world. In the late 70s, the Soviets encouraged or otherwise influenced events so that Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Laos, Cambodia, and other countries embraced Soviet communism. And in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
These don’t seem to be the actions of a state in the midst of questioning its foundations — they seem more like the actions of a state convinced that its foundations are solid. Further, the Soviets were convinced that the United States would avoid any confrontation over this expansion because Vietnam was still a painful memory. The correlation of forces was, from a strategic Soviet perspective, working in their favor.
Reagan, unlike his predecessors and even part of his own administration, believed that the Soviet Union’s economic weakness could be exploited to the point that communism could be rolled back. The Reagan doctrine was an implementation of that belief. While the Soviets never actually thought it possible to compete with Reagan’s military buildup, that buildup — combined with efforts to promote democracy and capitalism and deter socialism in the developing world — moved the correlation of forces to the West’s favor. So, while Reagan may have had little effect on the already failing Soviet economy, I think it likely that he had a significant effect on what had been the Soviet’s attempts to ‘bury’ capitalism and the west.
And while Reagan’s first term followed a much harder-line approach than most Americans could stomach (during the 70s, most Americans favored a military buildup to offset the Soviet’s nuclear superiority. During Reagan’s first term — and after movies like The Day After — that trend had reversed), his second term favored dialogue and diplomacy, despite protests from hawks at home. That Reagan embraced Soviet reform and avoided cornering the ‘sick bear’ shows that he understood foreign policy.
Had Reagan not escalated the arms race during his first term, had he not pursued the doctrine of promoting capitalism abroad, had he not supported people like the mujahideen, and had he backed down about deploying missiles in Europe, the Soviet’s strategic policy of communist expansion in the 1970s may well have continued. Certainly, no one at the time thought it was going to end, that the Soviet Union was going to suddenly implode. And had he followed the advice of hawks in his second term, the outcome may have been a violent end to the cold war.
Surely Reagan didn’t single-handedly end the Soviet Union. But his foreign policies forced the Soviets to adopt different strategies than they’d held onto right up until his first term. And that resulted in a much better world.
Alan: actually, the Soviet economy arguably had very high rates of growth during a substantial portion of its history. But unquestionably it had falling living standards in the Brezhnev period. Soviet (and post-Soviet Russian) economists, historians point to the growing economic failures as the biggest cause of the collapse; so do western experts, such as economists Peter Boettke and Anders Aslund. I’ve personally interviewed the managers of several of the very largest Soviet state enterprises; when I mentioned the Reagan thesis they were incredulous.
I haven’t argued that there’s a general law that declining or low per capita GDP always causes any state suffering it to collapse. N. Korea and Cuba are not even vaguely comparable to the USSR. The USSR was an enormous and artificial agglomeration of heterogeneous states, held together only by a basic ideology and the power wielded by the center. These both were failing well before Reagan was president — just as an example, U.S. satellite surveillance uncovered food riots in several smaller Soviet cities in the early 70’s.
As a proximate cause, Gorbachev certainly played a major role in ending the USSR; his reforms failed to stop the economic decline, but did help to disperse wealth and power, which strengthened a variety of groups & forces who were willing to end the Union.
In sum, the Soviets brought down their system — not Reagan, nor “the editorial page at the NYT, not the faculty in Cambridge, nor Walter Mondale.”
Sprock: I don’t follow your argument that the USSR’s aggressive foreign policies indicate that there was a lack of doubt in the USSR about its foundations. Regardless, there was growing awareness in the Soviet leadership that the system was failing, hence Gorbachev’s reforms.
I think that Reagan’s opposition to the evil empire was basically sound — both in opposing it and in opposing his chickenhawk advisors, just as you argue. But at most this was an effect at the margin.
123: II think you are entirely wrong that Reagan layed the foundation for today’s neocons or their populist popularizers (I guess that’s what kooks like Hannity ought to be called).
Reagan’s presidency was more than free-market rhetoric. He (or the gov’t under his presidency) drastically slashed marginal tax rates, got inflation under control, & cut federal regulation of business — the result was more freedom…and substantial economic growth followed. The “Reagan deficits” may be an exaggerated problem (as I argued in my first post) and regardless, substantial credit for them should go to the Democrats in Congress.
Modern neocons, as well as goofballs like Hannity, don’t seem to have any real interest in economic freedom (nor any other kind). They invoke Reagan, but Reagan himself ignored his own neocon chickenhawk advisors (as Sprock correctly points out). I see very little real similarity between Reagan-style convervatism and the current neoconism.
Here’s a short note by Ronald Hilton of the Hoover Institute that defends the thesis that Reagan hastened the end of the USSR. I think he gives far too much credit to Reagan But he does a good job of summarizing the issues, and makes it clear that there’s no sensible case for claiming that Reagan brought down the Soviet Union.
[http://wais.stanford.edu/History/history_ussrandreagan.htm]
As much as I agree with most of Alan Gura’s points, I would like to object two points:
Solidarity, it was clearly the signature of Prof. Brzezinski and so was the Afghan factor:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=WaiJtLrEwVU
NV
Great video, Nathalie.
But you really agree “Reagan ended the Soviet Union?”
The argument that the U.S. defense buildup ended the USSR makes no sense. What’s the causation?
The econ story I’ve told is both internally consistent and well documented.
Feb. 2 New York Times op-ed has an interesting essay by Thomas Friedman, in which gives a version of it from a curent Russian scholar in Moscow. I can’t get a link to it, but it is worth reading if you can find it. It follows my account quite closely.
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