Ezra Klein on Reagan the Detenteist Tax-Raiser

Ronald Reagan's long-run image in history will be as a president who started out as a destructive nut--huge deficits, arming the right-wing death squads of El Salvador, fueling the Iran-Iraq war--and who then stabilized as a constructive moderate: tax increases, centrist supreme court judges, detente with Gorbachev. Ezra Klein comments:

Ezra Klein: Robo-Reagan: This Charles Krauthammer column has a pretty trenchant intro:

Major grumbling among conservatives about the Republican field. So many candidates, so many flaws. Rudy Giuliani, abortion apostate. Mitt Romney, flip-flopper. John McCain, Mr. Amnesty. Fred Thompson, lazy boy. Where is the paragon? Where is Ronald Reagan?

Well, what about Reagan? This president, renowned for his naps, granted amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants in the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli bill. As governor of California, he signed the most liberal abortion legalization bill in America, then flip-flopped and became an abortion opponent. What did he do about it as president? Gave us Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, the two swing votes that upheld and enshrined Roe v. Wade for the last quarter-century.

The point is not to denigrate Reagan but to bring a little realism to the gauzy idol worship that fuels today's discontent.

You can't denigrate Reagan because he no longer exists. There's only Robo-Reagan, the better, stronger, faster, more conservative president that the Right has retroactively constructed and forced into the history books. But Reagan's flaws and shortcomings weren't necessarily his fault: You have to do something about immigration, and that will require some sort of earned amnesty for the 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the states. You can't outlaw abortion. You can't outlaw tax increases, of which Reagan passed many. You can't gut Social Security, which he tried, and failed, to do. Hardline conservatism just isn't very popular. Policy problems have their own logic, and their own demands. The Republican Base is demanding fealty to a platform that even Reagan, for all his formidable political gifts and advantages, couldn't hew to. His would-be successors, in office, will do no better.

One important caveat: Reagan did not believe in the wingnut platform--or, rather, he could be persuaded by others (Nancy, her astrologer, George Shultz, Marty Feldstein, James Baker) not to believe in the wingnut platform. He didn't hew to it because in the end he did not want to. That's important.

Comments

[wcw]

It is important. Still, I hate the man more than Bush I, for the simple fact that a) he was by far the more successful at implementing a right-wing push and b) he is a myth.

Myth is important and effective. Reagan is the only myth left for the US right wing, and as such, I hate him. Absent the Reagan myth alone, W. never gets close enough to steal FL2K.

Imagine Gore, warts and all, as president since 2000, and stop polishing the Reagan-wasn't-so-awful mini hagiography. Yes, he wasn't so awful on balance. However, myth matters -- and the Reagan-really-sucked myth, as inaccurate as the Reagan-as-demigod alternative, is also important.

[Doctor Memory]

"...arming the right-wing death squads of El Salvador..."

...and Nicaragua, and Honduras, and Guatemala. We could forgive Reagan based on his later "moderation" but that, to coin a phrase, would be wrong. When Reagan was compos mentis, he was happily turning Central America into a charnel house in the name of anti-communism. That his smarter viziers steered a saner course once dementia took Reagan's mind is of no credit to Reagan himself.

[nu]

... and Angola... Remember Jonas Savimbi, often "credited" for starting the use of children as soldiers, hosted the Democratic International meeting..

[M. carey]

Actually, Reagan really DID believe, at least a few things. Thats what made his presentation so powerful. Even if (many of)the things he believed were wrong.

[Reagan believed rhat commies were evil and tjat he was a man of peace who trusted Gorbachev. Reagan believed in cutting spending and helping people. Reagan believed incurring taxes and balancing budgets. Reagan's beliefs determined nothing--it was who he trusted at that moment.]

[andres]

Brad:

[Reagan believed rhat commies were evil and tjat he was a man of peace who trusted Gorbachev. Reagan believed in cutting spending and helping people. Reagan believed incurring taxes and balancing budgets. Reagan's beliefs determined nothing--it was who he trusted at that moment.]

Precisely. And in spite of being less awful than GWB, Reagan was still an awful president most of the time based on who he decided to trust: Weinberger on rearmament, Arthur Laffer and friends on tax cutting (and no, the downward spiral on the budget was reduced but not eliminated with the last round of tax increases), Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon on Lebanon, and Eliot Abrams, Ollie North and friends on El Salvador and Nicaragua.

The idea that Reagan started out as a destructive nut but then "stabilized" is not acceptable given that the damage he dealt out in his nut phase was far greater than the positives he accomplished in the last part of his second term, many of which were actually forced on him. First, please don't give him credit for Kennedy and O'Connor. The Senate did not approve Robert Bork and would not have approved Clarence Thomas during Reagan's second term--Kennedy and O'Connor were about as far as he could go.

Second, detente with Gorbachev may have had benign intentions on RR's part, but the intelligent and non-benign Republicans such as Baker had decided that the USSR was on its way out and that continuing US hostility would only delay the process. And Reagan's subordinates (and to be fair, their Democratic counterparts) gave Russia zero direct help in the post-1991 transition (and the indirect help through the IMF was more of a curse than a blessing).

With the exception of Gorbachev, practically every other part of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy was both evil and a disaster:

*He sent subordinates such as Rumsfeld to let Saddam Hussein know that it was ok both to gas the Kurds and to continue his destructive war against Iran.

*He armed death squads in El Salvador and terrorist guerrillas in Nicaragua and Angola.

*He supported Israel's invasion of Lebanon and lost several hundred US marines trying to get in on the act. Then he immediately invaded Grenada as a way to save face.

*He supported the apartheid regime in South Africa long after it had become an international embarrassment.

*He wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on space-based missile defense research which has yet to bear any practical results.

In view of this, you still think he stabilized as a moderate because (a) he reduced somewhat the size of the budget mess that he himself created, and (b) made diplomatic peace with a regime that had already been diagnosed as on the verge of collapse?

Give me a break, Brad. If I needed any further proof that you are a conservative defender of the long-term US status quo (and therefore one of the many individuals who actually support the political system that put GWB and Cheney in power), the above apologetics for Ronald Reagan are Exhibit A. Utterly shameful.

[Sheldon Timberlane]

Newt Gingrich condemned the Democrats to the Welfare State platform going into 2008, when he quivered his lip, and whispered in soto voce, "I shore wouldn't want to run against Hillary and Obama, no sir!", eyes round in his down-home Georgian Brer Rabbit fashion.

Now we're stuck with two lightning rods.
Sure would be a wonderful time to call up silicon magic and resurrect Ron Headroom from the 80's, for a little Newt payback.

http://www.neoearly.com/bbs/data/test/MaxHeadroom.jpg

Ron Headroom could speak to our nation's youth, and recall for them the debacle of a Star Wars investment with the lowest ROI and lowest FTE/$ in US history, or the October 1987 stock market meltdown that ensued, the ripples of which are still with us today.

I can just see Silicon Ron pontificating:

"Well, let me say this about that. Benito Guiliani isn't a real Republican, and he's said so himself. He's sure no faith-based mensch, unless marrying three times in acts of sequential infidelity is an act of faith. Hey, did you see me in Storm Warning back in 1951? Now *that* was a district attorney!"

"Mitt Romney? I've know B-actors who could act more convincingly than he can. Did you see me in Cattle Queen of Montana? Now that was some flip-flopping! Why, I knew George Romney, and Mitt, you're no George Romney!"

"John McCain? Well, I was a Prisoner of War, did you see my film? I flew over North Korea and that was a lot hotter than in Viet Nam. What's McCain doing running for president anyway? He's older than dirt!"

Just sayin'. LucasFilms graphic animation. Ron Headroom. Poke fun at the Neo's flubs. Think about it. Won't cost ya' nothin'.

[Mike Schilling]

In right-wing myth, Reagan gets credit for winning the Cold War by being a tough guy. In reality, Reagan gets credit for ending the Cold War for recognizing that Gorbachev sincerely wanted to end it, which required ignoring Rumsfeld, Cheney, Podhoretz pere and the rest of that crowd.

Oddly, one never hears them praise Reagan as "A man whose finest moment came when he realized that the rest of us are lunatics."

[Jim]

The difference between Reagan and Bush II is that Reagan was not half crazy and emotionally infantile. He was reasonably mature and reasonably level headed. When he made a mistake he could bring himself to correct it. Reagan, for all his faults, was an adult. Bush II has never grown up, the process probably interrupted by drugs and drink.

[Paul J. Reber]

I think the history of the Reagan presidency has to also include:
* Iran-Contra, perhaps the biggest unprosecuted incident of executive-branch lawbreaking of the late 20th century;
* Strengthening Osama Bin Laden and his religious fanatics in Afghanistan based on a misguided "enemy of my enemey" logic.

Reagan's nutty phase really did light the fuse for almost all the true non-stop insanity that is the Bush/Cheney administration.

Interestingly, most of the non-insanity of his later moderate phase, I mentally associate with the relatively non-wingnut administration of the first Bush presidency. I hadn't really thought of it extending back into Reagan's administration, but obviously it did. Perhaps the end of his second term saw the same group of relative moderates coming to influence that brought us Bush the elder. Or even the first case of a strongly influential VP affecting executive policy (as Reagan's incipient Alzheimer's progressed), presaging Cheney's hold over the junior Bush. Perhaps.

Random aside on Reagan & AD: AD rarely comes on suddenly (especially in older people) and as techniques for assessment are improved, clear evidence for incipient dementia and memory problems can be seen earlier and earlier. In the AD research field in the late 80s & early 90s, I hear it was hard or impossible to publish certain results on the age/onset of AD progression because they strongly implied we had a demented president for several years. I was told this be people who would know, but I don't know the details of how that censorship was implemented. There may have been a voluntary aspect of it -- as in, it's better for everybody if it isn't exposed the fact the president is in an impaired cognitive state.

Maybe it's plausible to consider Reagan the Pres just from 1981-1986 and Bush I effectively Pres from 1986-1992 (if he and/or his advisors were setting executive policy in the later Reagan years).

I think of Bush I as not insane. But is this accurate, or is it just in comparison to early Reagan and Bush II?

[nick]

I remember spending the summer of 1990 in Bohemia: Prague and small towns. Everybody I met, smart, hip types, all assured me that of COURSE Reagan deserved all the credit for bringing down the Iron Curtain.

is there some sort of term for the belief structure whereby each side is fooled by the other guys' propaganda because they correctly see through their own side's stuff?