Though he reduced federal spending only slightly overall, allowed the United States debt to continue to grow, and failed to dismantle major federal agencies as he promised during the 1980 campaign, Reagan spent his political capital on the central part of his domestic program: cutting taxes across the board for individuals and businesses. This action alone kickstarted the economy, and the nightmare scenarios predicted by critics of Reagan’s “voodoo economics” did not come to pass. The inflation rate fell from 10.4% to 4.2%, unemployment declined from 7.2% to 5.4%, and the American economy experienced its largest period of peacetime expansion up to that time. Along with this, Reagan’s sunny optimism and can-do spirit was contagious and inspired hope for the future in Americans, spurring them to spend, invest, and start businesses. The Carter economic “malaise” and its concomitant crisis of American spirit evaporated.
Second, He won the Cold War.
Reagan the conservative recognized that earthly life pits good against evil, and he firmly believed that the United States, despite its faults past and present, was on the side of good while the Soviet Union was “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Post-Reagan paleo-conservatism has largely adopted a pacifist attitude toward war and conflict and cringes at the notion of going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” Yet, like it or not, there are ideologies, religions, and countries that seek to destroy the West, and to acknowledge such realities does not entail embracing schemes to make the world safe for democracy. Nor does it make one a “neo-con,” but in fact it makes one a conservative, who in the spirit of Tolkien, recognizes that “there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”
Third, He used the bully pulpit to support socially conservative positions:
Reagan spoke out often about the importance of family, traditional morality, and the right to life. Though he has been criticized for his failure to do more to fight abortion, the president, of course, has no recognized authority to overturn Supreme Court decisions or to act against federal and state law. What Reagan did as president was to speak out passionately and often for the sanctity of human life—in many speeches, in his State of the Union address, and sometimes off the cuff. His pro-life presidential statements comprise forty-five pages of his official presidential papers.
Fourth, He was a conservative at heart.
Reagan’s constitutional views were decidedly conservative: he publicly called the United States “a federation of sovereign states” and sought to appoint only strict-constructionist federal judges (in this he was not always successful, especially when it came to the Supreme Court). Reagan had been a New Deal liberal until he witnessed the anti-Americanism of leftists in the Screen Actors Guild in the 1950s; after his political conversion, he had little time for the moderate, country-club political set that ruled the Republican party. His speech nominating fellow conservative Barry Goldwater for president at the 1964 Republican—formally called “A Time for Choosing” but known among conservatives simply as “the speech”—is still considered a seminal manifesto of conservatism.
In his abhorrence of war, Reagan was also by nature a conservative. Ironically, he was portrayed as a war-monger by many in the media during his rise to national political prominence; Ronnie “Ray-Gun” some called him. But Reagan was really a peacenik. As president he sent American forces into harm’s way only three times (in Beirut and Grenada in 1983 and in Libya in 1986). His goal in building up the American military in his first term, as he stated repeatedly at the time, was to force the Soviets to come back to the arms negotiating table where the United States, from a position of strength, could forge deals that did not merely reduce nuclear stockpiles, but eliminated them. Reagan had been deeply affected after watching the television movie, The Day After, in 1983. The film portrayed the horror of a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was this nightmare scenario that drove Reagan and to try to force the Soviets to negotiate and to develop his Strategic Defense Initiative, which held out the promise of insulating Americans from nuclear strikes.
Fifth, He was a gentleman.
Perhaps Reagan’s ex-wife, the classy Jane Wyman, said it best upon Reagan’s death in 2004: “America has lost a great president and a great, kind, and gentle man.” Ronald Reagan was indeed a giant among men, a true Man of the West, and conservatives should rightly and proudly claim him as one of their own.
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