Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Commentary 8- Reagan's Legacy

Posted by Myrhaf on his website

Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Reagan's Legacy

Some Republicans want to put Reagan's face on Mt. Rushmore. In our bitterly divided America, in which both sides say 20 words attacking the opponent for every one word they say supporting their own side, I wonder if the Republicans really think Reagan deserves this honor or if they just want to rub the liberal nose in conservative shit.

Reagan was a mediocre President who got a few things right. (You could say the same thing about Teddy Roosevelt, whose image is on Mt. Rushmore; he's the farthest one back, as if the artist knew something was wrong including him among Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.)

The best thing about Reagan was his supply-side economics and tax cuts that spurred an economic boom that, with a few dips along the way, we are still enjoying. He is given credit for ending the Soviet Union, but the fundamental reason it failed is the nature of communism. Socialism, or "planned chaos" as Mises called it, can't create wealth and simply cannot compete with the productive dynamo that is capitalism. Reagan was lucky to be in the White House when the Potemkin Village that was the Soviet Bloc began to collapse and people saw it was an empty facade.

Reagan's pragmatism toward Iran and terrorism, with his non-response to the Beirut barracks bombing and his Iran-Contra Scandal, makes him the single man most responsible for our feckless Middle East policy. Conservatives blame Carter and Clinton, but the enemy knew those men were weak. Reagan is worse because he pretended to be strong but was in fact as weak and appeasing as any liberal you could find. Our pretense at strength convinced people such as Osama bin Laden that America is a paper tiger. We still have not proved him wrong.

The size of government more than doubled during the Reagan Presidency. You can blame it on Tip O'Neill's Democrat Congress, but the fact is that Reagan didn't have what it takes to stand up to the big spenders. Such weakness is the stuff of mediocrity.

Worst of all, Reagan brought the Religious Right to power, destroying the Goldwater paradigm of a party dedicated to individual rights. With Reagan, the contradictions in the Republican Party grow. 20 years later we have a Republican President who expands the welfare state like a liberal and brings in faith to work with the welfare state -- and calls it "compassionate conservatism." The Republicans are well on their way to becoming, like the Democrats, a force for tyranny rather than for freedom.

Reagan on Mt. Rushmore? It would be an act of injustice.

Original referenced Link


My Commentary

12/18/07
Mike Zemack said...
Reagan, I believe, had two great achievements that puts him among our most consequential presidents.

First, his foreign policy strategy, I believe, was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Empire. During the 1970s, the Soviets were gaining strength and influence due to the appeasement policies of the West. This included the moral sanctions implicit in America’s policies of Détente and peaceful co-existence. It was generally accepted in the West that the Soviet Union was solid both militarily and economically, and that the only way to avoid a catastrophic war between East and West was to accept and get along with them. This translated into massive economic “aid”, subsidized “trade”, and the sale on credit of advanced technologies. This enabled the Soviet Union to achieve, by the late 1970s, virtual nuclear parity with the U.S.

While you are right that “ the fundamental reason it failed is the nature of communism.”, this by no means gives reason to believe that it was inevitable that the Soviet Empire was on the verge of collapse. The demoralization of the forces of freedom behind the Iron Curtain due to the acceptance as legitimate of their rulers by the world’s foremost bastion of freedom, America, coupled with the material and moral support of the West in general could have easily enabled the Soviet Empire to survive for many decades, very possibly with dire consequences for us.

Reagan’s great achievement was in recognizing the fact of Communism’s utter bankruptcy. This may seem
obvious in retrospect, but it must be remembered that Reagan bucked a virtually unanimous consensus of hostility toward his policies and convictions. Alan Greenspan, in his recent book, stated that Reagan was one of only two people that he knew of that believed that the Soviet Union was a house of cards ready to collapse if Western support were withdrawn. The other was Ayn Rand.

When Reagan declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire”, thus removing America’s moral sanction, the dissident forces behind the iron curtain were electrified and emboldened. At the same time, Reagan set out to remove the economic lifeline of Western support while simultaneously pressuring them with America’s military re-armament and “Star Wars.” The dye was cast. A close friend and co-agent of his endeavor, Margaret Thatcher, said in here Eulogy for President Reagan “So the president resisted Soviet expansion and pressed down on Soviet weakness at every point until the day came when communism began to collapse beneath the combined weight of those pressures and its own failures.”

There is no doubt in my mind that Reagan was instrumental in triggering the Soviet collapse.

His second major achievement is one that you briefly acknowledge… his economic policies. But more importantly, Reagan unapologetically went to bat for the productive in America. In his Inaugural Address in 1981, he said such things as “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”…and “We hear much of special interest groups. Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we're sick -- professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truckdrivers. They are, in short, ``We the people,'' this breed called Americans.”…and “It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.”…and “We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we're in a time when there are not heroes, they just don't know where to look. You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond. You meet heroes across a counter, and they're on both sides of that counter. There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity.”

Nowhere in that speech do you here the usual phony political handringing about the “poor” and the “downtrodden” who never had a chance. As you point out, he then backed up his ritoric by rolling back regulation and slashing income tax rates from 70% to 28%. We have had only two mild and brief recessions since and we are still enjoying the benefits of those tax cuts, as rates are still well below those that Reagan inherited.
But Reagan’s most important domestic achievement may be that he halted for a time the Socialist advance in America. For this, Objectivists can be a little thankful for the time he bought us. Since the rise of Reagan, Objectivism has gained a small but significant and growing foothold in academia and the culture. With the “Reagan Revolution” beginning to give way to a reinvigorated Statist Left, we are at least in a better position now to offer a strong alternative, especially since the Republican Party has become, at least for the moment, pretty much useless (or worse).

There is much to criticize President Reagan for. His advocacy for returning prayer to the public schools, for example, as well as his Social Security “fix” and the failure to make much of a dent in federal spending. Although he did recognize the long-term threat posed by Islamic Fundamentalism, he let his military advisers talk him out of an attack on terror camps in Syria after the Beirut bombings (which he wanted to do).

But the re-acceleration of the statist trend in America today as well as the sorry crop of GOP candidates so far makes Reagan look awfully good right now. Flaws, contradictions and inconsistencies aside, America could, in my opinion, do a lot worse than to get another Ronald Reagan as our next President.

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