Q1. What is the evidence against the four parts of the “nutshell case” for Reagan’s greatness?
Q2. What are the problems with the 5 myths about Reagan?
Q3. What has been the effect of Reagan’s legacy on the Republican Party?
Reagan's Record
Sorry to spoil the birthday party, but …
By Michael Kinsley
9 Feb. 2001, Slate <http://slate.msn.com/id/100474>
Ronald Reagan's 90th birthday has set off a national debate about the Reagan presidency. Was it as wonderful as we thought at the time? Or, on the other hand, was it even more wonderful? Happy birthday to Mr. Reagan, a genial, well-meaning, patriotic man, who never (we presume) had oral sex near the Oval Office. A great leader, too, in the general view—and on the question of leadership, the general view is, by definition, hard to dispute. On most other subjects, though, objective fact may be worth consulting as well.
On that basis, Reagan's achievements as president appear in hindsight to be just about exactly as wonderful as I thought at the time. Not very.
The nutshell case for Reagan's greatness is: 1) He ended the crisis of stagflation and malaise, restoring our country to prosperity and self-confidence. 2) He cut taxes and reduced the size of government. 3) He rebuilt America's military strength and won the Cold War. 4) He lent dignity to the office, unlike a more recent ex-president one could name.
The case against the case takes a slightly larger nutshell.
Start with the economy. The economic crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s was double-digit inflation. Double-digit interest rates and a double-dip recession were the medicine we took to cure it. The doctor who administered the medicine was Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. Volcker was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, who fecklessly allowed inflation to develop and then (nobly? naively?) sacrificed his presidency to stop it. Reagan deserves a couple of points for not complaining too much as Volcker twisted the tourniquet. But Reagan's ultimate thanks was to deny Volcker the third term he wanted.
Reagan hagiographers don't even have a theory, beyond raw assertion, to explain how their man is supposed to have stopped inflation. They are happy enough to blame the pain of the actual cure on his predecessor while claiming credit for the prosperity that followed. That triumph and that prosperity—a record of economic growth over eight years second only to Clinton's!—helped to renew the country's spirit (as did the force of Reagan's sunny personality and our great victory over the island superpower of Grenada). But what caused the prosperity?
Two things that clearly did not cause it are smaller government and lower taxes, because this legendary Reagan revolution barely happened. Federal government spending was a quarter higher in real terms when Reagan left office than when he entered. As a share of GDP, the federal government shrank from 22.2 percent to 21.2 percent—a whopping one percentage point. The federal civilian work force increased from 2.8 million to 3 million. (Yes, it increased even if you exclude Defense Department civilians. And, no, assuming a year or two of lag time for a president's policies to take effect doesn't materially change any of these results.)
Under eight years of Big Government Bill Clinton, to choose another president at random, the federal civilian work force went down from 2.9 million to 2.68 million. Federal spending grew by 11 percent in real terms—less than half as much as under Reagan. As a share of GDP, federal spending shrank from 21.5 percent to 18.3 percent—more than double Reagan's reduction, ending up with a federal government share of the economy about a tenth smaller than Reagan left behind.
And taxes? Federal tax collections rose about a fifth in real terms under Reagan. As a share of GDP, they declined from 19.6 percent to 18.3 percent. After Clinton, they are up to 20 percent. It's hard to think of variations in this narrow range as revolutionary one way or the other. For most working Americans, the share of income going to taxes (including FICA) went up even under Reagan.
Reagan enthusiasts say that what matters is marginal rates, which did decline significantly during his tenure. Of course, rates rose significantly under Clinton, which doesn't seem to have done the economy any harm. Critics say that if Reagan's tax cuts fed the 1980s prosperity, it was as an old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus, caused by the huge deficits the cuts produced. It's easy to throw a party if you're willing to triple the national debt.
But even if Reagan's defenders are right that lower marginal rates were key, they're misstating history a bit to give Reagan credit. The most dramatic rate reductions came in the tax reform of 1986. This bipartisan effort—led by Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley—was a response to public outrage at revelations that Reagan's earlier tax cuts had left many wealthy individuals and profitable corporations paying no taxes at all.
Hey, this is going to take a bigger nutshell than I thought. We'll wrap it up next week. Or maybe we'll wait for the great man's 100th.
Reagan's Record II
Did he win the Cold War?
By Michael Kinsley
16 Feb. 2001, Slate, <http://slate.msn.com/id/100979>
"I've become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence," said President Reagan in his "Star Wars" address of 1983, in which he first proposed to build a defense against nuclear missiles. Its purpose, he said, would be "introducing greater stability" in the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. "We seek neither military superiority nor political advantage."
Reagan's hagiographers, currently frolicking in celebration of his 90th birthday, now say he was lying about all this. They don't put it that way, of course. But that is the necessary implication of their claim that Reagan's tough rhetoric, his costly defense buildup, and his Strategic Defense Initiative in particular were all part of a successful strategy to defeat communism and win the Cold War.
If Reagan was lying in order to hide an actual intention to destroy the Soviet Union, whom was he trying to fool? Not the enemy, since the whole theory is that Reagan scared the Soviets into giving up. If he was lying, it must have been in order to deceive the American citizenry about the most important issue facing any democracy. Not nice.
But more likely he was telling the truth. In favor of this theory is the fact that in all his denunciations of communism and the Soviet Union, before and during his presidency, the emphasis was on the enemy's enormous and allegedly growing military strength and the need to counter it for our own survival—not the hope, let alone the intention, of toppling it.
The famous exception is his "Evil Empire" speech of 1982, in which he predicted that communism will end up "on the ash heap of history." Reagan's critics wrongly denounced that speech for stating the obvious about who were the good guys and who were the bad guys of the Cold War. But even on this occasion he described the collapse of communism as "a plan and a hope for the long term." He (correctly) gave most credit to communism's own economic and political failures. And the "concrete actions" he advocated to hasten the day (although "we must be cautious about forcing the pace of change") were entirely unmilitary—basically the creation of what became the National Endowment for Democracy.
In the economic sphere (discussed in last week's column), the Reagan hagiographers give him credit for things he intended that never happened, such as smaller government. On the world stage, they credit him for things he never intended that did happen.
Well, so what? Even if Reagan didn't intend his military buildup to achieve victory, that was the happy result—wasn't it? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly the half-century long bipartisan policy of containment played a role. The effect of variations one way or another is debatable. The notion that Jimmy Carter left us weak and vulnerable is certainly exaggerated. Once you give up the idea that Reagan planned it all, the notion that his buildup (for which we're still paying) made the crucial difference becomes less than obvious.
Some former Soviet apparatchiks have testified that Reagan's policies were devastating. This is oddly persuasive to people who wouldn't have believed a word these guys said when they were following the party line of their previous masters. But it's amazing how credible you can become when you tell me what I want to hear.
Suppose events had played out closer to the way Reagan actually predicted. Suppose that, two decades later, communism's internal collapse was continuing on a long fuse, but meanwhile its military strength had continued to grow. And suppose we had responded with continued Reagan-style increases in defense spending. What would the Reagan hagiographers be saying then? Would they be saying, "Well, he did a lot of great things, but his defense policy doesn't seem to have worked"? No, they would be saying exactly what they're saying now: that history had proved him right.
Winning an argument you refuse to lose is a Pyrrhic victory. If no outcome short of outright defeat or nuclear annihilation would be accepted as evidence that Reagan's policy was a failure, no particular outcome is evidence that it was a success.
One Reagan foreign policy initiative almost no one tries to defend is trading weapons for hostages in Iran-Contra. It was morally contemptible, it violated one of the central principles that got Reagan elected, it trampled the very value of democracy it was ostensibly designed to promote. And it didn't even work.
But the question history must decide is: Was it better or worse than oral sex with an intern [what Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky]? It seems to me that subverting the Constitution on an important policy matter is worse than embarrassing everybody with your private squalor. It seems to others that overzealousness in freedom's cause is easier to forgive than raw self-satisfaction. Whoever is right about that, the mantra of the Lewinsky scandal was that the lying, not the original transgression, is what counts. If so, Reagan's sins are at least equal to Clinton's. He never testified under oath until he was out of office and his claims not to remember things had become sadly believable. But at the height of the scandal Reagan lied to us on television just as spectacularly as Clinton did, with that little shake of the head, rather than a Clintonian bite of the lower lip, as his signature gesture of phony sincerity.
The Man, the Myths
Don't believe everything you hear about Ronald Reagan.
By DavidGreenberg
9 June 2004, Slate, <http://slate.msn.com/id/2102060>
During crises and other shared public experiences, the news media often stop worrying about their mission to tell the truth. Instead, they take on the role of national rabbi or shaman, fostering a collective sense of good feeling by recounting stories and myths we wish to hear. Since Ronald Reagan's death, the media have chosen mostly to do just that, sugar-coating his life and career rather than grappling with his difficult legacy. Herewith, then, some myths about Reagan now being bruited about and why they don't do justice to the man's complexity.
Myth No. 1: Reagan, the "Great Communicator," owed his success mainly to his facility with television and public relations. From his first forays into politics, observers hailed Reagan for his undeniable skill in front of the camera. His acting talent, though never much admired when he was actually an actor, allowed him to master the televised speech and the nightly news clip. A myth thus took hold that Reagan embodied the triumph of style over substance, image over reality.
The myth was suited to the period when television became central to politics. It flattered aides such as Michael Deaver and David Gergen, who received credit for masterminding his generally favorable coverage. Above all, it comforted Reagan's liberal opponents, who could reassure themselves that the public didn't really support his conservative policies and had simply been duped by Hollywood showmanship.
Reagan, however, promised—and largely delivered—substantive policies that a majority of the electorate (at least come election time) desired. He may not have fulfilled his pledge to radically shrink the overall size of government, as Tim Noah has noted, but he reasserted American military prowess, led a backlash against liberal permissiveness, and pruned social services that many middle-class voters had no wish to keep supporting. Even many people ill-served by Reaganomics supported him, not because they were fooled by clever image-making but because he both articulated their conservative values and enacted policies that moved the country rightward.
Myth No. 2: Reagan was a uniter, not a divider. Reagan's tenure is being depicted as a brief moment of national unity before the advent of today's strident partisanship. In fact, apart from Richard Nixon, it's hard to think of a more divisive president of the 20th century. As I've noted, Reagan was, during his first two years, one of the least-liked presidents of the postwar age. The festering economic doldrums, the worsening Cold War tensions, and doubts about his temperament conspired to make him less popular than Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, and even Carter were at comparable points in their terms. Nor was Reagan's second term free of strife. Starting in 1986, the Iran-Contra scandal revived widespread criticism of his leadership—including calls for his impeachment—and his poll ratings went into free fall.