President Reagan has come to a unique distinction among the past presidents. No other president comes close to the relentless play his memory and image are getting from Republicans determined to deny and distort history. They are counting on their campaign to immortalize him, to anoint him with sainthood, to give him a place in history that is at odds with history. But the roadblock that they can’t conquer will always be there: He personified political paradox, swimming in contradictions and ironies. His favorite words: “Trickle down.” At last, a demigod of corporate power, Wall Street, the One Percent. The only president seemingly who didn’t know that the pulse of democracy is trickle up, not trickle down.
One of the large ironies of his political career lay in his ardent devotion to the Democratic Party for most of his Hollywood years. It made his political success an enduring contradiction of real conservatism: fiscal responsibility had long been the hallmark of Republican faith. It died without the funeral it deserved because the GOP couldn’t face the embarrassment.
Yet none of the contradictions he practiced was larger than his incessant claim that “government is not the solution, government is the problem.” He knew better, of course. He knew that the great advances that the nation made in the 20th century were largely the products of public-private partnering. The towering example was the Allies’ complete victory over the fascist Axis, led by American industrialization that dwarfed anything the world had seen before. It was the crowning gamble of the FDR presidency, whose vision and dividends would keep the USA tracking to become the lone superpower well before the turn of the millennium.
I remember as a boy the excitement that swept Utah County when ground was broken on the eve of WWII for the new USSteel works that would replace the old Geneva swimming resort on the edge of Utah Lake. It came from FDR’s desire to put more basic industry inland, out of range of Nazi submarines and Japanese bombers. It was consistent too with the initiatives that FDR had chosen to fight the Great Depression.
Victory in WWII would play out as the ultimate public-private partnership. It’s a history that neither Reagan worshippers or Tea Party zealots can change. It topped a series of public-private partnerships that would go on forging two incomparable, interlocking rewards: American economic and military supremacy and an unrivaled middle class that was the envy of the world. Other important strides that sprang from FDR’s vision include, but are by no means limited to, the vast expansion of basic infrastructure, notably waterworks and sewer systems, revival of the South also through dams that provided both river management and huge new lakes afloat in booming recreational pleasures.
But these historic lessons were lost on RR and his camp. Accustomed as they were to Hollywood living, they were dimly aware at best that the thriving middle class was the workhorse that in the second half of the 20th century was at last making America the fulfillment of its dreams of life, liberty, and happiness.
What they were aiming for instead was an America that would work to their advantage. Sadly, RR’s insistence that “government’s the problem” would not only contradict history but also his own politics. It would slacken those great lessons and rewards. Their motive and ideal were one and the same: trickle down. Their America would become one that rode the twin rails of privilege and advantage, working together as hand and glove. Each was its own reward.
The camp that came with him to the White House was light on conservatives and deep in a new breed becoming popularly known as neoconservatives, or neocons. The contradiction of Reagan they embodied was approaching government “the problem” as something else: a work to be molded to their liking, to their benefit.
They moved boldly to choke conservatives with their own petard, by ramping up defense. Always-arms-happy Casper Weinberger was given the Pentagon, and as secretary of defense he immediately ordered production of a score of new weapons systems. Reagan fans will always insist that this buildup of arms hit the Soviet Union with the competitive pressure that sank it. But the larger truth found the USSR unable to rise from the ravages of World War II and the devastation left by Hitler’s armies. The endless American shipments of essential supplies that enabled the Red Army and a bitter winter to stop Hitler cold had long since ceased. The largest country on the planet was left too poor to resuscitate either its bumbling bureaucracy or its basic industry. Beyond co-opting captured German scientists into helping it produce its own atomic bombs, it had no chance of making itself competitive in the economic boom that followed the war. My dear late-wife Carol, watching TV news, remarked several times, “How do the Russians imagine competing, when they can’t grow good potatoes two years in a row, or build a car that isn’t junk after 10,000 miles?”
But against this history, the neocons loved the arms race too much to give it up. Most of the new arms on which the Reagan White House was accelerating production were delivered on budget-busting cost overruns, with huge profits lining the pockets of the makers, who then were doubly happy that they were Reagan boosters. All as intended by the neocons.
Who were conservatives to complain? How dare they think they could have their cake and eat it too? With more defense their first priority in the Cold War, they would have to swallow the cost. Thus, in stunning contradiction of the Grand Old Party’s oldest and dearest plank, the national debt would double under President Reagan. History must have blinked twice: the national debt doubling under a Republican president! Absolutely unthinkable — until it happened.
Untraceable in the red ink was RR’s war within the war. Col. Ollie North was given the basement of the White House to orchestrate the secret war that zealous reactionaries were promoting to sink a small commie beachhead in Central America. Congress was never consulted, the Constitution be damned! It was easily the most impeachable gambit ever made by a president. But the rather recent embarrassment of the fatally criminalized Nixon presidency left both the public and the Congress without stomach to dig at the Reagan-North crimes.
The neocons were succeeding in spades. Government was the clay with which they were making it a monument to themselves — in the image, of course, of RR. The federal payroll was much bigger on RR’s last day in office than on the first. And, lots and lots of the red ink he was spilling was ending up — one way or another — in the pockets of the Bohemian cronies and allies of his California days.
Spilling on too into the 21st century has been the lingering misdirection of “trickle down.” It came to an abrupt pause in the Bill Clinton presidency, whose years of job growth showed promise of a middle-class revival. But that hope was dampened by the non-election of George W. Bush, who was handed the White House by a 5-4 vote of the right-leaning Supreme Court, which had rejected Democratic pleas for a recount of the Florida returns that could have put Vice President Gore in the Oval Office.
While Bush II pledged a reign of “compassionate conservatism,” he invoked priorities that quickly turned the pledge hollow. Certain Congress would show good faith by granting his first wish, he won a code-wide tax cut that no one else was pressing for, thus keeping faith with Reagan on “trickle down” but targetting all the compassion on the rich. With Vice President Cheney at his elbow, pointing the way, he would prove a match for RR also as a warrior.
They had the attack on Iraq in mind even before they took office. They needed only the word of one unreliable observer who claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (MSD) in the works to launch the invasion. They had first wooed Congress into neutrality with lies they used Secretary Colin Powell to tell the United Nations. Their strike on Baghdad treated the world to a show of military “shock and awe” unlike anything it had seen before. The president took to military uniform on a carrier deck to declare with banner “Mission Accomplished.” More than a decade later the “shock and awe” lingers on in rising national debt, which for the second time was doubled under a Republican president. Unthinkable — until it happened.
Between that unconscionable Iraq War and the Great Recession — larger in every way than the Great Depression — that the deceitful Bush-Cheney reign of “compassionate conservatism” handed on to President Obama, their presidency is bound to be remembered as the most destructive in American history.
Yet its bloodline flows clearly from the “trickle down” that RR and the neocons have delivered in spades. It has given us an endless string of budget deficits, but for Clinton’s second term, and a future of growing inequality, an insecure middle class, an endangered ecosystem, relentless extremism of both political and religious bents, and spreading oligarchy that turns cherished capitalism on its head.
The 21st century already is showing us that TD, oligarchy, smaller government and evangelical fervor, singularly or combined, form no defense against terrorism, the Mafia and like gangs, corporate power, Wall Street abuses, or climate change. A true list of serious threats and risks is much longer, obviously. All are fed in one degree or another by our assorted appetites.
Capitalism is driven to oligarchy by ego and greed. Marx counted on capitalism never working the way it’s meant too for its own success. Capitalism becomes the snake that swallows itself when it concentrates wealth more than it spreads it. Great wealth is no guarantee of security for the long run. Consumer economics no longer holds the promise of the good life.
Nature is rewarding our wasteful ways with a trickle down of its own. As the polar ice caps keep trickling away, every inch that the oceans rise erases trillions of dollars in coastal enterprise and property values. As the glaciers also trickle away, safe water supplies will become increasingly problematic on every continent. The serious minds in science, business and economics are telling us this century has grave challenges coming hard in waste management and pollution control. Will our answer be an epidemic of drug addiction? Or will we find it in the NRA and Second Amendment?
So much for the legacy of Ronald Reagan and TD. Stubborn revisionists can’t sweeten it. Still-eager neocons and the endless arms race can’t redeem it. They, not he, are at fault. An endless arms race was not his wish. Military muscle was his answer to the Cold War. But it has played on into a conspiracy of arms-makers and gun-nuts that ironically threatens freedom itself.
Its price has become more than a chronic string of budget deficits. It dogs the Tea Party with hypocrisy because it makes smaller government unworkable, since it claims one half of the discretionary spending of the annual federal budget. It equals the combined military budgets of the other ten largest nations. Such might makes its own engine of fear. It keeps us fearful, though we know instinctively that military muscle is not the cure for terrorism.
Rarely recalled in the lessons of leadership that FDR gave America and the world in the triumph of democracy over WWII fascism was his manifesto of the Four Freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The desired fruits of American democracy were never better uttered, yet always left to WeThePeople and the Constitution to defend. It is terribly sad that the Supreme Court in its narrowing grasp of law, in its preoccupation with technicalities, can’t realize this. By opening the Bill or Rights to corporate power, as it did in 2010 in Citizens United, the court has lessened the people’s claim on the Four Freedoms, and reinforced TD.
Ronald Reagan could hardly have imagined that wealth and privilege would set the stage for a 21st century global showdown between corporate power and terrorism. Fear will grow and so will guns, both fed by the NRA and the gun-makers who swell the NRA budget. The gun nuts can see only their own right to pack heat. But what about the folks without guns, who are nearly two-thirds of the nation’s households? They keep no guns because most fear them — as they should — since the fatalities from use and misuse of guns approach the highway toll every year. When will they bring a class action against the NRA for infringing their freedom from fear?
Second Amendment fever has helped TD grow the arms race and corporate power into the ultimate double-barrel shotgun. But all the firepower in the world won’t defeat terrorism. That’s a battle of the spirit. Have consumer economics and material comfort so soften free people that they can’t outlast the extremists? Or make peace with the earth?
All the wealth in the world won’t tame global warming. The rich can run, but they can’t hide. They can’t buy off science, either. If the oceans rise ten feet within the century, as some scientists foresee, most of what passes for wealth today will drown. The oceans — not the churches, not the scientists — will have the last word. Unless, of course, people of every stripe vastly modify their ways of life. May we learn that to live better is to live simpler, and survive? The odds are long, and the time is short. So short.
Yet science estimates that our solar system and the earth could well live another five billion years. With the oceans taking charge, they may yet make another start. Let the earth rest a million years, then Adam and Eve might get another chance. It’s been the opinion of a brilliant psychiatrist friend that “Our race has been one of God’s failed experiments.” Surely God deserves another chance – if He wants one. Or needs one. The Hubble is showing us a universe whose vastness suggests God may have bigger things to do. Real TD has only one source — the universe.
Frank Mensel — June 2014