In Which I Rise to Victor's Bait
In "Reagan: Almost Revolutionary," his post below, my friend and hero Victor Davis Hanson proves intentionally and mischievously provocative. Also successfully. The proof? I'm provoked. To take each of Victor's accusations in turn:
Item: "Reagan signed an abortion bill."
True. As governor of California, Reagan did sign what was then one of the most liberal abortion laws in the nation. He agonized beforehand, concluding that fetuses represented human life and that abortions could therefore only be justified in the interest of the mother's medical well-being. He sought--and received--extensive assurances from the medical community that abortions would take place only rarely, and only when truly medically necessary. Very soon after signing the legislation, Reagan realized he'd been duped, and he regretted it for the rest of his life, becoming, and remaining, staunchly pro-life. See for yourself.
Item: Reagan "provided blanket amnesty in disastrous fashion."
Wrong. Completely. The 1986 immigration bill that Reagan signed did indeed grant amnesty to the three million or so aliens then in the country illegally, but--a point often overlooked--the legislation also contained stringent new measures to shut down illegal immigration from that point on. What went wrong? In subsequent years the federal government utterly failed to enforce these new measures. But by the time this breakdown became clear, Reagan had left office. An amnesty for a modest number of immigrants in return for secure borders from then on. There was nothing "disastrous" about that, and if the feds failed to enforce the law, the blame falls on subsequent chief executives, not the Gipper.
Item: Reagan "started withholding taxes in California."
True--although he resisted doing so for a good long time before, under intense pressure from the whole apparatus of the state government, he finally gave him. Care to guess who made the same mistake? Milton Friedman, who, in the Treasury Department during the Roosevelt years, advocated tax withholding. Nobody's perfect.
Item: Reagan "raised them [taxes] while in Washington."
Oh, please. Yes, Reagan raised taxes, but the critical question, surely, is what he did on net. The answer: he cut taxes a lot more than he raised them. After enacting the biggest income tax cuts in history in 1981, Reagan came under intense pressure again, agreeing in 1982 to take back part--but only part--of his tax cuts if Congress would reduce spending. (Does it go without saying that Congress welshed on the deal?) And then, with his 1986 tax reform, Reagan reduced tax rates once again.
Item: After the 1983 bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Reagan was guilty of "fleeing Lebanon."
True--with important qualifications. As Donald Rumsfeld demonstrates in his new memoir, Known and Unknown--Rumsfeld served as Reagan's Mideast envoy--whereas Reagan's own instincts were to remain in Lebanon, everyone else wanted out. Everyone? Yup. Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher included. You could argue that Reagan should have overridden the counsel even of these tough-minded, courageous advisors. What you can't argue is that Reagan simply cut and ran in some sort of spasm of cowardice.
Which leads to an important question of historical judgment. Rumsfeld gets to it in the title of his book, which of course comes from his remarks during the war in Iraq that there are "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns." During the nineteen-eighties, the Reagan administration was focussed on defeating the Soviet Union--and, of course, did so. Terrorism tended to be seen in the government as disconnected acts by separate groups with disparate grievances. The notion that terrorists of all kinds might make common cause under the banner of a radical form of Islam or that they might represent a systematic threat to the United States--this was something new, something that a few figures here and there (George Shultz, for one) seem to have glimpsed, but to which the government as a whole, including Reagan himself, was not awake. It represented, in some basic way, an "unknown unknown."
Should the government have been awake to the terrorist threat? Should Reagan have been? It would have been good, obviously, if they had been. But, again, should they have been? That strikes me as a hard question.
Consider Churchill and FDR. During the Second World War, they devoted all their energies to defeating Hitler. Churchill opposed Bolshevism as a young man, between the wars. And yet during the war, there he is, working hard to ingratiate himself with Stalin. In Moscow in 1944, Churchill connived with Stalin in dividing up Eastern Europe--we have the notes in Churchill's own hand.
Then, at Yalta in 1945, Churchill and FDR cooperated with Stalin in ceding Poland, Czechoslovakia and much else to Stalin entirely. Yes, the Red Army was already in possession of much of Eastern Europe. But you can't read the notes of the Yalta Conference without shaking your head in dismay. Why didn't FDR and Churchill push harder? Why didn't they refuse to permit themselves to become implicated in the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe?
The answer, of course, is that they were still busy fighting Hitler in Europe and Japan in the Pacific--Yalta took place six months before the first test of an atomic bomb. The Soviet overlordship of half of Europe--the whole Communist enterprise that would do so much to blight the second half of the twentieth century--FDR and Churchill simply were not awake to it. Churchill knew better, you could argue--just over a year later he would deliver his "Iron Curtain" speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. But at Yalta? Even Churchill failed to demonstrate the kind of burning moral indignation you might have expected.
Of course it would have been better if Reagan had grasped the terrorist threat, just as it would have been better if Churchill and FDR had at least laid down moral and diplomatic markers at Yalta, refusing to cooperate quite so completely with the Soviets. But should Reagan? Should Churchill and FDR? As I say, this strikes me as a hard question. History is the story of fallible beings. We ourselves prove naive if, in retrospect, we expect too much of them.
My. I can hardly wait for Victor's reply.
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May '10
Re: In Which I Rise to Victor's Bait
Anyhow, sorry for that long, broken-up post! I obviously took your bait on Churchill and Central and Eastern Europe! To summarize, by Yalta there wasn't much the West could have done about Eastern Europe, even had WC made a point of it. As for Central Europe, WC could have been more forceful, but there wasn't necessarily a need at that point. The West could have still influenced most of the region toward neutrality had it taken the necessary actions afterward. Churchill pushed these actions, but his position was turned down.
Edited on February 22, 2011 at 11:02pmDec '10
Re: In Which I Rise to Victor's Bait
Michael Labeit
Nickolas: Reagan... became a Republican and he became more conservative and libertarian, in particular about the role of government in the economy and in domestic affairs.
He concluded government is part of the problem, not part of the solution, and he said so.
I think most libertarians would dispute this and I would agree with them. I wrote a member feed on Reagan's advocacy of government intervention and the scathing reviews of him by his libertarian detractors. Many admire his rhetoric but treat him as a kind of fraud.
Note I did not say Reagan was a libertarian. I said he became more libertarian.
Also, I think there are degrees of libertarianism. I've posted this before -- Libertarian Purity Test.
Though some may disagree, the test's author, Bryan Caplan, is a certainly a libertarian and he seems to recognize a spectrum. Reagan held some libertarian views, such as the one I note above.
Speaking from my own experience with the Libertarian Party, most who are not LP members who self describe as libertarian would not be considered "libertarian" if judged by the members of the LP. And they may be right.
Jan '11
Re: In Which I Rise to Victor's Bait
I guess this is proof that there's no "JournoList" for the right. The vast right wing conspiracy fails yet again; sigh.
Dec '10
Re: In Which I Rise to Victor's Bait
Ronald Reagan was a great man who made some great errors.
Re: In Which I Rise to Victor's Bait
Peter Robinson
Could one imagine Churchill's demonstrating greater indignation at Yalta? His storming over to the villa where FDR was staying to insist on seeing the president? For that matter, his refusal to sign the final documents? Yes, one can at least imagine something like that--and, in light of more than four decades of the effective enslavement of half of Europe, one can really crave for some sign, on the record, that Churchill at least felt an impulse to do so. Then reality settles in. Churchill was constrained in a hundred ways, just as you say. Expecting him to have done more may simply be unrealistic and unfair.
Just so--and this is my point--Victor's charge that Reagan fled from Lebanon. One can certainly imagine Reagan's grasping the terrorist threat as we grasp it today, then taking the battle to the terrorists themselves. But over the objections of his Secretary of Defense? And of Margaret Thatcher? Again, a sense of historical reality settles in. · Feb 22 at 12:33pm
At the time, I cannot imagine WSC doing what you suggest. Politically and economically, he was at his wit's end.
Re: In Which I Rise to Victor's Bait
Peter Robinson
Just so--and this is my point--Victor's charge that Reagan fled from Lebanon. One can certainly imagine Reagan's grasping the terrorist threat as we grasp it today, then taking the battle to the terrorists themselves. But over the objections of his Secretary of Defense? And of Margaret Thatcher? Again, a sense of historical reality settles in. · Feb 22 at 12:33pm
I can imagine Reagan doing just what you describe. He did something of the sort at Rejkavik. But I am nonetheless with you against Victor. He had much bigger fish to fry at the time. The mistake was going into Lebanon in the first place. Useful rule of thumb: Never start something you do not intend to finish.
Jun '10
Re: In Which I Rise to Victor's Bait
Reagan should properly be measured against Carter. Churchill should be compared to Chamberlain. FDR was sick, debilitated and dying in late 1944, but he did give us the right man in Truman. It's too easy to criticize on the basis of what might have been done. Better to offer the laurels of victory for what was done.
May '10
Re: In Which I Rise to Victor's Bait
WSCh's unhappiness w. Yalta ame from his perception of supreme irony: "We went into WWII because Poland was attacked, we spent our treasury, sacrified million lives, destroyed our cities and broke the empire, and in the end... Poland is not free..."
For me, as a Czech, and believe me - I live-eat-dream WWI, WWII and Cold War, the whole bloody century - the culprit, as in WWI / W.Wilson, was FDR and especially Eisenhower. The US Army penetreted the ancient Czech-German border in January 1945, then waited, and waited... When Prague burned in the last spasms of WWI on May 5th, US Army was 45 km and observing the carnage by binoculars! Yes, Eisenhower, was a gentleman, he kept his word. It's sad Stalin wasn't, but sadder still that Eisenhower trusted him!
Sep '10
Re: In Which I Rise to Victor's Bait
This is probably the most sensible and thoughtful comment on this entire thread.
Comparing even Reagan to today's standards commits a mortal sin offerred by many of today's "historians"; that being the judging of people in the past against today's sensibilities.
FDR and Churchill were lions in war and there is no disputing that. Could anyone in today's Democratic Party even come close to FDR or Truman? I really doubt it. I doubt many Republicans today could stand as tall. George W. Bush probably couldn't hold a candle to them either, considering even he allowed frankly ridiculous rules of engagement to exist under his watch in Iraq.
Dec '10
Re: In Which I Rise to Victor's Bait
No man single-handedly changes the world. Reagan did single-handedly subdue union activism for a generation.
Re: In Which I Rise to Victor's Bait
I note only that Peter qualified rather than refuted my points, and ignored my homage that located Reagan's conservatism in a much more difficult political and lonely climate of the 1970s and 1980s than is true today. I also note that sometimes the qualification is reduced to the absurd, such as the defense of, yes, the disastrous 1986 immigration law on the logic that the "feds" did not do what Reagan apparently wanted. But was not Reagan the chief of the feds "in subsequent years", say from 1986 through 1988? Thematic in Peter's lament is that those around Reagan did not carry through on what Reagan "really" intended (e.g., immigration, Lebanon, etc.). I liked Reagan a great deal and found him far better than most all who succeeded him, but an occasional lax executive style, at best, led to some "disastrous" decisions, and at worst a certain naivete.
Edited on February 24, 2011 at 12:13amJul '10
Re: In Which I Rise to Victor's Bait
On the score of who is or isn't a libertarian, or Libertarian, I have never attended a Libertarian Party social event where the conversation was not dominated by the who in the room is more libertarian, who in the room should not be there (so collect his dues before calling him out), that guy over there has been showing up for twenty years for no reason we can discern, and how do we get females to come to the meeting, or join, or to respond when greeted or asked questions, and so it goes.
Full points to Reagan for Income tax reform, economic management, his "industrial policy," preparing the end of the Cold War, SDI, and not sticking it to the depositors in the S&L crisis. That he accomplished what he did with opposition control of Congress is proof of his worth. My recollection is that the enforcement element of the Amnesty bill was crippled in the Congressional budget process, while the promised Congressional cuts from various concessions by Reagan never materialized.
My take on Reagan remains, his primary goal was to win the Cold War, which was not supposed to be possible, and he did.
Edited on February 24, 2011 at 5:46am