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The Long Shadow of Reagan
Seen the other night at a clothing store aimed at younger buyers
President Ronald Reagan represents the high-water mark of Republican presidencies within living memory. Eisenhower’s quiet leadership and managerial style are, much like Calvin Coolidge’s, largely forgotten. Nixon’s presidency was marked by an expansion of federal power, followed by a scandal and implosion. Ford is hardly worth mentioning. Bush 41 tried to tack away from Reagan on domestic matters and lasted only a single term. Bush 43 will be long associated with scandals and a collapsed economy, in spite of whatever good he did (and he did do a lot more than we normally acknowledge, but so much was temporary, and the rest is tainted).
Above all of the rest, Reagan stands as a colossus, casting a shadow on every candidacy and campaign. He is invoked as a totem, and, in a way, even prayed to as a saint. I spotted this sweater the other night at a clothing store aimed at ironic younger shoppers. All too often today, in conservative discussions on policy, tactics, or personality, you will eventually hear the phrase “What would Reagan do?”
Invocations of “Reagan” or “The Party of Reagan” or “Saint Ronaldus, Pray for Us” make as little sense to the party today as the Democrats’ constant invocation of JFK in the 1990s. We are now as far from Reagan’s presidency as JFK was from Herbert Hoover’s, or as Reagan himself was from the end of the Truman years. We are well past the time to recognize that even if we were to somehow revive the “Reagan Coalition” many, many of those voters are now beyond our reach (save in Chicago).
I was four when Reagan was elected and cherish those happy years coming to political awareness under his leadership. But people born after about 1984 would have little memory of his presidency, and those people are now 33/34 at the oldest. My youngest sister was born in 1990, so the earliest president she remembers is Bill Clinton. My eldest daughter will be able to vote in her first presidential election in 2020. The first president she remembers dimly is GWB, and the only one she remembers well is Obama.
All she has known is Obama’s relentless trolling, abuse of power, and personal attacks on conservatives. How would invoking Reagan’s appeal in any way to her? It would be like my parents trying to persuade me how to vote in the 1996 primary (my first) by invoking the Eisenhower years as a benchmark. Moreover, what my daughter implicitly understands of presidential power and its potential for misuse stems entirely from how much damage Obama did. For her, Obama and Trump are the new benchmarks for what a president could do, both for good or ill.
Time marches onward with a relentless pace and, as EJ Hill details, the benchmarks and touchstones of prior generations are ever and always sloughing off their mortal coils to be replaced by younger people. Our frame of reference, our collective living memory, always moves.
By 2020, the youngest people with any living memory of Reagan’s presidency will be 36, and most will be older. In 2020, the youngest voters will be 18, having been born in 2002, with their formative memories being the financial collapse of 2007-2009, and the eight years of Obama openly denigrating and mocking half the American populace on a regular basis.
The concerns of what drove people to vote for a Reagan type, the boom years of the ’80s and ’90s and 9/11, all happened before they were born. The War on Terror will have been continuous for their entire lives, assuming Trump doesn’t declare victory and pull back. We will have been in Afghanistan and Iraq for their entire collective memories. The Cold War will have been compressed to a paragraph or two at the back ends of their history textbooks, just one more footnote in what one professor of mine called “The motorcycle ride through the museum of history,” assuming that their teachers even get to that point in their classes by the end of the term.
Let us stop invoking the totem of Reagan as we address the strengths and weaknesses of the party over these next three years. We cannot summon him back to lead the party and even if we could (and if we could I think there is a painter in New Jersey we could tap to illustrate the possibilities), he would find this world a different place, and we and he would be estranged. Instead, let us take the world as we find it now. Let us continue to take Trump as we find him now. Let the past be the past, ironic Christmas sweaters aside.
This post is an expansion of a comment I made on @garyrobbins recent post.
Published in Politics
Herein lies the problem: the last time the Republican Party agreed on the relative greatness of one of our own leaders was the time of Ronald Reagan. I personally revere Bush 41 and Bush 43. But I represent about a third of the current Republican Party. We have a problem.
If the Republican Party were to build itself around someone, it really should be Reagan. No recent leader has amassed any kind of following that even closely approximates the size of Reagan’s.
Indeed. Walker is showing the way in Wisconsin. Engage the culture as it is, engage the problems people are bringing up. Don’t hide from conservative positions but sell them. But personality matters too.
It’s frustrating for me here in Illinois. Going on two decades now of almost complete Democrat control of city, county, and state and almost near bankruptcy and ruin with people and business fleeing. Where are the Republicans to rail against the madness and catastrophe? Where are the Republicans to come and pluck this low hanging fruit? Who knows; we got Bruce Rauner instead. We could really use a Reagan or even a Trump here locally. And why not? Illinois is still quite a jewel to be prized; we’re not dead yet and there’s plenty of room to grow.
The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that exulting Reagan would be the right way for the Republican Party to go.
Let us skip over the leaders we don’t agree about and put Reagan on a Jefferson-Adams pedestal.
Should a party be built around a person though? Especially a dead one? A party must be a living ideology that is actually in touch with its own times and issues. A person can certainly lead a party, but under our system such leadership is always temporary. What happens when that leader is out of office?
Many of the policies also have not changed. Doing the right things is always right and always brings results. People just don’t pay enough attention to history.
Such a pedestal would only be a memorial though, a historical anchor point in our memories. For all the USA has historically exalted Jefferson, Adams, or Washington, how often do we actually look back to their policies or practices when informing our own today? Not often, except when in search of a pithy quotation or a borrowing of the halo.
No, Skip, we should not build around a dead guy that half the country would revile (although the left would revile anyone on the right methinks). However, I think it’s unavoidable that coalitions are built around people. The more I experience the business world the more I regret not developing the “who you know” aspect as much as the the “what you know”. As much as I don’t want it too be that way, human nature needs both of these sides of the coin, and as conservatives we should acknowledge that truth and stop or battle against human nature so that we can instead align with human nature. Having personality doesn’t exclude having principles and vice versa. Real success in politics or culturally will require both.
Aren’t the Dems in the process of expelling Jefferson? I though there was a move to rename the Jefferson/Jackson dinners.
I’m not talking about some sick worship of a dead guy. I’m talking about quoting him often and looking to his speeches for inspiration.
I apologize if it came across that I was insulting Skipsul. I was just stating my thoughts at the moment about what he wrote.
I have nothing but respect for Skipsul and his intellect. :)
Reagan was born in Illinois. When everything falls apart, someone will pop up to fix. We’ve seen it here in Michigan.
The original post was posited to be about a person. You want me to respond to a different post.
No, the original post was saying the person, and all of the Republican Presidents before Trump, were not terribly relatable to the youts of ‘Merica.
On the other hand, it may be that most people like talking people more than they like talking policies.
I took no insult from your comment. :)
We’ll have to try harder.
I’ve been thinking about this.
The idiots who wear the Che shirts, or who invoke Lenin and the rest, do so out of supreme ignorance or naivite, neither knowing nor caring the full histories of these creeps. Especially with the Che shirts, they’re nothing more than virtue signaling shorthand for proving that the wearers are somehow compassionate rebels.
I would guess that the Reagan-Bush sweater I saw is likewise marketed to those who have neither the memory of, nor the interest in who Reagan was and what he meant to those of us who remember him fondly. It’s just a means for youthful fools to sport an ugly (to them) Christmas sweater that uses false 80s nostalgia for a laugh, just as I’ve seen teenagers wearing Atari or Misfits t-shirts as sold by Hot Topic. They wear the old symbols with frivolity, that mean and evoke so more for those who actually know and remember.
But I still want to punch the morons in the Che shirts.
I see your point, but be careful not to fall in with the wrong crowd. Some Republicans, young and old, have never liked the principals that Reagan brought to office.
Reaganism reached sort of a nadir during the Bush/Delay years with a massive expansion of government spending and regulation. The concept that the dollar should be “as good as gold” (Reagan’s words) was thrown out the window with a substantial devaluation.
The Weekly Standard lauded the new “big government conservatism,” and Ed Gillespie (the guy who just lost Virginia) gleefully declared that “the days of Reaganesque railing against big government are over.”
The policies of that era started the slow growth that has dogged the 21st century, worsened the 2008 crisis and gave us President Obama.
After our 2008 loss, David Frum and the “Reform Conservatives” splashed onto the scene saying that we need to “get past Reagan.” Not only that, they said we need to de-emphasize free markets and limited government. They seemed to think of free markets as appropriate for the eighties but not a good fit for the 21st century.
Frum and company didn’t seem to realize the they had already gotten their wish, bringing about the above described disastrous results.
I’m not politically astute enough to know how much we should talk about Reagan, but I’m dead certain we should keep his guiding principles.
I’m so glad.
It’s been bothering me.
Agreed again. Is it loaded any time we quote someone, though? “Calvin Coolidge once barely said…” and then the idea you bring forth is dependent completely on someone’s perception of that figure. Maybe it’s more appropriate and effective to borrow the ideas rather than the words. I think I’m nitpicking here, and I’m not meaning to pick apart this idea, just add to it.
(Warning: non sequitir) I’ve been monitoring the social justice wars over Marvel Comics (a childhood love) via YouTube. It’s led to a number of channels made by younger, even college-age, conservatives. They have all the right ideas and invoke the past as evidence rather than reverie. Some of us have fallen into a romantic trap in recent years, and some are still trapped in their perception of “it ain’t what it used to be.” No, it’s not; and it never will be, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be better.
That’s where Reagan’s (and others’) thoughts cross a threshold to vision. Vision, and the leadership to carry it out, is what has been primarily lacking and why we perceive a lack when it comes to these ideas. I think we’ve done a good job of articulation over the years, and a bad job of follow through…hence Washinton, D. C. as “swamp.”
I know that’s not where you were going, Marci, it’s just a side note that the message does resonate, even among youth who have had little reason and opportunity to hear it. It’s easy to think otherwise. Reagan himself revered accomplishments of the past, and constantly pointed our noses to the future.
And while I disagree with their ideology, I think electorally, they (not Frum specifically, but others who self-identify as Reformicons) may have had a point, as Trump’s victory demonstrates: Trump did go more populist, he was willing to talk as if free markets give voters a raw deal, and as if government should do things to give Americans a “good deal”, not just get out of Americans’ way – and he won.
Whatever policy is best, whatever ideology is best, a great many voters evidently like to hear that their government will do something for them, not just get off their backs. Even many who self-identify as rugged American individualists apparently like to hear this. I’m not great at the game of figuring out how much you have to tell people what they want to hear in order to accomplish X or Y. I don’t consider it a trustworthy game. But it’s a game that’s inevitably part of politics.
It has always been thus. Again, human nature never changes. Individual humans grow and learn and improve themselves, but the race is unchanging.
Oh, definitely.
What we often forget with Reagan is that one of his core arguments was getting the government off of our backs, and why this resonated so strongly at that time. Why has this not been getting traction in subsequent decades? It’s not as if the government has gotten any smaller, and there has been no lack of people invoking that argument (either on its own, or under the Reagan banner) ever since. But the argument still does not get any traction, and is often met with outright scorn even on the Right. Why is this?
Too many people think that they are benefiting from the size of the government and that people are trying to take something away from them, and the Democrats hit that line heavily. RWR sold his ideas with humor and examples of waste, fraud, and abuse that showed things were better done closer to home. We also need to do so.
You can say that again. These days the Republican Establishment is trying on many fronts to centralize and do away with state and local rule. This happened big time with banking during the reign of Bush the Elder, and is happening with energy policy, food labeling, occupational licensing, and internet regulation.
Outside of fear of an audit, the feds are basically nonexistent in my life. Everything else is just talking about abstractions.
The neverending campaign here in VA is a bigger problem in my life than pretty much everything being campaigned on.
Speaking of MI, I’ve been intrigued for awhile with this guy John James running for US Senator from Michigan.
Oh, I know they know not of what they speak (wear).
But with Communism, they’ve heard for years from their teachers and from the media that it’s all candy canes and rainbows, and that “it’s just never been tried.”
We need to get the word out that:
a) It has been tried; and
b) It leads to nothing but suffering for all but the very few on top.
How we get it through their heads, I’m not certain. It has to begin with either taking back or overthrowing the Academy, to be certain, because not only have the kids been taught the wrong things about Communism, they’ve been taught the wrong things about everything, starting with the ideas that the Nazis were right-wing. Hell, they’re probably being taught that the government of 1984 is right-wing by now.
Well said, @dnewlander, and may I point out, using your own words to address an issue directly in the tradition of Ronald Reagan without once using his name. I think maybe you just made @SkipSul‘s point :-)
I always think of this when these things come up.