I’m one who rarely looks on the "bright side," but the news of the last few weeks has been so depressing that I feel as if I have to indulge in some optimism, at least for a moment. To that end, I think one of the few positive things that may come out of the collapse of the US economy is that, at long last, the reality of Ronald Reagan’s legacy will finally be shown for what it is - a bizarre mix of cynicism, ignorance, naivety, short-sightedness and above all, failure. It’s a legacy that has given rise to a body politic that’s more concerned with the advancement of ideology over reality, that promotes selfishness over solidarity, and anti-intellectual ignorance over knowledge.
It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that it was his legacy that’s to blame for the current mess. While it’s easy to point the finger at George W. Bush - and don’t get me wrong, when it comes to competency, Bush makes Reagan look stellar by comparison - the systematic trashing of the United States of America goes back to a time before W. and Rove, back when Junior’s two biggest concerns were scoring high-grade Peruvian cocaine and determining how many shots of Jack Daniels a human being can endure before lapsing into an alcohol poisoning-induced coma. Now then, let us commence:
Racism And The Politics of Polarization
The indictment of Reagan on this count is not so much that he gained from the existing polarization that was an unhappy consequence of the civil rights movement, but rather that, instead of exercising leadership and working to heal racial divisions, he encouraged it and developed a veneer of respectability for it in the form of his classical liberal message. While I doubt that Reagan himself harbored much ill-sentiment towards black Americans, he cynically provoked racism on a near-constant basis. His very first campaign event in 1980 was at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi - near the site of one of the most brutal hate crimes in American history - where he proudly proclaimed "I believe in states' rights!" to a crowd of cheering white Mississippians.
Now, while one can certainly support strict federalism without having a racist bone in their body, it's no secret that this sort of rhetoric has been used for decades as a way to incite and appeal to racist sentiment, while simultaneously cloaking the true message in language that is more respectable and less virulent. If anyone doubts this, I'd encourage you to merely visit a bar anywhere in the rural south and mention "states' rights" - the amount of time before one of the locals goes off on an unambiguously racist tear will likely be measured in nanoseconds. Perhaps Reagan was legitimately worried that Federal civil rights legislation would result in an omnipotent police state, perhaps it was pure cynicism, or perhaps it was the second combined with politicians' seemingly endless capacity for self-deception. In the end, it doesn't really matter; the damage to race relations and national unity was done either way. Even worse is that this, combined with shameless pandering on "social issues," has given rise to a large constituency that is quite frankly, insane.
Abortion And The Rise Of The Delusional Right
Since the founding of the American Republic, there has been a large contingent of the public that has adhered to various brands of extremist, fundamentalist Christianity. However, seeing the danger these people posed to the survival of a secular, constitutional government, most elected leaders largely ignored the groups now known collectively as "Christian Conservatives." The fundamentalists believed that the US government was inherently corrupt, and by participating in a corrupt system, they were approving of it. The religious right didn't vote, and the powers that be were content to pursue a live-and-let-live approach towards them. Elected officials of both parties understood that those who subscribe to a faith which says that religious scripture is the ultimate authority in legal matters is ultimately incompatible with a government of laws.
But Reagan and his supporters, hell-bent on getting elected and implementing laissez-faire purism, exploded this unspoken agreement. Allying themselves to fundamentalist leaders, they successfully used "wedge" or "social" issues (many racially tinged) such as abortion, drug abuse, crime, and welfare to turn out Christian conservatives in record numbers. And, for the better part of three decades, this cynical agreement resulted in a political windfalls for the GOP. However, they apparently didn't realize what the ramifications of this would be. The business elites who bankrolled these efforts thought that they could simply make the religious right into "useful idiots," pocketing the fundamentalist vote but keeping firm control of the GOP's politics and policy. Oh, how they were ever wrong.
By the 1992 Republican National Convention, the fundamentalists had seized virtually every component of the Republican machine. Social moderates who agreed with many aims of the far right but knew well that their coercive means could not possibly succeed, found themselves increasingly ostracized and isolated. GOP moderates simply couldn't rally the same level of support that the extremists could. Republican primaries increasingly degenerated into little more than litmus tests to determine who would support the most reactionary, draconian policies. Meanwhile, the investor class continued to ignore the very real threat these developments posed to the GOP and the nation as a whole. Sure, there were immense short-term political benefits, but by 2004 the GOP had passed the point of no return. The Republican establishment, beginning with Reagan, willfully infected their party with a parasite, and now that parasite fully owns its supposed host.
The public eventually got wise to this reality, and the Democrats reaped the gains in the back-to-back landslides of 2006 and 2008. Yet the threat to republican (small-"r") government Reagan helped create continues to grow. Any democratic society needs at least two viable political parties to be sustainable, and the religious right, by demanding more and more attention even as their relative importance has declined, has seriously endangered this viability. The inevitable result of the GOP's wars against science, personal freedom, and reason generally is that the "moderate majority" increasingly finds Republican ideas to be either laughable or irrelevant. Politically, the GOP currently has a lock on the poorest, least educated locations in the country - places in the south and mountain west where rural cultures are still dominant - but not much else. This is Reagan's political legacy, and it's an enormous problem for the country. Thanks for bringing the crazies out of the woodwork, Gip.
Reagan's Disastrous Foreign Policy
No matter what, anytime someone criticizes Reagan, his apologists invariably bring up the collapse of the Soviet Union. Anyone who's ever listened to conservative talk radio has probably heard the mythology that "Reagan ended the Cold War." While it's true that his communicative skills helped rally the world to the cause of the US during the 1980s, this is more than overshadowed by the numerous blunders his administration made. Foremost among these is the very thing that makes him a hero to the right - the collapse of the USSR.
It's common knowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Empire was a victory for the USA and liberal democracy in general. After all, the Soviets were Communists - the "Evil Empire." It was a glorious day when Gorbachev finally declared the USSR to be no more, right? I mean, how could anyone dispute that?
In fact, it's a dogma that is not only easily disputed, but for informed citizens, quickly debunked. You know, there's a saying about "common knowledge" - it's knowledge that everybody has and nobody questions, but which is usually wrong. While there have been many positive developments from the USSR's implosion, the fact that its collapse is almost universally regarded as a triumph is little more than a testament to the power of political marketing.
The truth is that Gorbachev's election marked a sea change in Soviet Politics. When he assumed office, the USSR's centrally-planned economy was on the verge of collapse; the Soviets could crank out jet fighters and tanks by the thousands, but without a functioning market system, economic planners were completely unable to determine meaningful prices for consumer products and capital. The result was chronic shortages in some areas, surpluses in others, and nearly endless waste. The average Soviet citizen spent weeks every year standing in line for basic necessities like food, clothing, even toilet paper.
Gorbachev realized this and moved to open Soviet society, liberalize the economy, and transition from command socialism to the market-based paradigm of social democracy in the mold of the Scandinavian countries. The Soviet military was also mired in a quagmire with the American-sponsored Mujahadeen militias in Afghanistan, a conflict that the struggling economy could not afford. And yet when the new Soviet government reached out to Reagan for help in these endeavors, they were shocked by the stubborn, petulant, ideologically-motivated, adversarial attitude of the American administration. Rather than work with the Soviets - as we had with the Chinese, beginning with Nixon - Reagan, on the advice of his neo-conservative advisers, ramped up defense and covert ops spending, lavished subsidies on energy companies in order to artificially suppress the price of Soviet exports (essentially a de facto blockade), and severely restricted the flows of capital and technology necessary for the USSR to rebuild.
The results? By the end of the Reagan administration, the Soviet Union was rapidly approaching bankruptcy. Gorbachev and the reformers had burned up much of their political capital, and the hard-liners were ascendant. After an attempted coup by the military, the Soviet state simply collapsed. The former Soviet Republics splintered, and most of the population of Eastern Europe was plunged into squalor. In many of these new states, dictatorial strongmen filled the power vacuum. After Bush I's defeat, the Clinton administration was forced to back Yeltsin's increasingly corrupt and totalitarian actions to prevent the Communist Party of Russia - now divested of the moderates - from once again seizing power. The chance for an open, democratic society in Russia was probably effectively destroyed right away, but the hope continued to wither away for years. Meanwhile, the Russian people still hadn't seen many appreciable increases in their living standards years after the end of communism.
The rest, as they say, is history. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB operative, assumed the Russian Presidency - along with the strongman role played by the likes of Stalin and Khrushchev. While it once looked as if the United States and the USSR were headed toward genuine peaceful coexistence - if not outright friendship - those hopes have been dashed. While the blame doesn't belong solely to him, it was Reagan who effectively sabotaged the efforts of a moderate, pragmatic, pro-western reformer in the foolish pursuit of a righteous victory for the west and neo-liberal ideology. Now we're left with the adversarial big-man duo of Putin and Medvedev - you know, the team that's eliminated the free Russian press, nationalized the oil and gas industries, and is currently putting long-range bombers into Venezuela.
Reagan's Energy Policy: Saudi Arabia First
With the two oil shocks in the 1970's, Jimmy Carter was acutely aware of the grave dangers America's dependence on oil imports posed to our economic, financial, diplomatic and military strength. Furthermore, after being forced into the articulating the Carter Doctrine, he also saw much sooner than most how detrimental the oil companies' expanding influence over foreign policy matters had become. Carter embarked on a course to rapidly reduce this dependence: he created the Department of Energy, signed tough auto efficiency standards, championed renewable energy, and likened the challenge of reducing oil imports to the moral equivalent of war.
By every objective standard, Carter's energy policy was a success. Net oil imports fell dramatically during his administration; whereas the US was importing over 85 million net barrels per day when he assumed office in 1977, by the time he left office, that number had declined to less than 64 million - a staggering 25% reduction. The effects of his policies persisted after he left office, and the downward trend continued until 1985, when net imports bottomed at 43 million barrels per day. In other words, the Carter administration put in place a solution to America's energy crisis, and it was working.
However, soon after Reagan's inauguration, he began gutting Carter's energy initiatives. Reagan, obsessed as he was with laissez-faire ideology, saw these programs as wasteful big-government spending, and believed that the unfettered market would solve this and every other problem. Apparently, it never occurred to him that the cost of defending Middle Eastern supply lines and the risks to OPEC dependence weren't accounted for by the market. By his second term, Reagan's contempt for taxes and government generally kicked in to high gear, most significantly through rolling back fuel economy standards. After all, to Reagan and his followers, using a lot of oil is seen as a virtue.
Now, all of this could have immediately backfired, making him highly unpopular. However, he hit the political equivalent of the Power Ball jackpot, as North Sea crude production was being ramped up and Alaskan production peaked right at the end of his second term (to be fair, Alaskan production contributed partially to the aforementioned fall in net imports). Yet he got extremely lucky while the country has been left to suffer the effects of his policies, which not only eliminated the solution in place for this problem, but proactively encouraged its exacerbation, all while ridiculing efforts to ween the US from foreign oil imports as the pie-in-the-sky fantasies of "tax-and-spend liberals."
This is the end...
Reagan was a very skilled speech-maker, and his status as "The Great Communicator" is certainly deserved. However, as his relentless pandering to the lowest common denominator, his willful ignorance of reality, ideologically-driven style governance, and short-sightedness shows, I think a more apt title would be "The Great Masturbator" of public opinion. The current economic, financial, energy, and foreign policy crises the US faces are very much the legacy of the kick-the-can-down-the-road style of politics that this incompetent snake-oil salesman promoted. As such, his apologists have a great political advantage in that the effects of their elixir don't manifest themselves for a long time after the salesman has departed. Fortunately for the country, the American people finally decided to take the antidote last month.
Addendum - I wanted to include a section on Reagan's irresponsible, disgraceful fiscal policies, but I've already gone on too long and the ballooning of the national debt under his administration is quite well known anyways.
Cross-posted at my new blog, The Daily Elitist.