Dutch's Political Legacy

After the mid-1990s, I fell into the co-editorship of H-Survey (the edited list for teachers of the beginning college course in U. S. history) and I met (virtually, at first—in person later) Richard Jensen. Jensen is one of the best political historians of his generation. Jensen—ahead of his time—was computer proficient and created/encouraged discussion groups (lists) on the Internet for historians. All of this has grown into H-Net with Web sites and lists for everything from H-1960s (history and legacy of the 1960s) to H-World (world history); in the midst of that collection is H-Survey (teaching United States history survey courses). Richard Jensen responded to the death of Ronald W. Reagan with this essay. If this is (fair & balanced) historical writing, so be it.

[x HNN]
The Man Who Was Responsible for Dividing the Country ... into Reaganite Republicans and Reaganite Democrats
By Richard Jensen

American politics today is evenly split into two camps, the Republican Reaganites and the Democratic Reaganites. Start with economics—no one had to tell Reagan, “it’s the economy, stupid!” Reagan’s first challenge was mending an economy in such deep trouble that most observers thought the country was permanently stagnating relative to its stronger competitors. Stagflation in 1980 was a combination of inflation and high unemployment. The Keynesian model said it was impossible: the theory was that the “Phillips curve” taught that you could always trade one for the other. Yet inflation was out of control and interest rates had soared to nearly 20 percent, making long-range planning almost impossible for corporations, and home mortgages prohibitively expensive for young couples. Reality destroyed Keynesianism; today it’s as dead as socialism. Critics said Reagan would need voodoo to slay that monster; his voodoo worked and it is the Democratic Reaganites (like Robert Rubin) who today warn against fiscal policies that threaten to raise interest rates again.


Reagan railed against the federal deficit—his screeds are echoed almost word for word by the Democratic Reaganites these days. (Government debt is indeed hurtful when interest rates are as high as they were in 1980; when they are as low as they are today, the debt is not much of a burden to ourselves or our grandchildren.) Reagan preached Supply Side Economics that combined basic themes of republicanism and efficiency. In terms of political ethics it reflected Grover Cleveland’s dictum that unnecessary taxation is unjust taxation—it is a corruption and an evil. In the name of efficiency, supply siders argued that cutting taxes would permanently boost the economy by releasing entrepreneurial spirits. The Republican Reaganites of course hold faithfully to the creed. Most Democrats, like John Kerry, have accepted it. (Kerry says he will only raise taxes on the undeserving super-rich, thus neutralizing the idea that unnecessary taxes are a corruption.) As for the empirical results of Supply Side, note that federal revenues, after declining in the first year after Reagan’s massive tax cuts, rebounded strongly – as predicted. Indeed, the economy that caused so much malaise in 1980 was roaring back in 1984: America was back, stronger than ever. The voters of 1984 of course realized that; 49 states rejected the old New Dealer, Walter Mondale.

The New Deal was largely reversed during the Reagan years. He did preserve the Social Security system, which was in danger of collapse. Thanks to a universally accepted compromise designed by his chief economist, Reagan and Congress raised the retirement age and thus dramatically reduced the future payouts and stabilized the system. That is Reagan lowered the implicit national debt. Reversing the hoary adage of the Progressive Era, he proclaimed, "Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.” He was an enemy of the welfare state—he cut some budgets and most important he transformed the terms of the debate.

Reagan’s redefinition of welfare as corrupt and inefficient allowed the triumph of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in 1995, when they abolished the most egregious features that perpetuated a cycle of poverty and dependence. No leading Democrat to the right of Dennis Kucinich now speaks of returning to the old system. Reagan was the foremost enemy of the regulatory state. He built a bipartisan coalition that swept away most of the remaining New Deal controls holding back industries such as banking, airlines, telecommunications, and trucking. People have complained about some of the effects, but no one wants to turn back the clock. As a trust-buster Reagan scored the biggest success since President Taft dissolved Standard Oil in 1911 by breaking up ATT, the New Deal’s favorite monopoly. Simultaneously he dropped the punitive attacks on big business that had characterized New Deal Democrats like Lyndon Johnson. (In his last week in office LBJ started a massive antitrust suit to break up IBM.. Seeing it as an unfair attack on entrepreneurial success, Reagan dropped the suit.)

Reagan was the one who finally buried the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982. Recall that the New Deal had also strongly opposed it, albeit for different reasons. Did women need special protection or could they achieve the American dream without special protections? Women soared under his watch. The enrollment of women in law school, business school, medical schools and the military rocketed upwards. This achievement was ignored by the militant feminists, who ideologically were unable to celebrate middle class success. But even they stood in awe when Reagan moved the Supreme Court to the right by making his first nomination--a conservative woman whom everyone had to vote for. He finalized conservative control by promoting William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, not to mention hundreds of young conservative lawyers who reshaped the federal district and appeals courts. Reagan’s judicial triumphs helped eventually to reverse the crime wave. After getting blown apart by the way Michael Dukakis mishandled the explosive crime issue in 1988, Democrats sought safety under the Reaganite umbrella. Today they nominate tough prosecutors like Kerry and take credit for adding 100,000 new police officers, building hundreds of thousands of new prison cells, and keeping them filled so that our streets are no longer so fearsome.

In foreign policy Reagan’s critics warned of Armageddon, making hysterical charges that he would destroy détente, ruin relations with our allies, and bring the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust. He did put détente on hold until Moscow did a 180 degree about face; then he rewarded Gorbachev with a series of astonishing arms reduction deals and set up the end of the Cold War. As for the allies, he did convince NATO countries to accept new missiles over the vehement protests of the peace movement and anti-American forces. More important in the long run was Reagan’s success in forging a special relationship with Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, setting up a partnership that to this day underpins the Bush-Blair alliance. The Democratic Reaganites hail Reagan’s achievement in ending the Cold War. In 1991 Jimmy Carter proclaimed, "Under President Ronald Reagan, the nation stayed strong and resolute and made possible the end of the Cold War." Just yesterday Kerry said Reagan had “shaped one of the greatest victories of freedom." They attribute Reagan’s triumph to his being inspired by Democratic Cold Warriors like Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, John Kennedy and Paul Nitze—which surely is more accurate than saying Reagan followed the Republican isolationist guidance of Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft. However I suggest the Democratic Reaganites misread history. Reagan after 1960 rejected containment, and came much closer to the ideas of James Burnham (of the National Review). Barry Goldwater was getting his “Why Not Victory” ideas from the same source, but lacked Reagan’s uncanny ability to disarm his critics. Reagan attacked Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger in 1976, and Carter in 1980 for pushing détente and setting up the humiliations suffered during the 1970s. That all ended with Reagan’s new policy of rollback. He started with Grenada in 1983—a small move militarily but the greatest policy shift in a generation, one that stunned the world and shocked the Soviets into totally rethinking their entire system. He put heavy economic or even military pressure against Communist regimes in Afghanistan, Poland, Latin America, and indeed everywhere. The longstanding argument against rollback was that it mean nuclear war. Reagan found just the right formula—Star Wars, combined with a massive increase in high tech warfare and a new offensive mission for American military might. Star Wars was funded and is going forward right now--all the major Democratic candidates this year supported it (including Howard Dean). Clinton gingerly adopted rollback when he secured Congressional approval in 1998 for a policy of regime change in Iraq; it was George W. Bush who wholeheartedly endorsed rollback, winning two wars (against adversaries as strong as Vietnam) with support from most Democratic leaders. Kerry has supported Bush’s basic strategy in the Mideast, complaining that Bush handled Iraq and terrorism inefficiently. Kerry’s solution is to add even more troops, attack terrorists more aggressively, and to modernize the military even faster than Reagan. Only a few Democrats recoil away from the this Reaganite vision of American moralism triumphant. Kucinich is the most articulate foe; along with Ralph Nader and Michael Moore; they speak for the anti-Reaganite remnant of the once dominant New Deal movement.

Reagan made Americans proud again. The malaise was gone, forgotten as the economic demons were slain and foreign enemies faltered. Many occasions of national pride and unity found the ideal spokesman in the White House. He went to Europe for his best platforms: telling the British that the last pages of Soviet history were now being written, demanding that Gorbachev “tear down this Wall,” commemorating the heroes of the Normandy beaches twenty years ago today . Reagan personalized American politics—asking not if the statistical indicators were a few points higher, but if you personally felt better off than four years before. No Reaganite, Democrat or Republican, has matched his eloquence with the single exception of Bush’s address to the Congress after 9-11. Ronald Reagan redefined the two core values of American politics, republicanism and efficiency. For the last two decades every major politician has worked in terms of his ideas and his values, and, with a show of the optimism he made famous, we can expect his vision will guide the nation for decades to come as we try to Win One for the Gipper.

Jensen is emeritus professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Jensen also founded H-Net: an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Our edited lists and web sites publish peer reviewed essays, multimedia materials, and discussion for colleagues and the interested public. The computing heart of H-Net resides at MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, Michigan State University, but H-Net officers, editors and subscribers come from all over the globe. H-Net received the JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON PRIZE of the American Historical Association for the teaching aid which has made the most outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history in any field for public or educational purposes.

Copyright © 2004 History News Network

Dutch's Liberal Legacy

Dutch saved Social Security, relented on his tax cut, and negotiated with the Soviets. He preserved the liberal agenda. The federal payroll grew during the Reagan administrations. President Bill Clinton reversed this growth, unlike his two Republican predecessors. Nostalgia blinds men to the reality of the past. If this be (fair & balanced) non-hagiography, so be it.

[x Washington Monthly]
by Joshua Green

OVER THE PAST SEVERAL MONTHS, Nancy Reagan has quietly, been alerting friends and family that the health of her husband Ronald Reagan, the nation's 40th president, is failing rapidly due to Alzheimer's. Reagan will turn 92 on Feb. 6, and the signs seem to suggest that he won't be with us for very much longer.

It is not uncommon, when such circumstances involve a national figure, for the media to prepare tributes and obituaries in anticipation of the event. But in the case of Ronald Reagan, the magnitude of this ritual seems certain to eclipse anything that has preceded it. As long as five years ago, the three main newsweeklies had locked up eminent presidential historians to write his valedictories. The conservative Heritage Foundation has underwritten a multimedia Reagan legacy project, cued up and awaiting word of his death. The major networks and the History Channel have prepared exhaustive documentaries (the latter didn't even wait for Reagan's departure, airing "Ronald Reagan: A Legacy Remembered" over Thanksgiving). And media jockeying to pay tribute has already begun: This month's Esquire dubs Reagan the "greatest living American."

But the clearest indicator can be found at the bookstore. The last few months have brought an avalanche of Reagan biographies, from John Harmer's Reagan: Man of Principle to Peter Schweizer's Reagan's War to Peter Wallison's Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency. They join such recent fare as William F. Buckley Jr.'s Ronald Reagan: An American Hero, Peggy Noonan's When Character Was King, and Dinesh D'Souza's Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, themselves just a fraction of the 427 listings on Amazon.com, many of them gauzy tributes, each striving to bestow an encomium more noble and gallant than the last. Indeed, what is so striking about these books--besides their sheer number--is their collective determination to exalt Reagan as the heroic embodiment of American conservatism.

This is no accident. In fact, there is an active campaign to nail into place a canonical version of Reagan's life and career. Energetic conservatives have organized a drive to glorify the former president by trying to do everything from affixing his name to public buildings in each of the nation's 3,066 counties to substituting his face for Alexander Hamilton's on the $10 bill. A similar dynamic applies here. Many of these hagiographies are written by noted conservative authors (Buckley, Noonan, D'Souza) or former Reagan staffers (Wallison, Martin Anderson, Michael Deaver), under the auspices of conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (Wallison), the Hoover Institution (Anderson and Schweizer), and the Heritage Foundation (Stephen F. Hayward's The Age of Reagan, the first of two volumes).

One would have to go back to FDR to find a comparable example of a president portrayed in such consistently glowing terms--and the swashbuckling triumphs depicted in these books mythologize Reagan to a degree which exceeds even that. As one might expect, most gloss over or completely avoid mentioning the many embarrassing and outright alarming aspects of his presidency: from consulting astrologers to his fixation with biblical doom to the tortured rationalizations that enabled him to believe that he never traded arms for hostages. But they also do something else. Most of his conservative biographers espouse a Manichaean worldview in which Reagan's constancy in the face of liberal evils is the key to his greatness. But to sustain such an argument requires more than simply touting (and often exaggerating) his achievements, considerable though some of them were. The effort to gild Reagan's legacy also seems to demand that any accomplishment that didn't explicitly advance conservative goals be expunged from his record. And so they have been.

Reagan is, to be sure, one of the most conservative presidents in U.S. history and will certainly be remembered as such. His record on the environment, defense, and economic policy is very much in line with its portrayal. But he entered office as an ideologue who promised a conservative revolution, vowing to slash the size of government, radically scale back entitlements, and deploy the powers of the presidency in pursuit of socially and culturally conservative goals. That he essentially failed in this mission hasn't stopped partisan biographers from pretending otherwise. (Noonan writes of his 1980 campaign pledges: "Done, done, done, done, done, done, and done. Every bit of it.")

A sober review of Reagan's presidency doesn't yield the seamlessly conservative record being peddled today. Federal government expanded on his watch. The conservative desire to outlaw abortion was never seriously pursued. Reagan broke with the hardliners in his administration and compromised with the Soviets on arms control. His assault on entitlements never materialized; instead he saved Social Security in 1983. And he repeatedly ignored the fundamental conservative dogma that taxes should never be raised.

All of this has been airbrushed from the new literature of Reagan. But as any balanced account must make clear, Reagan acceded to political compromises as all presidents do once in office--and on many occasions did so willingly. In fact, however often unintentionally, many of his actions as president wound up facilitating liberal objectives. What this clamor of adulation is seeking to deny is that beyond his conservative legacy, Ronald Reagan has bequeathed a liberal one.

Roosevelt Republican

Reagan arrived in Washington with a full head of steam, vowing, as he put it in the major economic speech of his 1980 campaign, "to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of federal spending." To conservatives, and many others, he seemed destined to fulfill campaign pledges to abolish entire government agencies, rein in the excesses of the welfare state, and end Americans' overreliance on government. Sensing the historical moment, Reagan echoed John F. Kennedy in famously declaring, "If not us, who? If not now, when?"

At the outset of his first term, Reagan's revolution appeared to have unstoppable momentum. His administration passed an historic tax cut based on dramatic cuts in marginal tax rates and began a massive defense buildup. To help compensate for the tax cut, his first budget called for slashing $41.4 billion from 83 federal programs, only the first round in a planned series of cuts. And Reagan himself made known his desire to eliminate the departments of Energy and Education, and to scale back what his first budget director David Stockman called the "closet socialism" of Social Security and Medicaid.

But after his initial victories on tax cuts and defense, the revolution effectively stalled. Deficits started to balloon, the recession soon deepened, his party lost ground in the 1982 midterms, and thereafter Reagan never seriously tried to enact the radical domestic agenda he'd campaigned on. Rather than abolish the departments of Energy and Education, as he had promised to do if elected president, Reagan added a new cabinet-level department--one of the largest federal agencies--the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Though his budgets requested some cuts in some areas of discretionary spending, Reagan rapidly retreated and never seriously pushed them. As Lou Cannon, the Washington Post reporter who covered Reagan's political career for 25 years, put it in his masterful biography, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, "For all the fervor they created, the first-term Reagan budgets were mild manifestos devoid of revolutionary purpose. They did not seek to `rebuild the foundation of our society' (the task Reagan set for himself and Congress in a nationally televised speech of February 5, 1981) or even to accomplish the `sharp reduction in the spending growth trend' called for in [his] Economic Recovery Plan." By Reagan's second term, the idea of seriously diminishing the budget was, to quote Stockman, "an institutionalized fantasy." Though in speeches Reagan continued to repeat his bold pledge to "get government out of the way of the people," government stayed pretty much where it was.

This hasn't stopped recent contemporary conservative biographers from claiming otherwise. "He said he would cut the budget, and he did," declares Peggy Noonan in When Character Was King. In fact, the budget grew significantly under Reagan. All he managed to do was moderately slow its rate of growth. What's more, the number of workers on the federal payroll rose by 61,000 under Reagan. (By comparison, under Clinton, the number fell by 373,000.)

Reagan also vastly expanded one of the largest federal domestic programs, Social Security. Before becoming president, he had often openly mused, much to the alarm of his politically sensitive staff, about restructuring Social Security to allow individuals to opt out of the system--an antecedent of today's privatization plans. At the start of his administration, with Social Security teetering on the brink of insolvency, Reagan attempted to push through immediate draconian cuts to the program. But the Senate unanimously rebuked his plan, and the GOP lost 26 House seats in the 1982 midterm elections, largely as a result of this overreach.

The following year, Reagan made one of the greatest ideological about-faces in the history of the presidency, agreeing to a $165 billion bailout of Social Security. In almost every way, the bailout flew in the face of conservative ideology. It dramatically increased payroll taxes on employees and employers, brought a whole new class of recipients--new federal workers--into the system, and, for the first time, taxed Social Security benefits, and did so in the most liberal way: only those of upper-income recipients. (As an added affront to conservatives, the tax wasn't indexed to inflation, meaning that more and more people have gradually had to pay k over time.)

By expanding rather than scaling back entitlements, Reagan--and Newt Gingrich after him--demonstrated that conservatives could not and Would not launch a frontal assault on Social Security, effectively conceding that these cherished New Deal programs were central features of the American polity.

"Mondale Would Have Been Proud"

It's conservative lore that Reagan the icon cut taxes, while George H.W. Bush the renegade raised them. As Stockman recalls, "No one was authorized to talk about tax increases on Ronald Reagan's watch, no matter what kind of tax, no matter how justified it was." Yet raising taxes is exactly what Reagan did. He did not always instigate those hikes or agree to them willingly--but he signed off on them. One year after his massive tax cut, Reagan agreed to a tax increase to reduce the deficit that restored fully one-third of the previous year's reduction. (In a bizarre bit of self-deception, Reagan, who never came to terms with this episode of ideological apostasy, persuaded himself that the three-year, $100 billion tax hike--the largest since World War II--was actually "tax reform" that closed loopholes in his earlier cut and therefore didn't count as raising taxes.)

Faced with looming deficits, Reagan raised taxes again in 1983 with a gasoline tax and once more in 1984, this time by $50 billion over three years, mainly through closing tax loopholes for business. Despite the fact that such increases were anathema to conservatives--and probably cost Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, reelection--Reagan raised taxes a grand total of four times just between 1982-84.

This record flummoxes the best efforts of today's Reagan hagiographers to explain away. Peter Wallison, for instance, after proclaiming that Reagan "stayed the course against changes in his economic plan," later dismisses the president's tax increases as "a modest rollback" that "seems to have been the result" of his accepting a Democratic promise to cut spending by twice that amount. (Whatever happened to "Trust, but verify"?)

Reagan continued these "modest rollbacks" in his second term. The historic Tax Reform Act of 1986, though it achieved the supply side goal of lowering individual income tax rates, was a startlingly progressive reform. The plan imposed the largest corporate tax increase in history--an act utterly unimaginable for any conservative to support today. Just two years after declaring, "there is no justification" for taxing corporate income, Reagan raised corporate taxes by $120 billion over five years and closed corporate tax loopholes worth about $300 billion over that same period. In addition to broadening the tax base, the plan increased standard deductions and personal exemptions to the point that no family with an income below the poverty line would have to pay federal income tax. Even at the time, conservatives within Reagan's administration were aghast. According to Wall Street Journal reporters Jeffrey Birnbaum and Alan Murray, whose book Showdown at Gucci Gulch chronicles the 1986 measure, "the conservative president's support for an effort once considered the bastion of liberals carried tremendous symbolic significance." When Reagan's conservative acting chief economic adviser, William Niskanen, was apprised of the plan he replied, "Walter Mondale would have been proud."

So would Russell Long. In 1975, the Democratic senator from Louisiana had passed into law the earned income tax credit (EITC), essentially a wage subsidy for the working poor. Long's measure was tiny to begin with and had dwindled to insignificance by the time Reagan agreed to expand it in 1986 as part of the tax reform act. Despite years of opposing social insurance programs, Reagan's support of the EITC gave rise to what has become one of the most effective antipoverty measures the federal government has ever devised--by the late 1990s, the EITC was lifting 4.3 million people out of poverty every year. Reagan's decision to expand it was "the most important anti-poverty measure enacted over the past decade," wrote The Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt. The exemption of millions of low-wage earners from income taxes through the EITC and other reforms in 1986 added a significant measure of progressivity to the tax code. As evidence of its popularity with liberals, Clinton dramatically expanded the EITC in 1993.

At the time, many Republicans touted Reagan's support as proof that he wasn't the coldhearted tyrant liberals made him out to be. Other conservatives, like Niskanen, however, saw it as troubling evidence of their leader's weakness. Today, there is a growing movement within the Bush administration to roll back these changes by making the working poor pay their "fair share" of taxes.

These evident lapses in conservative ideology are a fact that some liberals have a much less difficult time coming to terms with than conservatives. "There were two Reagans," says Robert J. McIntyre, director of the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice, who was instrumental in the 1986 act, "the good one and the bad one. Liberals and conservatives wouldn't agree on which is which, but they would have to agree that Reagan completely flipped after 1981. If you like one, you can't like the other."

Bellicose Peacenik

Reagan has a good claim to the credit he receives for a foreign policy of confronting and challenging the Soviet Union that helped bring on its collapse--a central theme of any account of his life. But the vexing problem for conservatives, then and now, was that Reagan's bellicosity, which they liked, obscured an equally strong belief that nuclear weapons could and should be abolished, a conviction found mainly on the liberal left. Long before he became president, Reagan had argued for a massive military buildup not just to confront the Soviets, which hardliners approved, but also to put the United States in a stronger position from which to establish effective arms control--a goal to which conservative pragmatists subscribed. But no one shared, or even understood until late in the game, Reagan's desire for total disarmament. "My dream," he later wrote in his memoirs, "became a world free of nuclear weapons." This vision stemmed from the president's belief that the biblical account of Armageddon prophesied nuclear war--and that apocalypse could be averted if everyone, especially the Soviets, eliminated nuclear weapons.

Driven by this dream, Reagan embraced Mikhail Gorbachev and initiated a series of negotiations that ultimately alarmed everyone in his administration. Hardliners like Patrick Buchanan, Richard Perle, and Caspar Weinberger reacted in horror to the very idea of engaging the Soviets in such talks, warning against the "grand illusion" of peace. "Reagan is a weakened president, weakened in spirit as well as clout," echoed New Right leader Paul Weyrich in The Washington Post. Administration pragmatists like George Shultz and Robert McFarlane, who supported negotiations but believed in deterrence, were shocked by how far Reagan took them. At the Reykjavik summit, he and Gorbachev almost agreed to the "zero option" to eliminate both sides' thermonuclear arms. Reagan's unwillingness to give up his cherished missile-defense program doomed the agreement, though the talks did yield the signature arms-reduction pact of his presidency, the 1987 INF treaty.

Conservative biographers like Peter Schweizer seem determined not to acknowledge Reagan's timely softening toward the Soviets: Reagan "would not change course, even in pursuit of personal political glory." But, thankfully, Reagan did change course. After a defense buildup that pushed the Soviets to the verge of economic collapse, this shift, augmented by a reduction in U.S. military spending in the latter years of his presidency, strengthened Gorbachev's ability to proceed with reform in the Soviet Union, and set the stage for George H.W. Bush to oversee a peaceful end to the Cold War.

Reagan was similarly helpful in advancing another great liberal cause, one in which his overall record is deeply tarnished: human rights. The idea of pressuring despotic governments to better treat their citizens had long appealed to the left and rankled the right. Like other conservatives, Reagan criticized the Helsinki Accords when Gerald Ford signed them in 1976, and disparaged Jimmy Carter during his 1980 campaign for what he considered a soft refusal to engage with the bitter realities of communism. Reagan's indifference to human rights abuses committed by the Unites States's erstwhile allies in Central America is an especially ugly stain on his presidency. Yet, as time progressed, there was one place where he did apply the logic of bringing human rights into public policy: the Soviet Union. Through the latter part of his presidency, Reagan spoke forcefully and openly about human rights in speeches and in meetings with Gorbachev, presenting lists of thousands of persecuted Soviet Jews and dissidents, many of whom were ultimately allowed to emigrate. "Human rights became for Reagan the final shame that he could bring to bear on that aspect of the Communist empire," says Sean Wilentz, director of the American Studies program at Princeton University.

Reagan's human rights policy may have been inconsistent and hypocritical. But the very fact that he had one transformed the politics of human rights. With dissidents from Andrei Sakarov to Vaclav Havel testifying to the power of his words in sustaining their movements, it became impossible for conservatives to deny the usefulness of such commitments as a component of American foreign policy. Today, there are almost as many human rights proponents on the right side of the aisle in Congress as on the left.

Mourning in America

Many of Reagan's actions that wound up furthering liberal ends were to some extent the result of the normal compromises of political office. The fact that his conservative biographers don't see fit to acknowledge these deviations is a clue that their aim is something besides an accurate depiction of the life and achievements of the 40th president. When conservatives mythologize the Reagan presidency as the golden era of conservatism, it's not Reagan that they're mythologizing, but conservatism.

The great success of Reagan's 1980 campaign was that it united the disparate strands of the conservative movement: supply-siders, libertarians, religious conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and big business. The fact that Reagan's presidency didn't accomplish anything approaching its seismic promise--the size of government grew, abortion remained legal, and entitlements still abounded--is one that his partisan biographers elide by focusing on what Reagan believed and said rather than on what he actually did. The imaginary Reagan who inhabits these books embodies the ideas on which all these groups can agree. His shining example helps maintain the coalition while putting pressure on current GOP politicians to hew to the hard-right ideal.

The real Reagan, on the other hand, would bring discord to the current conservative agenda. If you believe, as conservatives now do, that raising taxes is always wrong, then it's hard to admit that Reagan himself did so repeatedly. If you argue that the relative tax burden on low-income workers is too light, as the Bush administration does, then it does not pay to dwell on the fact that Reagan himself helped lighten that burden. If you insist, as many hardliners now do, that America is dangerously soft on communist China, then it is best to ignore Reagan's own softening toward the Soviet Union. As with other conservative media efforts--Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, The Washington Times--the purpose of the Reagan legacy project is not to deliver accuracy, but enhance political leverage.

But, as Reagan himself liked to cite from John Adams, facts are stubborn things. And the fact is that Reagan, whether out of wisdom or because he was forced, made significant compromises with the left. Had he not saved Social Security, relented on his tax cut, and negotiated with the Soviets, he'd have been a less popular, and lesser, president. An honest portrait of Reagan's presidency would not diminish his memory, but enlarge it.

JOSHUA GREEN is an editor of The Washington Monthly.

COPYRIGHT © 2003 Washington Monthly Company

Dutch's Voodoo Legacy

Nostalgia was Ronald Reagan's great ally. He played upon it throughout his public life. The good old days were really good. However, truth be known, the good old days were lousy. This Washington Post appraisal of Reagan's fiscal policies offers a corrective to all of the nostalgic nonsense about the 1980s. If this is a (fair & balanced) appraisal of Reaganomics, so be it.

[x Washington Post]
Right-Leaning Policy Won a Nickname: Reaganomics
By Glenn Kessler

Through the prism of the right, Ronald Reagan's economic policies in the 1980s were a rainbow, a vision that was largely responsible for the nation's remarkable economy in the 1990s. Through the prism of the left, Reaganomics was a storm that devastated the poor and left huge budget deficits in its wake.

That debate may only be settled by historians not yet born, but this much is clear: Economic policymaking today must still contend with the rhetorical markers laid down by Ronald Wilson Reagan when he took office more than two decades ago.

Smaller government. Lower taxes. Less regulation. Low inflation.

Reagan's spending cuts barely nicked the fastest-growing parts of government, his tax cuts reduced revenue so much that later in his tenure taxes had to be raised repeatedly, his regulatory approach was criticized for leading to the savings and loan crisis and his unbalanced budgets to a near-tripling of the federal debt in eight years. Many economists give most of the credit for whipping inflation to former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul A. Volcker.

But over time, some proponents of Reagan's economic policies argue, a more lasting legacy will become clearer: They argue that Reagan's huge defense buildup helped bankrupt the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War. If that is the case, they say, then Reagan should receive credit for the fact that in the Clinton years, the United States could dramatically reduce defense spending and balance the budget.

"That defense buildup [and the Fed's tight money policies] were primarily responsible for the deficit," said William A. Niskanen, president of the libertarian Cato Institute and a member of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. "The Cold War is over. Tight money has brought inflation down. Both of these policies looked risky at the time but look good in retrospect."

In assessing Reagan's economic legacy, "you have to distinguish between being a master at creating a mood and what he actually did in changing the structure or content of government programs," said Charles L. Schultze of the Brookings Institution, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Carter administration.

But Reagan's "mood" changed the terms of the debate, shifting the nation on a rightward economic course. He fired the air traffic controllers when they went on strike, forever altering union-management relations. He tolerated the high unemployment brought about in part by Volcker's tight money policies. And Reagan championed the free market and railed against government programs, making it more difficult for his successors to create new ones except in the guise of a tax credit.

Tax-Cut Cry Still Reverberates

Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter, may have ushered in deregulation or set in motion a big defense buildup. But it was Reagan who took those policies to heart. Former president Bill Clinton may have declared "the era of big government is over" or finally balanced the budget. But it was Reagan who set those goals and inspired the Republican Congress that worked with Clinton.

Reagan also placed tax cuts firmly at the center of the Republican agenda. Before Reagan, Republicans disliked government and abhorred deficits. After Reagan, tax cuts became a crusade that one day would -- maybe, possibly -- lead toward smaller government and the end of deficits. Reagan preached that lower taxes would lead to greater economic growth, a theme that still echoes in the House and the Senate and whenever President Bush steps up to give an economic speech.

While Reagan only slowed the growth of nondefense spending, his deficits piled up and sent government interest costs soaring, thereby making it difficult for future Congresses and presidents to increase spending without making even bigger holes in the budget.

From 1980 to 1986, spending on annually funded domestic programs (besides defense), as a share of the overall economy, fell 29 percent, but in the same period defense spending rose 27 percent. Tax revenue plunged 17 percent while the interest on the national debt soared 61 percent. The net result: The budget deficit rose to 5 percent of the overall economy, an 86 percent increase.

When Reagan took office in 1981 after the inflation-ravaged years of Jimmy Carter, his advisers warned of a looming "economic Dunkirk." When he left the presidency eight years later, inflation and unemployment had fallen sharply and the country was in the midst of what was then the longest economic expansion in history.

That looks like success. But undergirding that expansion were stresses and fractures that quickly exposed themselves in the recession that doomed the George H.W. Bush's presidency. The boom was powered by the debt-financed defense spending, while savings and investment were poor, living standards had stagnated and the divide between rich and poor had widened.

Banks had lent money with abandon to finance real estate deals inspired by quirks in the tax code -- and soon found themselves in a financial crisis. The budget deficits, by eating away at overall national savings, helped keep interest rates from falling as much as expected, making it more expensive for businesses to borrow money to make long-term investments.

Were Voters Better Off?

Reagan owed his election to the economy. He won the presidency by asking a voters a simple but devastating question: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

In the waning days of the Carter administration, when high inflation and interest rates tormented Americans, the answer appeared to be no. And the former California governor appeared to have a plan: He would unleash the forces of the free market by reducing the size of government and cutting taxes. Reagan also demanded larger defense spending.

These goals appeared contradictory or, in the memorable phrase of 1980 presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, "voodoo economics." But Reagan insisted that reducing taxes would generate enough corporate activity to make up the difference in lost revenue. This was a theory espoused by "supply-side" economists, who focused on the impact of taxes on the total supply of output, in contrast to those who concentrated on how to stimulate demand.

The late Herbert Stein, who chaired Richard M. Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, said during the Carter-Reagan fight there was general consensus to get inflation down by reducing monetary growth, balancing the budget and cutting government spending. But lowering inflation would raise unemployment, balancing the budget made tax cuts difficult and cutting government spending would eat into benefits enjoyed by middle-class Americans.

That posed a challenge for policymakers. In his book "Presidential Economics: The Making of Economic Policy From Roosevelt to Clinton," Stein offered this difference between Carterism and Reaganism:

Carterism: "Pursuing each element in the approach so tentatively and flexibly that no harm would be done to anymore, but no significant good either."

Reaganism: "Denying that the objectives being pursued had any costs."

In Stein's formulation, the Reagan campaign was "the economics of joy."

Then came reality.

Cooking Books With Gimmicks

The problem was how to cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the budget in the midst of an increasingly grim economic situation. It was an impossible task, made possible by effectively cooking the books.

As recounted in the memoirs of budget director David A. Stockman and other former Reagan aides, the Reagan team was able to get its budget passed because of accounting gimmicks that came to be known by such terms as the "rosy scenario" and the "magic asterisk." The rosy scenario predicted the economy would do much better than expected, providing revenue that would never materialize. The magic asterisk was made of spending cuts that would be identified later -- but never were.

Congress did its part. The tax cut plan, which slashed taxes 25 percent over three years, was relatively easy to pass. So were defense spending increases.

But the same conservatives who eagerly denounced deficits fought cuts in agriculture programs, energy projects, highway funds or anything else with a vocal constituency. "Those were the mother's milk on which Republican politicians -- self-professed conservatives as well as moderates -- lived no less profitably than their Democratic colleagues," Stockman wrote in his book, "Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed."

Interest costs on the growing mountain of debt soared from 1.9 percent of GDP in 1981 to 3.1 percent when Reagan's successor took office in 1989. Those interest payments consumed about $69 billion in 1981 and $169 billion by 1989, a percentage increase almost as large as the boost in defense spending. While Reagan managed to kill few programs outright, those interest costs helped squeeze money out of domestic programs, many of which barely kept pace with inflation or shrank.

"In economic terms one of his biggest legacies was these very large deficits," Isabell V. Sawhill, a former Clinton budget official and Brookings scholar, said. She noted that during the Reagan era, the United States went from being the largest net creditor to the largest net debtor nation.

As the economy deteriorated early in Reagan's presidency, just months after the "rosy scenario" had predicted a balanced budget by 1984, the scope of the deficit problem quickly became clear. Within a year, lawmakers had convinced Reagan that he needed to raise taxes to help close the gap, though the president convinced himself he was only closing loopholes.

In 1986, Reagan made one more attack on the tax system, signing into a law a significant overhaul of the tax code that simplified the rate structure and shut down many tax shelters.

As the deficits mounted and some social programs were cut back, Volcker kept a tight grip on the money supply to cure the inflation problem. The result was the most severe recession in modern times.

Sawhill said one of the most positive aspects of Reagan's economic legacy was getting inflation under control. "He was willing to tolerate a deep recession to accomplish that," she said.

Still, Sawhill said, it could be argued that a better mix -- a smaller tax cut, lower deficits, less stringent monetary policy -- would have been a wiser economic course. The Fed, she said, would not have had to step so hard on the economic brakes if the administration, with its tax cuts and defense buildup, weren't at the same time stepping on the accelerator.

Staff writer John M. Berry contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company