Getting Reagan Wrong
Nofziger, Lyn
Books in Review "Getting Reagan Wrong" "rootless cosmopolitans," and the plan to deport Soviet Jews to Siberia in the last years of Stalin's life make the case for anti-Semitism "plausible"). Service suggests...
...And the threat of nuclear war is greatly diminished...
...And this is mild...
...While admitting that Reagan "was not a racist," Troy bluntly asserts that Reagan and his allies "happily exploited white anger for political gain," a not so subtle charge of racism...
...One paragraph pretty much epitoJUNE 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63 B O O K S I N R E V I E W mizes what Troy thinks of Reagan and the Reagan decade of the '80s: Overall, Reagan's 1980s accelerated the social solvents he blamed on the 1960s and 1970s...
...Conquest describes Hegel as "a charlatan," an "hyperacademic," "the purveyor of massive, `sophisticated,' complex, impressive verbiage...
...He delves into just about every aspect of American life during that period, covering in a relatively few words subjects about which volumes have been written...
...Now nothing restrains us from due disrespect...
...Likewise, what appears to be Troy's liberalism shines through on occasion...
...In fact, when Reagan reprimanded, which was seldom, he could better have been described as a low key reprimander...
...For instance: "Reagan came across as stupid or reckless or both...
...Reagan was "tone deaf on racial issues," he says...
...silly-clever...
...Nancy had better ways of showing her anger...
...He analyzes the Yuppie generation for us...
...But Reagan's effect on the culture and the politics and the governance of the United States was hardly more permanent than that of Bill Clinton, whose own effect is already being diminished by the kind of governing and leadership George W. Bush has brought to the nation...
...Eager as I then was to scale the presumed heights of modern thought, Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, I took the indictment too lightly...
...And in fact, Troy places a greater emphasis on what went wrong during the Reagan years than on what went right...
...they set your teeth on edge...
...So there was a mandate after all...
...Today our educational establishment turns out a stream of people who feel endowed with the right to secede "from reason and fact...
...The flood of documents from the Soviet Union's collapse by no means caused academics to repudiate their adherence to Communist falsifications...
...Service suggests that the Cold War was started by the Marshall Plan, "a dagger pointed at Moscow," rather than by Soviet decisions to test Western resolve and Stalin's own Marxist-Leninist mind-set, which anticipated inevitable and continuing conflict with capitalist nations...
...We have here, then, a book that attempts to combine the politics of the Reagan years and after with the B O O K S I N R E V I E W sociological changes that went on during those years...
...Indeed, an inordinate number of pages contain some sort of cheap shot, disparaging criticism, or belittling remark about "the greatest president" since FDR For instance, in the sentence immediately preceding his proclamation of Reagan's greatness, Troy declares that Reaganism at Lyn Nofziger is a writer based in Washington, D.C...
...And it's not as if this were an isolated criticism...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W "rootless cosmopolitans," and the plan to deport Soviet Jews to Siberia in the last years of Stalin's life make the case for anti-Semitism "plausible...
...Although the Marxist (nee Hegelian) system of "science" is no longer defended, its intellectual essence survives: the feeling that being on the right side of human history is "both argument proof, and fact proof...
...Among other things Reagan could take credit for, the Soviet Union has ceased to exist, Germany is united, and Eastern Europe is free...
...Together they capture the life and times of Joseph Stalin, a gangster, a killer, a Marxist-Leninist...
...The leading lights of progressivism were worse...
...One was an angry letter from Lenin demanding Stalin apologize for treating Krupskaya with disrespect...
...Centuries before they got around to socialism," the Progressives' eagerness to transform humanity had produced other social movements JUNE 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...
...The second part of the book consists of case studies—rather, of observations on cases—of contemporary intellectuals' willful resistance to reality...
...In fairness to Troy, he has taken on what he admits is a daunting task in trying to link Reagan to nearly everything—the good, the bad, and the ugly that went on in the '80s and into the '90s...
...The second was Bukharin's last letter, written from prison to his old friend, plaintively asking, "Koba, why is my death necessary for you?' The third was a letter from Marshall Tito saying that five assassins sent by the NKVD to assassinate him had been caught and warning that he would reciprocate...
...He takes his title, Morning in America, from a 1984 political spot produced by the Republican National Committee that became the signature for Reagan's re-election campaign...
...There was no Reagan mandate," he insists, but then a little later he tells us that "Democrats now tried to bury Reagan's mandate...
...While Reagan on rare occasions raised his voice in anger, I doubt that any of those who worked with him when he was a governor, candidate, or president would agree that he was much of a thunderer or bellower...
...Here are some: "Reagan's anything goes ethos," Reagan "often con-fused great wealth with great virtue," "The childlike 'Being There' dimension about Reagan's saccharine political appeal...
...Political spots being what they are, "Morning in America" exaggerated the positive aspects of Reagan's first term and eliminated the negative...
...Conquest had shown in his earlier writings that, even when much less information was available, historians who worked honestly had enough to see things as they "VILE-TEMPERED MULE...
...Phrases such as this may resonate with his students at Canada's McGill University, where he is a professor of history, or with others not familiar with the way government works in the United States, but it would be a rare American who took it seriously...
...Unfortunately Morning in America is filled with too many of Troy's opinions that he asserts as facts...
...Reagan's great contradiction: a desire to control crime but not guns...
...It was slick, upbeat, and tremendously effective...
...English Department philosophy...
...Reagan ushered in "a new era of greed and ostentation...
...In other places, he talks of "Reagan's warm, woozy rhetoric of selfishness" and "the empty and hypocritical promise of conservatism...
...based on such quackeries as phrenology...
...But once I had climbed the mountain and was guiding my graduate students up the same twisting paths, it occurred to me that Hegel was teaching us guides a game of flimflam that would endow us with authority to lead our followers wherever we wanted...
...He writes of the effects of movies and television on the public persona...
...Well, 40 years ago the great Eric Voegelin wrote a similar indictment of Hegel titled On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery...
...That is something Reagan admirers will have no trouble agreeing with, while at the same time they continue to demand that their hero receive credit for the good times of the "morning in America" years they so fondly remember...
...NORTON & Co., INC., 256 PAGES, $24.95) their own expectations...
...its worst "perpetuated self-righteousness mixed with selfishness...
...TT IS DIFFICULT ALSO TO BELIEVE that Troy, whose publicity blurbs tell us is a presidential historian with a doctorate from Harvard, doesn't know bet-ter...
...None of these is a serious mistake but taken together they get one to wondering what other mistakes might be scattered through the book...
...Reagan was "maestro of Time after time Troy makes statements that have the same grating results as fingernails scratching on a blackboard...
...But Troy's Morning in America doesn't fit into that mold...
...The record will also show that Ed Rollins was not the White House political director in 1981 and that Jimmy Carter, though he may have studied nuclear physics, was not a "nuclear engineer...
...Since Conquest spent most of his life as an exemplary student of the Soviet Union, the examples are drawn primarily from that fertile field...
...If Nancy were a shrieker I, without question, would have been one of those shrieked at...
...And in the end Troy admits as much: "But most of the problems troubling America in the 198Os predated Reagan and outlasted him," generously adding that Reagan "was not responsible for the massive govern-mental and social failures of the age...
...The "question prohibition" or frageverbot, elaborated by German philosophers has become the common intellectual heritage of Western education for its progeny: half-educated folks fit only for bureaucracy, for freezing, dumbing our cultures...
...If, for better or for worse, that is true, then Reagan has much to be praised for and as much to be blamed for...
...Too often he wants to have it both ways...
...Less filling...
...Bushism, not a Reaganism...
...In other words, the book is not just about Reagan...
...academic logobabble at a lower level...
...Hegel, he writes, "befuddled minds over six or seven generations—including of course the Marxists and post-Marxists...
...Only the need to under-stand the Soviet Union, I concluded, could justify spending any part of one's short life on Hegel...
...Reagan's sloppiness and extremism...
...I know...
...it is about what went on in America during the Reagan years "politically, culturally, socially, governmentally," and how Reagan not only affected what went on, but also how he fit into the changes that were going on in spite of anything he was doing or could do...
...It is difficult to take seriously a book that contains such exaggerations...
...Neither was Nancy Reagan a shrieker, as Troy also would have us believe...
...But of course it is only partly true...
...Reality Denial Reviewed by Angelo M. Codevilla Angelo M. Codevilla is aprofessor atBoston University and a fellow at the Claremont Institute...
...For instance, he says that despite his overwhelming victory in 1980 Reagan "lacked a mandate for change...
...What Troy apparently set out to do is prove, at least to his satisfaction, what should be general knowledge, that "morning in America" during the Reagan years was not the idyllic time many older Americans have chosen to remember it as being and that Reagan himself was several degrees less than perfect...
...they set your teeth on edge...
...He would have us believe, for instance, that Reagan "thundered" when defending his administration against charges of racism and "bellowed" in stating his belief that an unborn child is still a human being...
...There is an inconsistency to Troy that is bother-some...
...The main thing most had in common was a certain mental attitude—excessive eagerness to see what they wanted to see, as well as "hostility to envisaged uprightness and to those seen as its perpetrators...
...In the individualism he worshipped, the hypocrisy he embodied, and the politicization of moral discourse he facilitated, Reagan further undermined the traditional mores he so proudly hailed...
...More disturbing than the mistakes or the mischaracterization of Reagan as a bellower and thunderer are Troy's all too frequent criticisms of Reagan, both as a person and as president...
...For instance: "As the Reaganites marched into Washington and gave marching orders to the nation...
...But he doesn't...
...Troy writes as if he knew the persons about whom he is writing...
...is a Budweiser beer commercial (see page 3), when in fact any football fan could have told him it was Miller Lite...
...At least the Democrats thought so even if Troy doesn't...
...True, every Reviewed by Lyn Nofziger now and then Troy has a word of praise for Reagan, but much more frequent are his words of denigration...
...But you'd never know it if you only read the first 346 pages...
...and formerly a senior staff member for presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan...
...Time after time Troy makes statements that have the same grating results as fingernails scratching on a 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2005 blackboard...
...And almost any Republican could have told him that "the vision thing" was a George H.W...
...Getting Reagan Wrong J F YOU MANAGE TO PLOW THROUGH all 347 pages of Gil Troy's Morning in America, you will finally discover that Troy thinks, or at least asserts, perhaps to mollify Reagan admirers who read his book, that Ronald Reagan "saved the presidency from irreleMorning in America: vance" and "remains the How Ronald Reagan Invented greatest president since the 1980s by Gil Troy (PRINCETON, 417 PAGES, $29.95) Franklin Roosevelt...
...These are Robert Conquest's kindest words for the collective ind of progressive intellectuals—a mind likelier recalcitrant to reality than open to it...
...Going from the "Me Decade" to the "Mine All Mine Decade," citizens in Reagan's America felt less engaged, less constrained, less interdependent than ever...
...Here Conquest, the historian perhaps principally responsible for piercing the fog of lies with which Soviet Communism had surThe Dragons of Expectation: rounded itself, reflects Reality and Delusion in the on why and how intelCourse of History lectuaLs' minds are conby Robert Conquest sumed by the dragons of (W.W...
...And surprisingly, Troy's final conclusion comes at the very beginning: "We live in a Reaganized America...
...Reagan "ambled" into office...
...materialism...
...Can this be true...
...Service reports that three notes were found in Stalin's desk after his death in 1953...
...Forty-three American presidents have yet to give "marching orders" to the nation...
...Thank you, Robert Conquest...
...In actuality, Reagan may have changed the world more and more permanently than he changed America...
...But that should not be surprising since they come from an author who writes that "Tastes great...
Vol. 38 • June 2005 • No. 5
