Reagan Republicanism
McWilliams, Wilson Carey
CONSERVATIVE VISIONS & AMERICAN REALITIES. 2 Reagan Republicanism WILSON CAREY McWILLIAMS I Tis SURELY a sign of the times that Ronald Reagan, by his own admission, voted for Roosevelt all four...
...We have learned more and more to regard divorce as a normal event of life...
...Americans continued to feel society crumbling around them in 1980...
...Self-indulgence takes the place of self-denial...
...Traditional Republican doctrine always worried about inflation...
...Reagan argued for a "two-tier" wage system, with a lower minimum wage for teen-agers and the hard-core unemployed...
...he paraded his admittedly peculiar trade-union past and his lifetime membership in the Screen Actors Guild...
...is only reminding us that we will probably not live close to our families or old friends...
...Since in practice, a vote for Anderson helped elect Reagan, his supporters could affirm their anti-inflationary principles at the same time that they forwarded their inflationary desires...
...Reagan preferred to run as a New Dealer grown conservative, and that stance persuaded millions of voters that he was safe enough to afford them the luxury of dumping Carter...
...Herbert Hendin writes that affection and harmony are growing scarcer, "in and out of families...
...Clearly, this calls for "big government" with a vengeance, and while the social issue was bound to hurt any Democratic regime, the new Republican administration is not likely to find it much more congenial...
...Reagan's proposals turn on the notion that less restraint - a massive tax cut - can stimulate investment and productivity enough to offset inflation...
...Change, writes Alvin Toffler, is "unsteady, irregular and hard to predict" and makes yesterday's certainties into today's follies...
...It is hard to believe, for example, that a great many voters did not notice that Reagan's faith in the private sector was contradicted by Detroit's dramatic, dismal failure to anticipate the demand for small, fuel-economical cars...
...The private sector does not want to be let alone...
...Like quoting Roosevelt, referring to the "private sector" is a way of disowning the past, abandoning the world of the independent, small-town bourgeoisie for the new world of tax shelters, multinationals, and computer programs, where planning is the rule...
...Our communities, as Scott Greer wrote years ago, are "limited liability communities" where we learn to commit ourselves only superficially, retaining the freedom to cut our losses or move up as the social market dictates...
...Whatever else may be said of this proposal, it was tailored to allay the fears of established white workers...
...Long-distance may be "the next best thing to being there," but A.T.&T...
...Reagan's campaign, in other words, signals changes in conservatism more striking than any change in the Democratic majority...
...To do so, however indirectly, would require a willingness to curb individual freedom, change, and economic growth...
...the federal government, by contrast, had been urging the change on a recalcitrant Detroit for some time...
...True to laissez-faire, it wanted to let the market alone and relied heavily on the "bourgeois virtues" of the independent middle class...
...Supply side economics is selfconsciously modeled on the Kennedy tax cut of 1963, and it clearly involves government planning, though planning of a decidedly conservative sort...
...Rectitude and self-denial were themes of Congressman Anderson's campaign, but Anderson's old style, middle-class individualism is now peripheral in Republican politics...
...In fact, a good many of Reagan's promises suggest more government intervention, not less...
...In the second place, referring to the "private sector" allows Reagan to scrap "free enterprise" with its laissez-faire connotations...
...Anderson's "new realism" seems the exception to this rule, since he did not hesitate to call for restraint...
...As Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, wrote in 1979: Republican spokesmen have consistently emphasized private concerns such as profit and taxes, and private virtues such as self-discipline and self-reliance, and either have not had, or have not communicated, a persuasive conception of the public good...
...Even if Reagan's proposals work as well as he hopes, they make a mockery of middle-class virtues...
...The cure for inflation, in this doctrine, was less consumption and more saving, self-discipline, and frugality...
...grasshoppers are good citizens who fight inflation too...
...Even his attacks on the cherished gains of labor-his criticism of the minimum wage, for example-were couched in language designed to make them acceptable...
...During the campaign, for example, he argued for "enterprise zones" to stimulate growth in the industrial cities, and his transition team circulated a paper that would deny federal aid to any locality that persisted in rent control...
...Carter took a more somber tone, but he also shied away from any call for self-denial, promising "careful" and "balanced" tax cuts and the like...
...One of Reagan's undoubted advantages as a presidential candidate was his freedom from the baggage of old-line Republicanism...
...wilson CAREY McWILLIAMS teaches political science at Livingston College, Rutgers University...
...It is hard to say how much of this the voters believed...
...In fact, the term "private sector" is a talisman...
...If there is light and hope in the future of the Republic, it is not visible in the election of 1980.the election of 1980...
...In the first place, it suggests that there is a legitimate public sector, an inescapable component of government input into and regulation of our economic life...
...These are conservative plans, but they call for a good deal of government involvement on behalf of the "private sector...
...Copyright © 1981, Chatham House Publishers...
...The election of Reagan, the first divorced person to become president, will probably do more to legitimate divorce than his conservatism will do to stabilize families...
...A good many Democrats who defected to Reagan ignored his economics...
...There is little doubt that Reagan's administration will continue this strategy, and the new president can be relied on to oppose the ERA and abortion, to look for ways to permit prayer in the schools, and possibly to support aid to denominational education...
...The auto industry underrated the need to economize and our willingness to do so...
...Reagan will give social conservatives the symbols, but he will leave the substance to the forces that are making for privatism and social disintegration...
...THERE IS every reason, however, to think that Reagan's social conservatism, though sincere, is also superficial...
...it wants government to help it and, where necessary, to pick up the tab...
...And thus the more we are likely to limit our subsequent commitments...
...Taxing ourselves less will still enable us to balance the budget and provide for a bigger military, and at the same time interest rates will come down...
...Not so long ago, Reagan's rhetorical fondness for organized labor would have been high treason in Republican circles...
...They voted for him in the hope that he will do something about the "social issue," introducing government into the world of the family and the other traditional refuges of private life...
...We are drawing more and more into ourselves and away from family, country, and community...
...Detroit will need more help, not less, and the new conservatives will probably provide it...
...In economics, that is likely to be the direction of the new regime...
...And all this says nothing about Reagan's proposals for stronger defense and federal policies to defend the family...
...In reality, the auto industry showed all the rigidity and lack of imagination that, in conservative doctrine, is supposed to characterize government...
...This article is excerpted from his essay in the newly published The Election of 1980, edited by Gerald M. Pomper...
...People who are left behind-so often the old- frequently suffer even more than those who leave, and become still more guarded in consequence...
...2 Reagan Republicanism WILSON CAREY McWILLIAMS I Tis SURELY a sign of the times that Ronald Reagan, by his own admission, voted for Roosevelt all four times he ran...
...fundamentalists expected more from Carter than Sunday pieties, and they did not get it...
...Children, uprooted from homes and neighborhoods, learn through loss to be more reserved in making their commitments...
...but both Republican ideology and the corporate economy regard such restraint as anathema...
...The reason is simple: The tradition of liberal individualism, which shapes Republican ideology, acknowledges no public good that is not simply an aggregate of private goods and liberties...
...Family relationships are bound to reflect these currents...
...And while Carter himself was against providing federal funds for abortion-little enough to ask, as "right-to-Iifers" saw it-the Democratic convention in New York decidedly did not share the president's view...
...Reagan, in other words, presents himself as the defender of the American "fifth freedom," the right to consume, and he assures us that we will enjoy that liberty in his term of office...
...In any case, it seems likely that a great many of Reagan's supporters took their candidate's economics with a grain of salt...
...Carter had promised to make the American family a major concern of his administration, but the Democrats only damaged themselves when they tried to address the issue...
...they knew, in other words, that in practice they would not be required to make the sacrifices he urged- His candidacy, therefore, had a secret attraction for well-to-do liberals...
...To make family, community, and morality the goals of public policy would require that we subordinate private liberty to civil order, something neither Reagan nor his party is likely to consider...
...Yet the more normal divorce seems, the more we are reminded that we can and do make mistakes in judging others, even in our most important commitments and in our strongest feelings...
...Reagan is not likely to lend federal power to the quest for stability in personal relationships...
...Asked the cure for rising food prices in 1947, Senator Robert A. Taft responded, "We should eat less...
...Nothing could have been more alien to the style and substance of Reagan's campaign, and Reagan made much, scornfully, of Carter's suggestion that inflation resulted from the fact that we have lived "too well...
...With few exceptions, however, Anderson's supporters knew he would not win...
...We cannot commit ourselves very deeply to the institutions that are so prone to change...
...We are an "energy-rich" country, and the energy companies will prove it...
...After years of learning that' 'you don't shoot Santa Claus," the Republicans decided to nominate him...
...Civil libertarians and partisans of new, "liberated" arrangements protested against making the traditional family the norm of policy, and the administration yielded, although it ought to have been possible to advocate stronger and more stable relationships whether or not these are "traditional...
...He quoted Roosevelt happily...
...Ants are only grim, ill-humored folks who eat badly...
...Reagan made every effort to appeal to social conservatives, especially since the social issue lies at the hiatus between the liberals and working-class Democrats...
...Voters, in other words, were neither asked nor permitted to choose between austerity and extravagance...
...The forces that are weakening local communities and families are bound up with our individualism, mobility, and commitment to growth...
...Reagan suggests that the private sector, assisted by a sympathetic government, can make sacrifice unnecessary...
...The example of the auto industry does not augur well for a policy of "getting the government off the backs of the American people...
...and people, like everything else, are only too likely to be different tomorrow...
...The "supply side" economics symbolized by the Kemp-Roth tax proposal, moreover, indicates the change even more clearly...
Vol. 108 • May 1981 • No. 9
