Caveat Civis and the Reagan Legacy

...Like Deaver before him, Watt had no qualms about what he was entitled to as an ex-government official or about the ethics of making personal contacts gained from government service the decisive factor in doing business...

...Perhaps if he had shown anger at the scandals surrounding those who had worked for him...

...lIhy didn't such deliberate political sabotage upset the country while Ronald Reagan held office...

...We could make the 1990s the payback decade and come out ahead of where we were when the 1980s began...

...In the age of Reagan the new civil servant became the entitled guardian...

...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...

...In their eyes the house was the kind of reward anybody who held high office might expect, a perk to be accepted with the ease that earlier had prompted the president to quip to reporters, "Never look a gift house in the mouth...

...then when individuals sued and were restored to the rolls, the department adopted a policy of noncompliance, refusing to admit that it should restore to its disability-insurance rolls all those with similar claims...

...they're the author's responsibility...

...Reaganism wasn't finally about specifics...

...In the Reagan years the federal government no longer saw its primary task as one of protecting the average citizen from forces beyond his or her control...

...It lies with the fears that gripped America at the start of the 1980s...

...We needed him to succeed...

...The activities of Oliver North were, however, no different from those that defined the executive nullification that characterized a series of government agencies during the Reagan years...

...As a result, the third and final phase of the Reagan legacy 172 • DISSENT The Reagan Legacy became executive nullification: the deliberate sabotaging of any government agency with a mandate different from the one the administration saw itself pledged to fulfill...

...Who was there to make things better...

...The first was supply-side economic theory, based on the notion of the Laffer curve, which held that if taxes came down the wealthy would work harder and create an economy that produced higher revenues...

...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...

...We could acknowledge that, like a profligate grandfather, Ronald Reagan had spent more than he should, but we could also tell ourselves that the Reagan legacy had turned out all right...

...But nobody in the Reagan administration so personified the entitled guardian as Ronald Reagan himself...

...At the start of the 1960s, when the limits of the New Deal became clear, the egalitarian framework on which it rested pointed the way to Head Start, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act...

...From David Stockman's insider account of Ronald Reagan's failure to understand his own budget proposals to television pictures of the president dozing off at meetings, it was clear that he was often distant from the government he presided over...

...Others chipped away at its egalitarian qualities...

...That social contract said that the federal government had a responsibility to guarantee the accountability of the institutions on which the country depended but which no citizen could personally control...

...The other half of the explanation for the success of Reaganism has, however, little to do with the "great communicator...

...As the president observed in his first inaugural address, "In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem...

...Tax reductions became the economic heart of the Reagan revolution, and by his second term in office, he was saying of welfare, "With the best of intentions, government has created a poverty trap that wreaks havoc on the very support system the poor need most to lift themselves out of poverty—the family...

...The essence of caveat civis was that 170 • DISSENT The Reagan Legacy the government no longer had to defend itself for failing to defend those most in need...

...Ronald Reagan quickly made both views his own...

...This changed view of government came from two different sources...

...The civil rights movement was now a "special interest...

...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...But among the most committed of the Reagan administration radicals there was often an interplay between ideology and greed, between breaking the law for the public as well as the private good...

...For the few with unearned income from rents and interest, taxes were capped at 50 percent, and by 1986, when the second Reagan tax cuts went into effect, the taxes on those in the highest brackets were down to 28 percent...

...agan made the denial of compassion respectable," New York governor Mario Cuomo would later say...

...Even the language of Reaganism gained widespread acceptance...

...Rabbit's observation is shrewd, but as the 1990s—with an oil crisis, a budget crisis, and stagflation—begin to look like a rerun of the early 1980s, the anesthesia has started wearing off...

...A strikebreaker was now a "replacement worker...

...In succeeding years some presidents improved on the mechanisms of the New Deal social contract...

...With Walker's assistance Deaver was then able to meet virtually every member of the South Korean cabinet, and by the time he was ready to return to America, his contacts had paid off...

...Ambassador Richard Walker wanted to hear—the president had decided to extend his term as ambassador...

...Like the house in Sacramento that a group of Reagan friends bought when he was governor of California, the Bel Air house, with its option for the Reagans to lease or buy, was a bargain...

...Two months after leaving the White House, Deaver went to Seoul on behalf of Philip Morris Inc., bringing with him a message that U.S...

...By contrast, in an era of mergers and acquisitions, the Reagan Justice Department went out of its way to assure Wall Street that it had nothing to worry about...

...For there in the rubble of the Berlin Wall—like freshly minted dollars— was a peace divided...

...If during his actual time in office he was expected to avoid using his position for profit, he was under no such restraint the minute he left government...

...The second source was the welfare theory, advanced by conservative social scientist Charles Murray, which argued that liberal poverty programs of the 1960s had not helped the poor get on their feet but created a cycle of welfare dependency...

...The firsthand evidence of presidential lapses was impossible to miss...

...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...

...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...

...In 1981, when PATCO, the air traffic controllers union, seemed about to pull off a successful strike, the president quickly intervened, firing all those who refused his order to return to work and at the same time making it clear that for the rest of the 1980s union busting would be acceptable whenever workers threatened profits...

...In a less ideological administration caveat civis would not have gone beyond this point...

...At the scandal-plagued Housing and Urban Development Department the staff was allowed to shrink by more than 18 percent, and key positions were filled by political appointees hostile to the programs they administered...

...Here too the citizen who most needed to beware was the one who had the fewest resources to rely on...

...For a brief moment after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in November 1989, it seemed as if we might not have to pay for our codependency...

...It also redefined the nature of government service...

...Asked to describe himself in action, a smiling Watt replied, "There's a skilled, talented man who uses his credibility to accomplish his task...

...Deaver would later be convicted of lying to Congress about his lobbying activities, but his conviction would only highlight how profitable his lobbying had been and do nothing to deter other Reagan officials from skirting the law...

...We did not as a nation care that at the start of the 1980s the CEOs of the country's 300 largest companies made on average 29 times what the typical manufacturing worker did and that by the end of the decade the multiple had climbed to 93 to 1. In distancing government from the citizenry, Reaganism created an environment that distanced citizens from each Man's Best Friend Markets are man's best friend and, like man's best friend, they have to be kept on a leash, followed with a pooper scooper, and sometimes muzzled...

...The Office of Human Development Services withheld millions of dollars in congressionally approved aid to abused children and elderly adults with chronic illnesses, and the Department of Health and Human Services went even further: it struck thousands of people off the Social Security disability-insurance rolls...

...In part the answer lies in his success as the "great communicator" and the impact of massive government spending (garrison Keynesianism) on the economy...

...Under Reagan, you know, it was like anesthesia," Harry Angstrom, the aging hero of John Updike's Rabbit at Rest observes...

...The problem is that we still haven't put our finger on the real Reagan legacy...

...It was free to make its overriding goal the entrepreneurial one of promoting the interests of those most capable of creating wealth...

...Less than a year after leaving office, he and his wife accepted $2 million from the Fujisankei Communications Group for making a nine-day goodwill trip through Japan...

...Caveat civis also meant that in the 1980s the "magic of the marketplace" was to be defended at all costs...

...The Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and 1986 epitomized this process...

...The "magic of the market place," the Laffer curve, junk bonds—all suggested a world in which we could get rich without having to be accountable for our excesses...

...By the end of the 1980s, the economic realignment the Reagan legacy was designed to achieve was in place...

...Fifty years ago, through a series of measures ranging from Social Security to Federal Deposit Insurance, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal established a modern social contract for America...

...He not only had the encouragement of superiors who were in direct contact with the White House, he had the evidence (from Saudi Arabia's secret deposits of $2 million a month in the contra bank account of Adolfo Calero) of the role the administration was playing in getting around the ban that Congress, through the 1984 Boland amendment, had put on aid to the contras...

...Perhaps if the president had spoken out...

...In the absence of that phoenix-like market, the Reagan legacy has nothing to offer...

...government is the problem...

...THE EDITORS 0 174 • DISSENT...

...In the dream of America reborn that he offered us, we were codependents, bent on not seeing the Reagan flaws...

...By the end of 1985, his first year out of government, Deaver had acquired $3.2 million in contracts from Boeing, Rockwell International, TWA, and CBS, as well as from Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Puerto Rico...

...What followed was a political ethic that held that the federal government should begin to cut benefits going to the poor while making life easier for the wealthy...

...We know there is a link between our present troubles and the dreams we were encouraged to dream during the Reagan presidency...

...He was able to get Philip Morris the Korean tobacco concessions it wanted as well as secure for himself a $475,00 contract from the Korean Cultural Society and a $250,000 contract from a Korean industrial complex...

...But among Reagan officials, entitlement meant not only that it was appropriate to make a profit from government service but that in the name of the higher good the agencies they worked for should serve the goals of Reaganism, even when those goals conflicted with longstanding laws or express acts of Congress...

...Under Reagan such selfless notions became the dreams of a naif...

...Once upon a time the conservative ideal of government service was embodied in the selfless administrator who put aside expectations of personal gain and made service his contribution to the country...

...Then matters might have been different...

...Cveat civis did not mean that over the course of the 1980s the average American was systematically stripped of the social benefits acquired during the previous half century...

...But if we accepted these revelations at face value, then where was there to turn...

...But it wasn't just cuts in welfare and taxes that made caveat civis so important economically...

...The optimism of 1989 is gone...

...What we are left with instead is a sense of anomie—the ethic of caveat civis—that shaped the Reagan assault on the New Deal social contract, then became the perfect campaign slogan for George Bush, "No new taxes...

...q To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your ms—the mails aren't always reliable...

...Shortly after leaving the White House, Deaver set up a lobbying firm in Washington and soon was bringing clients to the White House tennis courts and doing business from a seat on Nancy Reagan's airplane...

...But as North pointed out at his trial, there was every reason for him to believe that he was acting with Ronald Reagan's approval...

...In shredding documents the FBI was after, in lying to Congress, North's admitted flouting of the law was impossible to miss...

...For the Reagans, there was, however, no acknowledgment that such a bargain might carry with it obligations...

...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...

...But no president—until Ronald Reagan—challenged the contract itself...

...But what we have not grasped with the seriousness they deserve are the ideas behind Reagan policy—the true Reagan legacy...

...They reduced corporate tax rates immediately, and then began to provide across-the-board cuts for individuals as well...

...In an administration that made the rich richer, the Re SPRING • 1991 • 171 The Reagan Legacy successful civil servant was someone who showed that the friends and influence he had acquired could be turned to personal advantage...

...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...

...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...

...The trip, arranged by longtime Reagan friend Charles Wick, the former director of the United States Information Agency, was, however, merely icing on the cake for the president and his wife...

...Of the 10,723 merger notifications the antitrust division received between 1981 and 1987, it challenged just 26...

...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...

...Now as we struggle with the Reagan legacy, the future feels more uncertain than ever...

...In 1986 twenty of his friends set up a concern, Wall Management Services, and chipped in $2.5 million to buy the Reagans a retirement house in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles...

...The 1986 tax bill, which contained a bubble that made the marginal rate of some taxpayers higher than that of millionaires, was passed with Democratic support, and by the 1988 elections, the Democrats were still afraid to make class politics an issue, insisting that "competence" rather than ideology was the most important question for the electorate...

...Getting the government off our backs became Reagan-era code words for a new social arrangement in which the business ethic of caveat emptor—let the buyer beware— was transformed into a modern political ethic, caveat civis—let the citizen beware...

...The biggest beneficiaries of all were the superrich...

...After a decade of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, after Watergate, stagflation, and the Iranian hostage crisis, it was too depressing to think that Ronald Reagan might be as big a disappointment as his predecessors...

...The share of national income going to the wealthiest 1 percent rose from 8.1 percent in 1981 to 14.7 percent by 1986...

...In 1989 a congressional investigation into the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Department scandals would reveal that former Secretary of the Interior James Watt, no expert on housing, had earned $420,000 for eight phone calls and one thirty-minute meeting with HUD chief Samuel Pierce...

...Lenny Glynn SPRING • 1991 • 173 The Reagan Leon other...

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...It always assumed that when the New Deal state was dismantled, the market, freed from overtaxation and too many rules, would rise up and save us...

...For longtime Reagan associate Michael Deaver, the deputy chief of staff at the White House, not even the Ethics in Government Act, which requires officials to wait one year before lobbying former colleagues, was an obstacle...

...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...

...With Reagan, however, a new era began, as different from the preceding three decades as the New Deal was from the world of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover...

...When in 1981 the Reagan administration attempted to cut Social Security, it met with immediate resistance from Congress, and the president quickly backed away from his own proposals...

...Even more significant, in the economic sphere Reaganism eroded the political opposition...

...But it was not just inequity that caveat civis legitimized...

...While still in the White House the president showed how thoroughly he believed in the concept of the entitled guardian...

...By contrast, Reaganism contains no compassionate next step...

...We know that he fostered a culture that turned the 1980s into a Second Gilded Age, and we know that he was wrong on specifics: on tax cuts that helped produce a $2 trillion debt, on deregulation that led to a $500 billion savings and loan scandal, on an energy policy that has made us depend on foreign imports for 50 percent of our oil...

...The average real income of the top 5 percent of the population rose from $120,253 to $148,438 while the average real income of the poorest 20 percent fell from $9,990 to $9,431...

...At the Environmental Protection Agency, Rita Lavelle, chief of the toxic-wastes division, not only undermined agency regulations but did so for the benefit of the company for which she had previously worked...

...For his role in the Iran-contra scandal, Oliver North became the best known of the Reagan saboteurs...

...For much of the 1980s, it was possible to believe that we could have a painless future, that no sacrifice was required to cure the nation's fiscal imbalance...

...At the Justice Department, civil rights lawyers, taking their cue from the president, who sought to restore tax-exempt status to discriminatory private schools like Bob Jones University, refused to litigate the kinds of racial cases that in the past would have gotten immediate attention...

...As the president put it, "What I want to see above all is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich...

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...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...

...As journalist Frances Fitzgerald shrewdly observed, "Grant and Harding officials came to Washington with no larger purpose in mind than that of looting the government...

...It was, however, Deaver's work in South Korea that best sums up how he was able to make the role of entitled guardian work for him...

...It was about changing the social contract between citizens and their government, and it is this new realignment that we must understand if we are to come to terms with the Reagan revolution...

...Moreover, so long as the victims of 1980s social change, whether unemployed factory workers or homeless mothers, could be blamed for their own fix, it was acceptable to ignore the widening gap between rich and poor...

...Unable to dismantle the liberal governmental agencies it had inherited, the Reagan administration let them wither from within or changed their historic mission...