A Reaganite Reconsiders

...we weren't all that interested in the profession of politics altogether...

...And Clinton said, fine...

...Their skepticism about the supply-side tax cuts, their willingness to sacrifice the defense buildup, their obvious unease with the Strategic Defense Initiative, their quiet hostility to the pro-life cause, their lack of interest in the contras, their passion for summitry with the Soviets-in short, their overall dedication to procedure over substance and image over principle-made them our nemeses...

...We were not campaign workers...

...They hate their bosses and swallow their anger so they don't get fired...

...But I was wrong, in large measure because the attitudes of ideological people like us bear little relation to the attitudes of ordinary people...

...If this was what we suffered with Reagan, the most ideological president of the century, what would we get with Bush...

...They played hardball...

...And they knew him to be a compromiser, knew him to be a wimp, knew him to be a man of government, and they said, Here we go...

...The Republican party won its colossal election in 1994, and is poised to advance that victory in 1996, because it burst into life as a tough-minded party of ideas and conviction...

...They could sign it and insist that they would improve on it...

...For a second time, in December, they told him: Do what we say or we'll shut the government down...

...They could spend the next few years trying to cut programs in order to find money for tax cuts...

...Compromise" was the seduction offered by the serpents in the Rose Garden...

...Reagan threw our disparate obsessions into a blender and came up with a new political melange that oozed over old boundaries and eventually hardened into new ones...

...It stopped being the Stupid Party of legend, the exhausted and fearful party of the permanent minority, and became true heir to the Reagan legacy...

...They may think it's on the wrong track, but then, they also tell pollsters they're pretty happy as a rule...

...And given such conditions, the word "compromise" was about as popular with us as the word "Munich...

...A Reaganite Reconsiders By John Podhoretz Reaganites, we called ourselves-and though we came in many different guises and had many different obsessions, we shared one predominant quality throughout the 1980s: We were proudly unyielding, immune to compromise...

...They could say, rightly, that the government is still too large and still takes too much of the people's money, and that Clinton is at fault for that...

...As detailed in Don Oberdorfer's vitally important book The Turn, by 1983 Reagan had already begun his brilliant strategy of trying to edge the Soviets into reforms that would unravel their system while simultaneously taking a hard line and spending money on defense like crazy...

...The freshmen had come to town as revolutionaries, as harbingers of sweeping change, and they were going to make it happen...

...The supply-siders had their Kronstadt with the 1982 TEFRA tax increase...

...It was Reagan's perception-not his handlers', as his handwritten letters to Soviet leaders demonstrate-that the internal contradictions of Communism could not long survive exposure to the West in full economic and social throttle...

...No, really, they said...

...We considered ourselves at war-against the Soviets on the march around the world and the America-haters on the march inside our own institutions and culture...

...So the Democrats and liberals were bad news...

...Though the Reaganites knew they were right, and Clinton was wrong...

...You can't compromise with the future of the United States simply because you don't have the votes to override a presidential veto...

...They could thus draw the appropriate distinction between the Republican party as the party of the taxpayer and the Democratic party as the party of government...

...Since many of us had come to political life not through partisan associations but through intellection (magazines, universities) or interest groups (the New Right), our fidelity was first and foremost to the ideas we believed in-ideas that had been given practical political life by Ronald Reagan...

...It seemed there would be no appropriate outlet for our passion...

...In the long run, then, just as Reagan caused the Soviet Union to collapse under the weight of its own wrongs and ills, so too could the Republicans cause Democratic liberalism's ultimate collapse by facing it problem by problem, calmly and consistently, and over a long period of time...

...They are committed more to ideas than to people...

...so what...

...This crucible requires a reevaluation...

...When your most cherished ideas about how politics works undergo the rigors of reality, you can no longer hide behind theory...

...We were idea warriors...

...And so the Reaganite passion for purity meets its match in the sensible worldliness of the electorate...

...But they don't think all of Washington should grind to a halt before a consensus about it is achieved...

...What we came, in 1980, to admire most about Ronald Reagan (someone few of us would have voted for in 1976) was precisely the quality that horrified the established political order in Washington-his supposed "extremism," his ornery commitment to a set of unfashionable ideas...

...Reagan never did, not really...

...And they don't see what all the hysteria is about in Washington...

...Washington had a hard time understanding the ethos of the Reaganites in Reagan's day, the same trouble it is having with the Republican freshmen right now, because both have a remarkably selfless approach to politics...

...They need to learn how to compromise as Reagan compromised...

...They make deals...

...Of course, an educated Reaganite had already learned some lessons about the uncompromising approach from discovering how Reagan conducted the Cold War...

...And, to the horror of most of us, this proved a gigantic tactical error...

...they increased in number...

...People would realize that the federal government did little for them, and they would see Clinton as the defender of bureaucrats and fiefdoms...

...animated more by conviction than by a desire for personal glory...

...We were prepared for what Bush might do, the compromises he might strike-and with the still-amazing exception of the Gulf war, he lived down to our expectations...

...And then came the election of 1994, and the emergence of the energized House leadership and the 73 Republican freshmen who seemed to find the very idea of compromise as abhorrent as we did...

...That legacy belongs not to the Bakers and Deavers, but to the Reaganites, to those who believed in the ideas that carried the day against the Soviets and, eventually, against the welfare state...

...Of course, this portrait of the Reaganites both past and present is drawn in broad strokes, but its essence is accurate...

...Where they work and live, they don't get to spend their lives in principled fights over first principles...

...If they were, say, to accept Clinton's seven-year balanced budget as the best deal possible at the moment, they would still achieve a major political victory-and one that could be built on...

...They were remarkably cohesive both as a team and as an ideological force from the moment of their election...

...The shutdown was a tactic I, for one, had longed to see in use because it seemed to me it would make the case for conservatism better than anything else...

...And they took it, really took it, right to Clinton...

...They could begin to address the moral questions raised by an intrusive and wasteful federal government...

...Their names were legion to us-Baker and Deaver, Darman and Gergen...

...All things considered, the public wants it in balance...

...For a Reaganite, there could be no worse accusation than that some Bakerite was behaving as he was because he sought favorable treatment by the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times...

...And we wanted the government shut down...

...committed to battle because they believe that, unchecked, the country and the world are headed for disaster...

...Time and again the Democrats sent the president foolish and spendthrift budgets for which Reagan mysteriously got the blame...

...Throughout the Reagan years, we sought policies tougher than those the administration could bring itself to support...

...They had been trying to destroy the country for years...

...Though we called ourselves Reaganites, we were not the usual members of the cult of personality that surrounds all presidents...

...Now conservatives need to learn from Reagan's other side, the side that did know how to use the Bakers and Darmans for their competence-the one-time union boss, the negotiator, the conciliator...

...Indeed, we came to dislike these senior officers in our own camp more than our enemies on the left...

...And they, too, understood that the lesson of the Reagan years was that compromise was a bad thing...

...They should understand that America is a big, lumbering, complicated place, and that if the body politic moves one step, the reverberations are enormous...

...They passed appropriations bills that are, by Washington's standards, models of ideological rectitude, and devised a balanced-budget plan that is, again by Washington standards, remarkably honest...

...The discovery of Reagan's two-tiered approach put to shame those of us who spent the 1980s worried that the sentimental president would somehow lose his nerve toward the Soviets as his predecessors had...

...Place not your trust in princes," we counseled one another whenever we found ourselves done in by another Reagan compromise...

...They could spend time building the necessary public support for specific spending cuts...

...They pay their bills...

...The true villains were those who (we believed) were sacrificing the principles of Reaganism because they thirsted for Establishment respectability...

...They preserved the proposed tax cuts...

...The federal budget has been out of balance for 26 years, and the sky didn't fall in...

...Let it close...

...We wanted summits with the Soviets canceled...

...We live in a world where we can see how ideas transmute into policies that either help or hurt people...

...Vital political arguments must be fought to the finish...

...The pro-lifers saw their cause slighted, year after year, by a president who would not even appear in person at their annual rally but rather talked to the crowd by phone...

...You have to examine them in full blossom to see whether they are beautiful or weedlike, whether they smell wonderful or lousy...

...And they shut down the government, something Reaganites had been arguing for year after year during the Reagan presidency...

...The conduct of the budget negotiations with Bill Clinton these past few months has been a Reagan-ite's dream...

...He was after bigger fish, the end of a corrupted and dying system, a system we did not quite believe would collapse...

...We wanted cabinet departments abolished...

...We believed that Reagan believed as we believed, but that he was, for various reasons, incapable of fighting the lonely battle for the sanctity of these ideas in the upper reaches of his government (and, indeed, in his own bedroom...

...nonetheless the public blamed them, blamed the Reaganites, for the trouble...

...And by making deals with the devil every now and then...

...They may dislike their neighbors, but they achieve a chilly modus vivendi...

...Now it is time to learn some of the same lessons domestically...

...A few big things a year-not everything, all at once...

...Finally, Reaganites had the reins of power on Capitol Hill...

...So, we yelled, show the public you don't want to spend the money...

...one was added...

...He was the binding glue for people who actually had little in common culturally or politically-anti-Communists, pro-lifers, anti-Keynesian economists, libertarian government-haters...

...And Clinton, mindful of the fact that the first government shutdown worked to his political advantage, said, fine...

...They cared about principle, an uncommon thing in politics...

...And Clinton said, fine...

...And with a Republican leadership shorn of the squishy, self-defeating moderate types who had dominated it for so long, we saw a remarkable phenomenon: At last, Reaganites were in charge of the legislative process...

...So we formed a new political alliance, this alliance against compromise, and one of the things that bound us together was our disappointment with the Reagan administration...

...Be careful what you wish for, says the proverb, for you may get it...

...And not open warfare...

...Go to the mattresses...

...though they knew they were honest, and he deceitful...

...These are life-and-death issues to us...

...The American people apparently don't think the world is going to hell in a handbasket...

...we said...

...The libertarians were heartbroken by the administration's halfhearted efforts to cut down on regulation...

...we cried (a phrase we learned from our favorite movie, The Godfather...

...Most of all, conservatives should learn from Ronald Reagan that they must never act as though the country is in a dire crisis requiring immediate rectification...

...This attitude only proves how divorced we can be, all we Reaganite populists, from the American public, whose foremost interpreter we profess to be...

...The foreign-policy hardliners were horrified that the president who said he would never negotiate with terrorists began doing just that with Iran, and then cut loose the selfless patriots inside his government who found themselves subjected to the worst kind of political persecution for the crime of attempting to fulfill their president's policy...

...Sequester...

...After all, what could you expect from such people...

...We will...

...though they knew they had the political wind at their back and Clinton was fighting to preserve a dead coalition...