Reagan's Greatness
KRISTOL, WILLIAM
Reagan's Greatness Giving a President His Due By William Kristol Ronald Reagan is today a president without honor in his own country, a Republican without imitators in his own party, and a...
...Such confidence rings strange in our postmodern ears...
...But why shouldn't we...
...One reason is clear: Reagan Republicanism is controversial Republicanism...
...and he decisively vindicated the claims of conservatism...
...Such a mood also infects the establishment of the Republican party...
...One commentator, while professing admiration for Reagan, has argued that Rea-ganism was in no way an innovation but simply "conservative common sense applied to the problems that had developed in the 1960s and the 1970s...
...Dinesh D'Souza is, and his fine new study of Reagan provides a fresh opportunity to consider Reagan's achievements and our neglect of them...
...in the September 15, 1997, Wall Street Journal...
...Yet today's Republican party, curiously, is not a Reaganite party...
...And political parties presumably like to win...
...Courage is the first of the virtues, and Reagan had it...
...it seems to support Peggy Noonan's quip that Reagan's example proves that "the unexam-ined life is worth living...
...Precisely because Reagan does not reach the heights of a Lincoln or a Churchill, he is accessible as a model to be followed by other ordinary political men...
...Reagan was, of course, a staunch anti-Communist...
...Reagan won the Cold War almost without firing a shot...
...For when you strip away the arguments of multilateral liberalism or Kissin-gerian "realism," you find a lack of confidence in American principles...
...If it is true, as D'Souza maintains, that "Reagan dominates American politics in the second half of the twentieth century," this is more evident in the Democratic party, with Clinton's clever appropriation of some Reagan-ite themes...
...Meanwhile, Rockefeller Republicanism attempts a comeback in the Northeast, and Pat Buchanan and his spinoffs try to peddle a message that is a peculiar mixture of George Wallace and Robert Taft...
...In his concluding chapter, D'Souza joins many others in warning against yearning for "another Ronald Reagan...
...Reagan Democrats" became Republicans because they were offered a new, not-traditionally-Republican, anti-establishment (and pro-American) vision...
...Elected with barely 50 percent of the vote, at odds with the entire foreign-policy establishment, Reagan in his first term set out, in the words of Sovietologist Stephen Cohen of Princeton in 1983, "to abandon both containment and detente for a very different objective: destroying the Soviet Union as a world power and possibly its communist system...
...Reagan dared to imagine such a world because he really did believe that the West would not merely contain communism, but "transcend" it...
...And it was Reagan's confidence that made possible his boldness...
...This is all too much for today's politicians, who do not want to confront such responsibilities and who in one way or another have embraced doctrines of American retreat...
...Reagan accomplished two great deeds as president—restoring America's economic health and winning the Cold War...
...But it was also Reagan's confidence in America that permitted him, in his second term, to move aggressively to take advantage of what Gorbachev felt forced to do in response to Reagan's tough first-term policies...
...His courage and his optimism were connected in this way: Courage often goes hand-in-hand with the belief—not always an entirely rational belief—that your cause will prevail...
...he laid the groundwork for the GOP to escape half a century of minority status...
...Reagan was able to add Nixon's silent majority to Goldwater's core of believers, thus creating a patriotic majority that was no longer silent, one that remains the basis of a possible lasting conservative realignment...
...and he believed these principles would be victorious...
...The point of transcending communism was not simply to allow America to come home again...
...He was also confident—far more so than most conservatives—that his country would prevail...
...Like many before him, D'Souza attempts to explain the "secret" of Reagan, "to solve the mystery" of Reagan the man...
...Reagan believed this because he was convinced Providence was somehow on America's side...
...It implies an America that is militarily strong, morally assertive, and politically dar-ing—in the service of advancing American interests and American principles in the world, and not because those principles are American but because they are morally superior to competing principles...
...And we also credit Reagan's contention— made in his magnificent 1984 speech at Normandy—that ours is "the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man...
...Reagan challenged a sitting Republican president and took on prevailing Republican orthodoxies and principalities...
...In any case, the proof is in the pudding...
...But even more striking than Reagan's trademark sunshine was his extraordinary political courage...
...But political greatness requires the courage to be unsophisticated...
...he believed that men deserve to be free and that they have the capacity to govern themselves...
...He was able to take the moral offensive against communism not only because he believed the Soviet Union evil, but because he believed America a force for good...
...But his anti-communism followed from his patriotism...
...Reagan's own party, which he led to the verge of triumph, shies away...
...Reagan was confident that what America stood for was right...
...He broke with conservative conventional wisdom as well when, in his second term, he brilliantly pivoted and helped Gorbachev along in the dismantling of Communist rule and the Soviet empire...
...Those conservatives who "see Reagan as another Goldwater who happened to run at a more propitious time" are wrong...
...Unlike the sophisticates of his time (and ours), Reagan "defined the conflict between the West and the Soviet Union as fundamentally a moral conflict...
...Reagan was perhaps not conventionally religious, but his confidence that God was looking out for America and for the right seems to have helped give him the courage to do all that he did...
...But when they turn to contemporary politics, they seem as ready as liberals to proclaim that we live in an age "after Reaganism...
...From the assault on detente to the Reagan Doctrine, from the deployment of the Pershing lis to the Reykjavik summit, Reagan pursued policies that were anathematized by liberals and derided by the "wise men" of the day...
...And it was the return of the GOP in 1994 to a Reaganite agenda— a return engineered by Newt Gin-grich—that produced the victory that finally ended six decades of the Democrats as the majority party in the United States...
...Reagan was serenely confident that he, and America, would prevail...
...D'Souza reminds us of the magnitude of the event: "What will probably prove to be the most important historical event of our lifetimes has already occurred...
...Since then, however, the Reaganite vision has been lost...
...The party has re-splintered into its pre-Reagan component parts...
...They may have been unsophisticated...
...If he was remarkably prescient about the weakness of the Soviet system, that merely followed from his confidence in the American system...
...He believed in the American people and in American principles...
...Reagan overcame and knit together these factions by offering, as D'Souza says, a "unifying moral vision for America," a vision of patriotism and national greatness...
...Reagan's view of America implies a distinctive American role in a post-Cold War world as well...
...Indeed, "Reagan saw himself as doing nothing more than clarifying what America stood for and against...
...In doing so, we honor Reagan...
...Any politician who now embraced a Reaganite vision would need the courage to challenge the odd mixture of fearful complacency and willful shortsightedness that characterizes the mood of the American establishment today...
...After all, Reagan was the most consequential president since Franklin Roosevelt, the most successful Republican leader since Theodore Roosevelt, and the first true conservative to reach the apex of American politics since Coolidge...
...But amazing as it may seem, few Republican leaders are interested in setting forth such a vision today...
...Embarrassed to appear nostalgic, or ignorant of Reagan's superior gifts, today's conservatives neither study nor imitate his example...
...He always emphasized the universal right to freedom and self-government...
...As D'Souza emphasizes, Reagan was in many ways an ordinary man who became an extraordinary leader...
...Feared by the Communists, patronized by the Democrats, loathed by the Left, Reagan vanquished them all...
...As D'Souza reminds us, Goldwater received less than 40 percent of the vote in 1964, and Reagan won almost 60 percent twenty years later...
...Reagan's views were not unexamined, though...
...Yet who today is a Rea-ganite...
...Surely we are entitled to hope for another Reagan...
...He brought politically incorrect social conservatives into the GOP and committed the party to a pro-life doctrine that the cultural elite could not, and still cannot, abide...
...Along with everyone else, D'Souza takes note of Reagan's "optimism...
...For it turns out to be easier to ignore Reagan than to appreciate him—if appreciating him means facing up to challenges that we would prefer to avoid...
...Meanwhile, as D'Souza suggests, we can work to reinvigorate Reaganism...
...The Reagan Doctrine—a determination to aid anti-Communist insurgents around the world—was a hard-headed and = shrewd means of weakening the 2" Soviet empire...
...And it was the sense that Clinton and the Democrats had contempt for this vision that completed the movement of the Reagan Democrats into the Republican party at the congressional and state levels in 1994...
...Reagan's Greatness Giving a President His Due By William Kristol Ronald Reagan is today a president without honor in his own country, a Republican without imitators in his own party, and a conservative without followers in his own movement...
...Much of the congressional leadership of the party is Nixon-ian—practicing a Republican version of old-fashioned Democratic interest-group, coalition-building politics, with a patina of Luntz-like happy-talk and no real consistency of message or moral vision...
...As for conservatives, they take pride in Reagan and claim his success as their own...
...This is so despite some superficial appearances to the contrary, and it is odd...
...The second, of course, is by far the greater, and D'Souza's discussion of Reagan's indispensable William Kristol, editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard, co-authored (with David Brooks) the article "What Ails Conservatism...
...Cohen, of course, was condemning Reagan for pursuing a "pathological" strategy...
...Reagan led the GOP to two stunning national election victories, the first of which brought in a Republican Senate for the first time in 26 years...
...role in concluding "the supreme political drama" of the latter half of the century is the best part of the book...
...the conviction that communism was not only dangerous but weak was rare among conservatives...
...the populist and moral appeal to Reagan Democrats was novel...
...We are unlikely to live through anything else of comparable significance...
...He simply was unafraid to stick to his guns when all around him, calculating the odds, fell away...
...Those achievements teach important lessons, and so does our neglect...
...He succeeded in handing over the White House to his vice president, giving the Republicans three consecutive terms in control of the executive branch for the first time since the 1920s...
...D'Souza convincingly shows that Reagan was "the prime mover" in his own foreign policy, "the architect of his own success...
...Though he is perceptive in his analysis, D'Souza never quite unravels the personal enigma of Reagan...
...Reagan Republicanism has proven to be winning Republicanism...
...But, as D'Souza 1 points out, "Reagan conceived of his doctrine primarily in moral terms...
...D'Souza is convincing in rebuttal: In fact, supply-side economics was a break with previous conservative orthodoxy...
...For, as D'Souza reminds us, "at a time when no one else could, Reagan dared to imagine a world in which the communist regime in the Soviet Union did not exist...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 9
