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Reagan's Legacy

He's dead, Jim: Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004

There are two Reagan anecdotes in particular that have always stayed with me. One involved his first wife, Jane Wyman, sitting off to the side at a 1940s Hollywood party where Reagan had embarked on one of his excruciating discourses about the Red Menace. Said Jane to a co-sufferer: "I'm so bored with him, I'll either kill him or kill myself."

The other concerned his son Michael's high school graduation. "I was real proud when Dad came to my high school commencement," the younger Reagan told an interviewer. After the ceremony, the old Hollywood pro sat for some photos with the class. He mingled with his son's classmates. He approached one young man, stared him in the eye, shook his hand, and said, "Hi, my name's Ronald Reagan. What's yours?" The young man replied, "Dad, it's me. Your son, Mike."

That was the Reagan seen most widely by those of us who despised what he stood for--the vacant, unstinting dullard whose rise was itself the greatest mystery. But it wasn't really so simple--Reagan, like W in our own day, was underestimated not to his peril but everybody else's. The following passage is from Gore Vidal's essay "Ronnie and Nancy: A Life in Pictures," a review of Laurence Leamer's starstruck bio of the Reagans.

Mr. Leamer might have done well to talk to some of the California journalists who covered Reagan as governor.... When I said something to the effect how odd it was that a klutz like Reagan should ever have been elected president, the journalist then proceeded to give an analysis of Reagan that was far more interesting than Mr. Leamer's mosaic of Photoplay tidbits. "He's not stupid at all. He's ignorant, which is another thing. He's also lazy, so what he doesn't know by now, which is a lot, he'll never know. That's the way he is. But he's a perfect politician. He knows exactly how to make the thing work for him."

I made some objections, pointed to errors along the way, not to mention the storms now gathering over the republic. "You can't look at it like that. You see, he's not interested in politics as such. He's only interested in himself. Consider this. Here is a fairly handsome ordinary young man with a pleasant speaking voice who first gets to be what he wants to be and everybody else then wanted to be, a radio announcer [equivalent to an anchorperson nowadays]. Then he gets to be a movie star in the Golden Age of the movies. Then he gets credit for being in at the start of television as an actor and host. Then he picks up a lot of rich friends who underwrite him politically and personally and get him elected governor twice of the biggest state in the union and then they get him elected president... The point is that here is the only man I've ever heard of who got everything that he ever wanted. That's no accident."

As for his legacy, I see that the first fusillade of obits is leaning hard on the end of the Cold War. That's fatuous--one of the objects of the Cold War all along was to make the Soviet Union spend itself into oblivion, and Reagan's was merely the hand at the rudder when the USSR entered its death throes. Reagan's real legacy is threefold: He demonstrated the viability, and tactical versatility, of the stage-managed presidency in the media age. Reagan was a ceremonial head of state whom hardly anyone took to be the guiding force behind his administration's actions. It thus became possible for Reagan to remain popular even when his policies were not. Was this disjunction the anomaly pundits made it out to be, or a subtle political triumph of the stage managers? The not-dissimilar ascent of George W. Bush and Karl Rove amounts to an argument for the latter.

Second, Reagan established the political template for the slow, deliberate dissolution of central government and of New Deal social guarantees. And he did it in the same manner that W. Bush now emulates: by simultaneously cutting taxes and sending defense spending through the roof, creating a fiscal crisis that--regrettably, regrettably--can only be solved by doing away with government as we've known it, which happens to include a slew of services most Americans would have no reason to wish away if the matter were put to a political debate. 

Third, and most strikingly, he launched a cultural revolution. Reagan popularized the ideology of the marketplace that our politics takes entirely for granted now--the view that the dictates of money are the main organizing principle of modern life, and justly so. It followed that wherever your net worth placed you on the Darwinian food chain was where you deserved to be. "Morning in America" really meant waking up from history, from shame, from so much as the pretense of looking out for any but your own. The pernicious mantra of "family values"--meaning, really, the negation of any larger social values--started here.

W said on Saturday that Reagan would be in his prayers, which no doubt included the lament that the Gipper left us too soon--about four and a half months too soon. Brace yourselves for the most protracted public burial the world's ever seen.

Posted by Steve Perry at June 7, 2004 2:44 PM

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