I've been pondering what to say about Ronald Reagan over the last couple days, and reading what others have to say. The first thing I said to someone when I heard he had died is that we would now have to endure wildly exaggerated obituaries from both his political supporters and enemies. His supporters would hail him as not only a hero but a savior, while his enemies would quite literally trace all of the world's problems to him. That prediction has borne true, of course. My own opinion is somewhat mixed.
The first thing that absolutely must be said is that all of the talk from my fellow libertarians about Reagan being a libertarian, or even close to one, is simply silly. On the economic front, while it's true that he cut taxes, he also increased spending dramatically across all fronts. While he often sounded like a libertarian in his speeches, talking about the need to eliminate entire federal departments, the reality was that he didn't do a damn thing to make that happen. And the familiar Republican argument that he couldn't cut spending because the Democratic congress wouldn't go along with it is flagrantly false. Only once in his 8 years in office did Reagan send a smaller budget to Congress than the one they sent back to him for his signature. The other 7 years, the final budget was smaller than his proposed budget. All talk and no walk on that front.
And on cultural matters, he was the very antithesis of libertarian. Reagan was the one who foisted Ed Meese and his overreaching War against civil liberties Pornography on us, as well as a vast ramping up of the war against drugs. He nominated Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, for crying out loud, and he pushed for a wholesale rollback of such decisions as Griswold v Connecticutt (the right to use contraception), Engel v Vitale (ended government-mandated school prayer), and Edwards v Aguillard (which struck down Louisiana's equal time for creationism law) and virtually the entire expansion of personal freedom that came from the Warrent court. He also pushed for expanded federal authority in a number of law enforcement issues. Yet the California Libertarian Party declared him a "great champion of individual liberty". Sorry, that's patently absurd.
The most familiar argument in his favor is that Reagan brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union by pushing the arms race and SDI. And in this regard, I think there is something to be said for it. The Soviets had to keep up with us, and their fundamentally broken economy simply couldn't handle it. This certainly did play a role in the Soviet system coming apart at the seams. The flip side to that, however, is that it also nearly bankrupted us in the process. We are still paying an enormous amount of taxes in order to pay off the debt incurred in that process. Was it worth it? Probably. But by cutting taxes while increasing spending to do it, Reagan wrote an IOU that we are paying off now and will be for decades to come. We are now spending something on the order of a half trillion dollars a year just for the interest on the debt we ran up while Reagan was spending money like a drunken sailor in a strip club.
On a more personal note, I think I would have liked Reagan very much. Virtually no one who met him disliked him, which is saying a lot. I think that he was a good man, and having seen many of the love letters that he wrote (by hand, since he didn't use computers or typewriters) to Nancy over the years, I admire how much he truly loved her. I also strangely miss him as a politician, and for this reason. Much of what Reagan believed was simpleminded and silly, in my view, but I don't doubt for a moment that he actually believed it. That's kind of refreshing in the aftermath of the two Bushes and Clinton, politicians who never saw an issue they wouldn't flip flop on in a millisecond in order to get elected again.
It occurs to me that something unusual tends to happen with ex-presidents - they get humanized. After leaving office, we begin to see them as human beings, not empty political vessels to be filled either with good or evil depending on how we view them. Jimmy Carter is the most obvious example of a man who was a political disaster, but a very compelling figure as a man once out of office. I think Reagan's illness helped to humanize him, and it also helped to humanize Nancy Reagan. I never liked Nancy at all when they were in political life, but I think she's handled his illness with a great deal of dignity and I've come to respect her.
All in all, Reagan was a mediocre intellect, but a good man and a great politician. His most lasting legacy could be yet to come. Nancy Reagan has spoken out publicly against Bush's ridiculous policy on stem cell research, which holds out the promise of curing the horrible disease that her husband died from. Perhaps his death will give her words more weight, and embarrass Bush into changing that flawed and dangerous policy.
To my surprise, your assessment of Reagan agrees almost point for point with one I just wrote to colleagues. And since you agree with me, you must of course be right. [I congratulate you on that. We'll make a good Unreconstructed New Deal Social Democrat out of you yet.]
When I heard the news about Reagan, though, my first reaction was "thank god. At last it's over. " Alzheimers took two and a half years to bring my father down and remember how painful the ordeal was for him, for my mother and the family in general. I can't imagine what nine years of that must have been like for Reagan, for his wife and for his family. Thank god it is over.
To my surprise, your assessment of Reagan agrees almost point for point with one I just wrote to colleagues. And since you agree with me, you must of course be right. [I congratulate you on that. We'll make a good Unreconstructed New Deal Social Democrat out of you yet.]
LOL.
When I heard the news about Reagan, though, my first reaction was "thank god. At last it's over. " Alzheimers took two and a half years to bring my father down and remember how painful the ordeal was for him, for my mother and the family in general. I can't imagine what nine years of that must have been like for Reagan, for his wife and for his family. Thank god it is over.
Yeah, I said to Lynn last night that I'm sure the family feels as much relief as they do grief. I can look at it more as a son, and I know how close I am to my father. It's completely unnerving to me to think about that happening to him. My father has such a vibrant and active mind, the worst thing that could happen to him would be Alzheimer's. He would rather have all of his physical abilities taken from him and be a complete invalid physically than to lose his mental faculties. That would truly be worse than death for him, and I can't imagine how painful it would be to watch him go through that. So I really do sympathize with him and with his family, and with you and yours.
We can only hope that Nancy Reagan and her family will speak out even more for brain stem research as Reagan's daughter Maureen did before her passing.
I agree closely with Ed's take although I think I liked Reagan even less.
I never seemed to benefit from anything he did when he was in office. Aand I seemed to almost invariably pay, in one way or another, for things he ended up doing
But he finally gave me something concrete. Ronald Reagan's death gives me this Friday off. And that's good enough for me.
Hello? Does anyone in the world have any memories going back, say, 15 years? Remember glasnost? Perestroika? The Congress of People's Deputies? The Commonwealth of Independent States?
The Soviet economy did not collapse. Indeed, in many respects the Russian economy became much worse during the transition to capitalism. The collapse of the Soviet Union was almost entirely political, a result of the 'Gorbachev revolution.' Reagan was merely a spectator, like the rest of us (or at least those of us who were paying attention).
flatlander100: yes... I actually heard about Reagan's death at a public concert by the Air Force Band of Liberty; the conductor announced it, the audience gasped and sighed, and the concert went on. But my first thought was not so much about Reagan's public legacy or personality, as about how when a loved one dies the way he did, after being debilitated with such a terrible illness for so long, you can't help but feel a little bit of relief. Alzheimer's disease runs in some branches of my family, too, and there are few things I'm more scared of, and few worse ways to go.
I can somewhat relate to what you, flatlander and Mr McIrvin are saying. My father died a few months ago. His memory has become vague. He had trouble connecting words at times. He was diagnosed with Atrophy of the brain, which in essence is shrinking of the brain. This comes with old age at times.
It was devastating to watch this happen. He didn't live long after being diagnosed.
I can't imagine how difficult it must have been for the Reagan family and for the 4 million other families who are affected by this disease.
The American people must insist on stem cell research.