Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan passed away Saturday, as every news outlet has been reporting.

Lou Cannon, a journalist who chronicled Reagan's career closely from his days as California Governor through his Presidency looks back on his career: Actor, Governor, President, Icon Washington Post 06/06/04. Cannon is kind of a throwback to a period of more responsible journalism. Cannon had a long association with Reagan, enjoyed good access and seems to have genuinely admired him. But he was also capable of writing serious analysis criticizing his faults in a meaningful way as well. If this kind of reporting and analysis were typical of today's American press, there would be no need to write "press corps" with quotation marks.

Anyone who reads my blog knows that Reagan's signature ideas, celebrated today by his Republican admirers, of slashing taxes for the wealthy, slashing education and services for everyone else, running up huge budget deficits and pouring billions into the nuclear arms race and boondoggle military projects like Star Wars are not in line with my general outlook.

I do have nice things to say about Reagan.

I do credit Reagan with three genuinely important achievements, though:

The 1983 refinancing plan for Social Security to put it on a sound financial basis (where it still is today, despite the hysterical propaganda of Republican ideologues who have always hated the entire concept of Social Security);

The 1986 tax reform, not to be confused with the 1981 tax reform that Republican rightwingers idolize. I remember distinctly reading about Reagan's proposed 1986 tax reform in Business Week and thinking, "Either this report has the facts really messed up, or Ronald Reagan just proposed a tax reform based on the principals that liberal Democratic tax reformers have been advocating the last decade or more." The main idea was to eliminate most business tax breaks (aka, tax subsidies) in order to minimize tax considerations in economic decision-making. (The proposed tax levels weren't nearly enough to pay down the enormous deficits that resulted from the 1981 cut and his other policies, but that's another story.) In the 1988 Presidential race, Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis supported maintaining the 1986 reform, and Old Man Bush for the Republicans proposed doing away with it.

The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, which reduced tensions with the Soviet Union at a critical time, allowing Gorbachev to press ahead with his democratic reforms, which led within a few years to the fall of the Berlin Wall and an end to the Soviet Union. That was not exactly the outcome for which Gorbachev had hoped. But Reagan's willingness to institute concrete measures to significantly limit the nuclear threat on both sides was a vital part in allowing that process to proceed.  Cannon's article linked above gives a prominent place to Reagan's policies toward the USSR that avoids the stereotypical distortion practiced by Republican hawks:

There is general agreement, however, that the meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan and later between Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush eased the transition from Cold War to peace. Alexander Bessmertnykh, deputy Soviet foreign minister during the Gorbachev-Reagan summits, said at a 1993 conference at Princeton that both Reagan and Gorbachev were more farsighted than their advisers in their idealistic determination to reduce nuclear arsenals.

It overstates matters to say there is "general agreement" on that point.  Republican hawks would sooner ignore it or criticize it.

Remembrances of Reagan unlikely to be heard on Fox News or Oxycontin radio

I recently linked to two important articles challenging the neoconservative view of the end of the Soviet Union, which include discussions of Reagan's Cold War policies which his Republican fans now remember with remarkable one-sidedness.

La Opinión (Murió ex presidente Reagan 06/05/04) recalls, "Reagan and his ultraliberal policies profoundly marked the American economic and society in the 1980s." Ultraliberal? No, this doesn't mean that La Opinión is to the right of the John Birch Society politically.

In most of the world, "liberal" is not a synonym for "left," as it is in the US. It refers to a tradition of liberalism that was sharply defined in the 19th century,that included advocacy of democracy, personal liberty and economic "free-market" policies, including free trade. So in Europe and Latin America and other places as well, "liberal" tends to refer to policies that in the US we would associate with conservative advocates of de-regulation. For most democracies, the term "right-wing liberal" would not be a bizarre concept, as it would be in the US. That would refer to someone who puts much more emphasis on economic "liberalism" than on the personal-liberty and democracy parts.

La Opinión recites familiar aspects of Reagan's "visceral anticommunism." But it also observes:

His anticommunist crusade drove him to support in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras ultrarightist militaries and businesspeople, without troubling himself about the grave violations of human rights that cost the lives of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

The article also quotes Sigfrido Reyes of the leftist Faribundo Martí National Liberation Front of El Salvador on that aspect of Reagan's legacy. He says that Reagan's passing closes a chapter of a "warlike policy"that resulted in a civil war in El Salvador that took more than 75,000 lives. Reagan's policies "were at odds with the desires of the peoples that aspire to social justice and democratic processes with free elections."

Steve Gilliard recalls one of the most important and unsavory aspects of Reagan's domestic politics, that still lives on today in the huge influence of rightwing Southern whites like Trent Lott and Tom DeLay in the Republican Party: Ronald Reagan 1911-2004 06/05/04.

... Reagan rode to power on a wave of reaction to the Civil Rights struggle. California, a state with a deep well of racial resentment, supported Reagan, who would protect the establishment and call for students to be murdered on their campuses. Reagan was regarded as a crank by many on the left, but his appeal to middle America was strong. It wasn't that Reagan was a racist, as fas as is known, he wasn't. But he sure could pander to them, as he did in 1984 at Philadelphia, MS. For those of you unaware, that is the place three civil rights workers were murdered by the Klan. It wouldbe like a British Prime Ministerial candidate going to Amritsar to talk about the glory of the British Army (the site of a 1921 massacre of peaceful Indian protesters). Reagan pandered to the racist right with ease, even as Barry Goldwater, the man he supported in 1964 with a convention speech, slowly backed away from many of his reactionary views. Instead, Reagan depicted blacks as "welfare queens" leeching off the society, when in reality, white women are the largest recipients of AFDC. Reagan used race like a club to hammer minorities and pander to the racist right.

Germany's Der Spiegel memoralizes him as "the last Cold Warrior": Der letzte Kalte Krieger 06/05/04. The writer, Lisa Erdmann, couldn't resist a favorite German image for American leaders:

With a bowlegged cowboy stride, he led America for eight years and divided the world into black and white. He called the USSR "the evil empire," the USA was the country with a calling. Historical knowledge he took from movies and he closed the government shop promptly at 5:00pm. He thought in simple structures, and dealt with things in the same way. That gave many Americans the feeling of having a dependable man in the White House, who was straightforward instead of spending a lot of time diddling around.  But he sometimes made the brows of his political companions break into a nervous sweat. "Just what planet does he live on?" asked an irritated Francois Mitterand, France's then-President when Reagan first took part in a G-7 summit in Ottawa in 1981. [my translation]

But her article does remember fondly one of Reagan's most famous lines, at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in 1987, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Teresa Montero in El Mundo remembers him as Ronald Reagan, un ferviente defensor del liberalismo 06/06/04 (Ronald Reagan, fervent defender of liberalism). See, I said you wouldn't hear this stuff on Fox News!

Montero recalls his "ultraliberal" economic policies and remember him as a "radical anticommunist." But she also notes that his escalating defense budgets and his diplomatic hostility toward the USSR was later supplemented by negotiations to limit medium-range nuclear missiles.

And she gives his administration credit - wrongly - as being "the longest period of economic prosperity in the United States." There was a longer period of prosperity in the 1990s. The short but sharp recession of 1980 that helped Reagan get elected President was over when he took office. His initial policies had a significant role in driving the economy into another recession in 1981, followed by a recovery that was painfully slow for job-seekers.

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