Walter In Denver

Reagan. He's Dead.

Reagan's expiration has been much more interesting than I imagined it would be. He's a polarizing figure in American culture, at least when concerning the Left and Right wings of American politics. You can make a good guess at a person's political leanings from hearing his description of Reagan, even while he praises the former Pres. A lefty will say something like, 'Reagan was a great communicator and instilled a sense of optimism to the country,' while a conservative will say the Reagan was a great champion of freedom. The leftist is quite correct, moreso than the conservative, but conservatives see the bigger picture. Reagan ran and was elected as a man of ideas.

One of many interesting aspects of the public dialogue this week is listening to the Left refuse to acknowledge that the economy has been on a (mostly) steady growth spurt since the early Reagan years, and watching the Right skirt its blind spot, that Reagan was a serious disapointment when it comes to most freedom issues. They say he stared down the Soviets, but he couldn't confront our own Congress.

Murray Rothbard detailed Reagan's failings in a 1987 essay titled The Myth of Reaganomics, including:

One of the most curious, and least edifying, sights in the Reagan era was to see the Reaganites completely change their tune of a lifetime. At the very beginning of the Reagan ad­ministration, the conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, convinced that deficits would disappear im­mediately, received a terrific shock when they were asked by the Reagan administration to vote for the usual annual in­crease in the statutory debt limit. These Republicans, some literally with tears in their eyes, protested that never in their lives had they voted for an increase in the national debt limit, but they were doing it just this one time because they "trusted Ronald Reagan" to balance the budget from then on. The rest, alas, is history, and the conservative Repub­licans never saw fit to cry again. Instead, they found them­selves adjusting rather easily to the new era of huge permanent deficits. The Gramm-Rudman law, allegedly designed to eradicate deficits in a few years, has now unsurprisingly bogged down in enduring confusion.

Reagan's administration was a bitter disappointment for the freedom movement, as he was elected on the strength of strong libertarian style rhetoric. In 1975 he granted an interview to Reason magazine, proclaiming, "If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism."

Reagan's presidency was nothing close to libertarian. As a debating point, his espousal of libertarianism only gave his opponents on the Left a convenient target - much like California energy policy is held up as a model of the failings of deregulation, while California's energy industries are more heavily regulated than ever.

I'm just old enough to remember politics at the end of the Reagan era. I probably would have voted for him if I were old enough in 1980, but I would not have done so in 1984.

Posted by Walter at June 10, 2004 06:23 PM