Two decades after Reagan’s death, we cherish his legacy — and wonder if we have the courage to live up to it.
Two decades after Reagan’s death, we cherish his legacy -- and wonder if we have the courage to live up to it.
S ince I am a longtime Reagan campaign officer, government-agency head, and admiring author, National Review’s editors have asked me to reflect on Ronald Reagan and what the world looks like now, 20 years since his earthly passing-away. I will pretty much respond by quoting his wisdom rather than my own and drawing some conclusions perhaps relevant for today.
President Reagan would probably begin any such comparison with how things looked to him as he delivered his First Inaugural Address:
. . . as we begin, let us take inventory. We are a nation that has a government — not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed. It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people.
And he continued:
Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work — work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.
Reagan was no anarchist but was a proponent of rule of law, derived, as he acknowledged, from philosopher and Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek, who like Reagan believed in a synthesis of limited free and local government, and a rule of law culture birthed within Western civilization and ultimately synthesized into the American Constitution.
Reagan believed this synthesis was still achievable even as it had eroded in modern times:
We’re not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing. So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope. We have every right to dream heroic dreams.
Reagan began with a broad free-market program, conquering stagflation and pressuring the Federal Reserve into informally following gold prices. This economic policy remained generally successful until the 2008 Great Recession. Reagan touched the “third rail of politics,” by increasing the Social Security retirement age. He reduced non-defense spending by 9 percent, cutting 100,000 employee positions (with some help from the author). He supported the Hyde amendment, federal health, and charity-drive restrictions limiting abortion. He divided 77 national welfare plans into nine broad state-block grants. He reformed the sacrosanct Federal Retirement program, cutting costs from 44 to 20 percent of payroll, saving multiple billions. All this then resulted in 25 years of U.S. prosperity thereafter, pretty much until his death.
Worldwide, as Margaret Thatcher said, Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot. He increased defense spending and reinvigorated foreign policy. Even here he was subtle. In the Inaugural, he told “potential adversaries” that “peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it; we will not surrender for it, now or ever.” He continued: “When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act. We will maintain sufficient strength to prevail, if need be, knowing that if we do so we have the best chance of never having to use that strength.” And, still, he committed fewer overseas troops in fewer hostile situations abroad than most other presidents.
Ronald Reagan’s secret was that he always thought deeper. In his London Guildhall speech in 1988, he explained his success in foreign policy was “not so much a struggle of armed might, not so much a test of bombs and rockets, as a test of faith and will.” Further: “Here, then, is our formula for completing our crusade for freedom. Here is the strength of our civilization and our belief in the rights of humanity. Our faith is in a higher law.” Earlier he had emphasized that the Founders had begun “the most exciting adventure in the history of nations.” It was “based upon the principles of human dignity, individual rights, and representative democracy,” “on common law, separation of powers, and limited government. Their victory was to find a home for liberty,” a belief “that the rights of men were ours by grace of God. That vision of our Founding Fathers revolutionized the world.”
These were his principles. But, as he warned, they “must be reaffirmed by every generation of Americans, for freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Even during the Reagan administration, at my final cabinet meeting as civil-service director, I reported that the administration was losing ground in meeting our goals for reducing the size of the bureaucracy. President Reagan responded by urging his agency heads to renew their efforts to cut government. He said that he understood how difficult it was, but that it was crucial. For from his readings in history, he concluded that no nation had gone so far down the road toward bureaucracy and statism as had the United States by that time and still come back to freedom.
The man regularly telling his epitome Christmas pony story, however, was too optimistic to end there. The president smiled and concluded, “Although no country has come back, I would like us to be the beginning. I would like us to be the first.”
But what about today? In the decades since, government has exploded, Reagan’s economic policies have been turned on their head, there has been more onerous bureaucratic regulation, the Fed came back to autopilot, spending has gone into the multiple trillions of dollars, traditional values have been questioned, and foreign and defense policy has been enfeebled. Even the rule of law has become seriously politicized: We recently witnessed the conviction of a former president, about which the Wall Street Journal suggested “this rough turn” away from the law “might have opened a new destabilizing era of American politics,” which “no one can say how it will end.”
It is difficult after 20 years of reversal to believe we will be the first to come back to Ronald Reagan’s hope for a renewal of freedom and rule of law. Reagan himself warned of the choice even back in his 1964 speech supporting Barry Goldwater. We will either “preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
Twenty years later, it looks less and less like preservation and more and more like darkness — a banana republic perhaps. Oh well; perhaps a Brazil-type politics, law, and government will be good enough for future Americans sometime down the road. Or is it still possible for a Reagan Christmas pony — and a generation with the courage and creative energy required for renewal?