… from a garden-variety media liberal at Salon:
Nostalgia lies so thickly over the ’80s that it’s hard now to recall what Ronald W. Reagan represented to your average card-carrying liberal. Hating him then was as much an article of faith as hating George W. Bush is now. Everything his supporters loved — the Plexiglas optimism, the blithe disregard for detail, the chuckle, the very cock of his head — we loathed. To this day, many of my friends refuse to call National Airport by its new title, and to this day, I refuse to pass the Ronald Reagan Building without a private snigger that Mr. Government-Off-Our-Backs has his name forever attached to a massive concrete bureaucratic complex.
But who’s sniggering now? History, it seems, is on the side of the turncoat Washington Post, and there’s a distinct possibility that if we paleo-libs continue in our ancient rancors, we’ll start looking like those troglodytes who still plump for Alger Hiss’ innocence.
Louis Bayard’s blunder here is to place the temporal locus of buffoonery in the future. How rare is it to find a mainstream American liberal, in the media or in your average college English department, who believes that Whittaker Chambers, not Hiss, was the villain of his time? The New York Times obituary for Hiss was headlined: “Alger Hiss, Divisive Icon of the Cold War, Dies at 92.” Divisive? The flat-earther skepticism of Hiss’s guilt in the Times has to be read to be fully appreciated, but this is typical:
To still others, many of them on the left, Mr. Hiss was what William Reuben, a friend and the author of one of the dozens of books on the case, called ‘’an American saint’’: an idealistic New Dealer and rising star in the foreign policy establishment whose career was ruined when he was framed, in part to discredit the New Deal.
And this howler from the same is priceless:
The cable said the agent had worked for Soviet military intelligence since 1935 and had flown on to Moscow after the Yalta conference. There was a notation on the document, by someone at the National Security Agency, suggesting that Ales was ‘’probably Alger Hiss.’’
Once again, Mr. Hiss’s detractors said the document was new proof that he had been a spy. Mr. Hiss released a statement denying he was Ales. Yes, he had spent a night in Moscow after Yalta, but he said he had gone there mainly to see the subway system.
Alger Hiss went to Moscow to see the subway? That sort of credulity is not the preserve of isolated trogs, it’s the standard media culture.
But back to Bayard and Reagan. What’s interesting about Bayard’s piece isn’t his callow and shallow thoughts on Reagan (if “thoughts” is the word) it’s the display of narcissism. It doesn’t help that Bayard is pretty clearly not the most candent star in the journalistic galaxy. Of all the facts touching Reagan’s legacy that might profitably be written about, the mirth of Mr. Louis Bayard as he passes a government building in Washington does not exactly command history’s full attention. Forget the substance of Reagan; all consequences hang upon the manner in which the exquisite personal sensibilities of Mr. Louis Bayard responded to the man, to his chuckle, and to the “very cock of his head.” On the subject of the twinkle in Reagan’s eye, Bayard apparently is agnostic. And no word on the way he wore his hat, which was everything to Sinatra but nothing to Bayard.
Conservatives are by no means immune to irrational, personal hatred (cf. “Clinton, William J., insane conspiracy theories concerning”) but it’s hard to imagine that 30 years from now we’ll still be writing about how we detested the way he bit his lip.
“Who’s sniggering now?” Bayard asks. There’s an obvious answer to that question. Listen carefully.