The Real Reagan Legacy

The weeklong coast-to-coast funeral ceremonies for President Reagan have come to a close. Our country has few national rituals. The state funeral we have just watched is one of the most moving of those formal moments in our nation’s life. Its relative rarity, once in a generation recently, makes it all the more powerful.

Much of the positive outpouring of Reagan reminiscences has been accurate and appropriate. Reagan did have an infectious optimism about this country. He was disarmingly charming with both friends and enemies. He was serenely self-confident in the big-picture positions that he took, without, at the same time, being either arrogant or self-righteous. He enjoyed making fun of himself and his foibles. I, like a majority of Americans, disagreed with most of his policies, but couldn’t help liking the man and often smiling along with him. Although I think Jimmy Carter is one of our most under-rated Presidents and Reagan is one of the more over-rated ones, I liked Reagan’s smiling dismissal of Carter’s dour doom-and-gloom presence during the presidential debates.

But all of these are personality traits, important to Reagan’s political success, but hardly the material or substance of important public policy. When one looks at Reagan’s public policy legacy, the good feelings fade quickly.

Reagan dramatically realigned American politics by drawing on disaffected elements of the old Democratic Party base. Reagan enthusiastically courted white southern voters, including the powerful racist elements among them. In a particularly painful moment for me, Reagan traveled to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where during the 1960s three of my civil rights colleagues had been murdered by a sheriff’s posse. Reagan’s visit was meant to indicate his willingness to politically embrace that element of the South. In the North he successfully courted disadvantaged white men, the Reagan Democrats, who felt threatened by the civil rights and women’s movements. Reagan successfully steered the “party of Lincoln” away from supporting Black aspirations while courting outright racists.

Reagan’s public economic policies were equally divisive. Enthralled by the dogma of economic quacks, he re-christened “trickle-down economics” as “supply-side economics.” He boldly asserted that the way to reduce the federal deficit was to dramatically cut taxes. That would stimulate such a surge of economic growth that tax revenues would actually rise, leading to a balanced budget. This was the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine that even many Republican could not help disparaging. “Voodoo economics,” George Bush Sr. called it. Of course it was exactly that. Federal deficits ballooned to record levels during Reagan’s years in office.

This was not just an error on Reagan’s part. This was, from his point of view, a cannot-lose policy. The ballooning deficits, he knew, would force cuts in the social programs that he opposed but were widely popular, including, ultimately Social Security and Medicare. By purposely bankrupting the federal government, he could get the reductions in government programs he sought and those reductions would have to keep coming long after he left office. This strategy continues under the current administration.

It was during this time period that the trend of increasing economic equality in the United States that characterized the middle of the 20^th century ended. Real pay and family income at the lower end of the distribution largely stagnated or fell while it began to rise steeply at the upper end. Except for the few who escaped upward out of the middle class, the center of American society began to be seriously squeezed.

Reagan also initiated a belligerent military policy, rekindling an incredibly expensive arms race, not only between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but also among the poorest nations of the world. Reagan’s partisans now claim that this belligerent military policy won the Cold War for the U.S. The truth is that the USSR was already teetering on the brink of collapse when Reagan took office. In one of our most spectacular intelligence failures, we attributed to the Soviet Union economic and military power it simply did not have, as became obvious during Reagan’s second term.

But Reagan confidently asserted the righteousness of an American empire built around overwhelming military might. To him, we were God’s chosen people, the shining city on the hill. Our political system, economic organization, and culture were the ultimate and nature products of progress that the rest of the world ought to embrace. If we had to give them a little nudge with our military might every now and then to get them to see the light, so much the worse for them. Of course, here too there are echoes in the current administration, along with distressing confirmation of the dangers inherent in such national arrogance.

These are not policies we can afford to either honor or continue.