Ronald Reagan Rip - Road to the Middle Class

I LOVED RONALD Reagan, eventually. But in the winter of 1980 I went to my local precinct caucus as a Bush supporter. Over in the corner were the Reagan supporters. They were lower middle class types, technicians with long sideburns, and they looked like they ought to be Democrats. But David Brooks is right. Politics is tribal, and I walked out of the caucus a Reagan supporter.

The opinion polls tell us that conservatives are happier than liberals, and by quite a significant margin. I don’t know what the reason may be, but one reason must be that it is forty years since Democrats had a leader they could be proud of. They loved JFK, but they had to have been embarrassed by Carter and ashamed of Clinton, even if they will go to their graves before admitting it. That’s why they have to be so angry at Bush. It cannot be, it must not be that Bush will turn out to be a great president that transformed the world.

But we Republicans can still bask in the afterglow of Reagan: the bold initiatives, the stirring words, the charm, and the sense of humor. And in George W. Bush we have a president who has transformed American foreign policy with the forward strategy to fight World War IV and who has somehow cut the taxes on capital in half in the teeth of outraged opposition from Democrats

The moment when Ronald Reagan burned himself into the heart of every Republican must have been his great swansong at the 1992 Republican Convention when, with exquisite timing, he advised Americans what do with candidate Bill Clinton. “Don’t. Inhale.” And he brought down the house.

It was a moment of quintessential Reagan, making a deadly serious point with a twinkle in the eye and a charming sense of humor. And we loved him for it, making politics full of light and hope.

They said he was a lightweight, and we believed them, even as we pulled the lever and voted for him. We believed them and we hoped and prayed that despite it all he would muddle through. We hoped that he would somehow be able to handle the Soviets, even if he was only an actor. We hoped that somehow he would manage to sneak the Kemp-Roth tax cut through Congress, though we didn’t see how he could outfox the wily Tip O’Neill and the powerful Democratic barons in the House of Representatives.

Oh we of little faith, how foolish we were. Now we know better. We’ve read the biographies, checked through his radio addresses, learned of his courage, how he stood up to the commie Hollywood unions, realized that the man was a work-horse, not the show-horse he pretended to be. We know now that he was a man of great compassion, always anxious to respond to people that wrote to him about their troubles.

We know now that he was not a dumb actor just reading the cue cards his handlers put up for him. We know now that his cue cards were part of a careful system that he had set up for himself, that the ideas were his ideas and the speeches his speeches.

We know now why Ronald Reagan struggled for forty years against the “evil empire.” He got mugged by reality in the late 1940s when fighting to keep Communists from taking over the Screen Actors Guild. Threats of physical violence have a way of changing your life. Forty years later t led to the great cartel and challenge flung over the Berlin Wall: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And at the Brandenburg Gate: “Open this gate.” Those were the historic words that Justin Kaplan, editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, didn’t think warranted inclusion in the 1992 edition.

As we look back at the extraordinary men that have held the presidency of the United States in its hours of need: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and now perhaps George W. Bush, we can only ask, in awe, how it could be possible? How is it possible that again and again American presidents have answered the call of greatness? Were they born great, did they achieve greatness, or did they merely have greatness thrust upon them?

In Ronald Reagan’s case, he brought to an end five hundred years of European civil war with a grand strategy of penetrating brilliance that still has not penetrated to the highly educated minds of America’s bien-pensants, if Sunday’s New York Times is any indication.

But we know that Ronald Reagan was a great man and a great president, and that we shall not see his like again. And we loved him for it.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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