Cut the Reagan Talk
by Patrick Ruffini :: November 19th, 2007 1:30 amSad to say, but Erick’s right here:
“I think the intentions are good, but I seem to remember Reagan being dead,” stated Erick Erickson, editor of RedState.org. “Basically, what it says is ‘We’re completely unoriginal and uninspired, so let’s go back to the old playbook.’”
Erickson stressed the principles behind the group are sound: “I think their heart is in the right place … but they need to re-brand.”
This goes all the way back to the critique of the leaderless Reagan21 coalition. I expressed my disappointment in their lack of new media savvy — ironic since their members tend to be the most plugged-in on the Hill. But Erick raises a broader point: how much should 21st century conservatives really be harkening back to Reagan?
I’ve had this same concern for a while. Look — I unequivocally believe that Reagan was our best President since Lincoln. I spent my best time in college studying the Reagan Revolution. But the fact that we’re turning our Presidential debates into a Reagan drinking game diminishes both Reagan and those who would hope to succeed him as conservatives in the White House.
Were Reagan here, as the eternal optimist that he was, I suspect that he’d be telling us to look forward not back. Reagan was now nearly a generation ago. Many of the principles are the same, but the issues are different now. Communism was defeated (thanks to Reagan). The regulatory state gave way to the free market (thanks to Reagan).
Because of Reagan’s incredible success, and the good run we had after the 1994 Revolution, conservatives are now largely spent of new ideas. That’s because we’ve implemented most of them. Incessant Reagan nostalgia tends to feed the notion that we have nothing new to offer the country; that when in doubt, we go back to the well of twenty years ago, to when it all began, rather than devise creative solutions for the future.
None of the people running for President are Reagan. Let’s just accept that and move on. If conservatism requires the second coming of Ronald Reagan to make progress, then we are in deep trouble. Yes — having Reagan with his iron will and magical stage presence would be a huge help. But the ideas should be strong enough to survive from one leader to the next. Someone like Reagan only comes along once every fifty years or so.
Reagan won power in 1980 because liberalism was spent — that it had been reduced to the mindless FDR-worship that could brook no changes to the New Deal legacy. In the Democratic mind, FDR-worship was displaced only by JFK-worship, with a legacy that is still with us to this day in the U.S. Senate. But what liberals forgot was that these leaders were a lot more flexible in office than their followers wound up being, with JFK’s marginal tax cuts being just one example.
Are conservatives going overboard with Reagan nostalgia? I’ve engaged in much of it myself, and having had the chance to see his casket depart from Andrews will rank among the greatest honors of my life. But at some point, we need to look forward and start answering the question, “But what have you done for me lately?” I can understand the 10- and 20-year anniversaries of important milestones in the Reagan era. It’s the 25- and 30-year ones — the ones that look back a generation or more — that start suggesting we’re a little worn out.
On the historical battleground, yes, Reagan’s legacy must be defended and we must not rest until he is universally recognized as one of the Greats: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan. But our contemporary leaders should be focused on making their own history not reliving someone else’s. Maybe they’ll prove us wrong and actually “be Reagan.”
(H/T: Bluey.)
Tagged: conservatism 
movement reagan21 ronald reagan
Comments (7) 
Trackbacks (0) 
del.icio.us 
digg it 
subscribe
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Reagan was a great president who had a consistent moderate-conservative agenda. But the expresson “Reagan principles” makes my skin crawl. It points to a cult of personality that is unhelpful in promoting a national agenda.
What made Reagan (and a certain fringe candidate we’re not allowed to talk about) appealing was his conviction in principles that were larger than he was. Smaller government. Less taxation.* Strong defense. Respect for the law. Not backing down in the face of Communist aggression. Simple concepts that he clearly and forcefully articulated with goodwill, without hesitation or apology.
Which candidate in “the party of principle” is promoting an agenda larger than he is? We may know their positions on specific issues, but what’s the philosophy that drives them? We don’t know. We may never know. We have before us a slate of technocrats who are being judged on their competence, not a political leader who is promoting a philosophy-driven agenda.
It’s a depressing slate, too. The GOP owes America better.
*(More in rhetoric than in actual practice, but his heart was in the right place.)
We are going to need Ron Paul if we wish to restore this country to the idealogical grandeur we once stood for.
And also let it be known that the Reagan is like Ron Paul more than any other of the slate of what, 9 still?
Does anyone think Ron Paul could say “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!!”
More likely, he’d have had us withdraw from NATO and tried the pseudo-remedy of “trade sanctions”.
The fact the Paul-bearers have gotten as far as they have is a sad commentary on how poorly our “leadership” in DC have made a positive case for the agenda of peace through strength that was a hallmark of the Reagan era. And for Wicca’s sake, we still have the porkmeisters trying to claim the mantle of fiscal conservatism
There are a generation of voters a bit older than you, Patrick, who truly understand how blessed this nation was to have had Ronald Reagan as President. If our polling shows voters between 35 and 55 aren’t really sold on the Republican party, maybe it’s because we stopped being the Republican party people my age built in our youth
I couldn’t agree more, Patrick. I for one still hold in my heart many of the same convictions that drove Ronald Reagan, but I must admit I am tiring of seeing candidate after candidate make pitiful attempts to imitate him. While imitation is the greatest form of flattery, most of these candidates don’t really convey the same messages. They choose to use worn photos of them shaking hands with Reagan, or to preach about how their tax cuts or defense strategies are of the same ilk as Reagan’s. In fact, they are not, and to insinuate as such is disrespectful to the real Reagan legacy, and is frankly becoming increasingly disturbing. Not to mention, those were different times, driven by a matrix of different causes and effects. The War on Terror is not the same thing as the Cold War, even if there are lessons to be learned from our past. The modern tax burden is not the same as it was in 1981. There is a difference between a candidate’s simplistic notion of reducing taxes and a lifetime–more than fifty years of one–spent relentlessly defending the need for less government, lower tax burdens, and the ways in which that could be done.
There’s one simple bottom line that I only believe one of our candidates really understands. We can’t carry the Reagan Revolution forward with sound bytes and hallmark images. We must carry it in our hearts, and believe in it, and never stop standing by it. Reagan made political concessions on reducing taxes in order to preserve the tax cuts he felt were most important–income taxes, etc. That’s politics. But he clearly stood by his values and principles for more than half a century. Through good times and bad, and even under relentless political and media pressure, he did not change the core of his values.
That’s where the GOP is lost. We have bits and pieces of time-proven strategies and philosophies, such as being the party of security. But we have let challenges of politics and apathetic participation (read: sound bytes) cloud our judgment, warp our communication, and disguise our core values. We need to remember who we are, and where we came from.
That is NOT accomplished by repeating the words of a fantastically great communicator. It’s accomplished by appointing and electing public servants who actually believe it, have a track record for it, and will always stand by it.
Dan
Newt Gingrich is the wrong guy to be the leader, but at least he attempts to deal with the future, and an agenda for the future.
Reagan was right for his time in 1980, but would likely not have been electable had he won the nomination in 1976. Things have to get pretty bad before the American public is willing to try a sharply different course.
Most elections are fought out over a fairly narrow middle ground, and the party differences are not really that profound. That is because members of either party owe their true allegiance to Incumbentstan. Power corrupts the small-government touters as much as it does the nanny staters.
In fact, most elections over history are of center right and center left coalitions, and polarization tends to be mostly over personalities.
It is discouraging to see Republican prospective leaders looking backward at other ages, re-fighting the same old battles, trying to patch together the same old coalitions, dwelling on the irrelevancies that differentiate the parties, like the tiresome social issues. Sorry, no President will ever eliminate abortion, patch up disintegrating families, make gays just disappear from public life, or stop large technological and social forces.
It is not in the job description, so why do we waste so much time and energy over who was most against abortion earliest? It’s crazy, and a true leader would break out of that whole paradigm.
I have fond memories of walking across my campus in 1980 to vote for the first time and yes, it was for Reagan. The world has changed since then, but optimism and
core beliefs transcend time, these are eternal values that will always honor the bright shining memory of President Reagan.
It was also true to read how his beliefs and convictions were rock solid. But these were healthy convictions, as opposed to a current candidate who wishes to legalize drugs. As a father of nine children, I can assure you any candidate with such extreme beliefs can win just about any election in California, but wouldn’t get a single vote as dog catcher in the rest of our country. As much as Peter Drucker invented modern management, we now need a POTUS who can re-invent effective government. That really narrows the field. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. We’re running out of time folks. It won’t matter about rebuilding the party after we lose this election, by 2012, if we stay this course, there will be no country to govern once our economy and currency collapses. Then it will be said that our enemies defeated the most powerful country in the world without firing a single shot. On that note, be thankful for your blessings and families tomorrow. I pray every day that my children won’t have to live out the consequences of our foolishness!
I couldn’t disagree more. The problem with the Republican Party today is that the Bush Administration has completely abandoned Reagan’s principles. Reagan advocated “peace through strength” not “peace through war.” Reagan won the Cold War because he showed the strength to limit the Soviet options. But he also showed the flexibility to negotiate.
Our current Vice-President and his neo-con allies thought Reagan was being entirely too conciliatory. If they’d had their way, the Cold War would still be going on.
And domestically, the GOP had a forward-looking strategy of privatizing social security and medicare as the next steps in dismantling the welfare state. The Bush Administration endorsed these programs but dropped the ball when it came to enacting them. Instead, they opted for expanding the welfare state with a new, unaffordable prescription drug program. Between that and the cost of the Iraq War, social security and medicare reform are not feasible in the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile the dollar has sunk to record lows and inflation is destroying the living standards of middle class and working Americans. Here is yet another departure from the traditional Republican policy of sound money.
So any new ideas to correct these problems are going to have to be more radical than the Republican incrementalism of the post-Reagan years.
Ron Paul’s followers may very win the battle in the long run as the gold standard may cease to be good idea and may become a necessity to save the dollar. The battle over illegal immigration may morph into a battle of legal immigration as well. English as our official language may become a hot campaign issue.
Isolationism may become a popular foreign policy position because no one can be trusted to follow a sensible middle ground, and interventionism is a predictable disaster.
Can the Republican Party coalesce around issues such as these? I’m not too sure it can. The old coalition of national security, social, and economic conservatives has been pretty much destroyed by the Bush Administration. A battle for control of the Republican Party will begin after the GOP loses this election. The 2012 race for the nomination will set the course for the future of the party if it has one.
Returning to the Reagan principles would be good start, not because those principles are sure winners in a general election, but because those principles spawn ideas that most Republicans (the neo-cons excepted) can unite behind.