He was not mean-spirited like Nixon, with contempt for blacks, Jews and liberals, nor did he regard political opponents as enemies of the republic. He radiated civility and took disagreement in stride as a natural part of political life. He held together the Republican Party, that incongruous partnership of the country club and the revival meeting.
He had a distinct course to steer in domestic affairs. When younger and perhaps wiser, he had cast his first four presidential votes for Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he dedicated his own presidency to undoing FDR’s work. The expanding role of government was, he claimed, the root of political and social evil. Get government off our backs, and our problems would solve themselves.
His central weapon was tax reduction. This, he believed, would pay for itself by stimulating the economy. He concentrated on tax cuts for the rich, expecting that the benefits would eventually trickle down to the poor. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan felt that tax reduction was deliberately designed to create deficits of such magnitude as to block social spending.
In the end, he failed to shrink big government. The number of federal employees grew by 7 percent during his two terms. Federal spending actually increased as a proportion of national output. Committed to balancing the budget, he ran the largest peacetime deficits in American history and tripled the national debt. Committed to the social agenda of the religious right, he failed to legalize prayer in public schools, to outlaw abortion or flag burning. In eight Reagan years, the gap between rich and poor Americans was greater than it had been for half a century.
His historic achievement came in foreign policy. Reagan’s admirers contend that his costly rearmament program caused the Soviet collapse. Maybe so; but surely the thing that did in the Russians was that time had proved communism an economic, political and moral disaster–which is what the architects of the policy of peaceful containment had predicted 50 years before.
The Reagan legacy? In 1995, Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” was supposed to complete the Reagan Revolution. It sank with hardly a trace, and Gingrich with it. Especially after 9/11, the antigovernment fever seems to be waning. Reaganism may prove to be a transient episode in the stream of American history. Yet memories will remain of Ronald Reagan himself as a gallant human being riding into the sunset of his life in a glow of national affection.
