June 12, 2004
Reagan's Legacy
With all the endless tributes to the late President Ronald Reagan this week, it seems appropriate to examine whether the political profile being promoted at his death matches what he actually accomplished while in office. Fact is, Reagan ran as a conservative but governed as a moderate -- even liberal -- by pragmatically doing things (like deficit spending, arms reductions with the Soviet Union, etc.) that the Right despised and by ignoring the "Moral Majority" efforts to infect American politics with overt religion.
As Joshua Green wrote in Washington Monthly last February:
Reagan is, to be sure, one of the most conservative presidents in U.S. history and will certainly be remembered as such. His record on the environment, defense, and economic policy is very much in line with its portrayal. But he entered office as an ideologue who promised a conservative revolution, vowing to slash the size of government, radically scale back entitlements, and deploy the powers of the presidency in pursuit of socially and culturally conservative goals. That he essentially failed in this mission hasn't stopped partisan biographers from pretending otherwise. (Noonan writes of his 1980 campaign pledges: "Done, done, done, done, done, done, and done. Every bit of it.")
The truth hurts. So in politics, and now political revisionist history, those who forget the past are doomed to mischaracterize the future.
Posted by glenn
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