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Ronald Reagan, Party AnimalThe man who taught Republicans to be irresponsible.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Saturday, June 5, 2004, at 7:33 PM ET

I've registered as a Republican exactly once in my life. The year was 1980, and Ronald Reagan, who died today at the age of 93, was seeking the GOP nomination for president. Teddy Kennedy was challenging President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination, and in Massachusetts, where I then lived, Kennedy was certain to win the primary. Better to cast my vote where it could do some good—in favor of John Anderson, who at that point was running as a Republican, and who seemed the only candidate capable of denying Reagan the nomination. Reagan was dangerous. He wanted to eliminate vast portions of the government indiscriminately, and he wanted to commit the military to ill-considered interventions abroad.

I couldn't have been more wrong. As an antigovernment crusader and as a warmonger, Reagan turned out to be all bark and no bite. In his first inaugural address, Reagan said:

It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people.

But that didn't happen. As Michael Kinsley has observed, after Reagan's two terms, spending by the federal government was one-quarter higher, factoring out inflation, than when he got there; the federal civilian workforce had increased from 2.8 million to 3 million; and federal spending, as a share of Gross Domestic Product, had decreased by one percentage point to 21.2 percent. "If Ronald Reagan and his 'Reaganauts' could only slow down the growth of government spending, not reverse it or eliminate wasteful programs, what hope is there for any other conservative president?" complained the conservative Heritage Foundation soon after Reagan left office. The only major government agency Reagan managed to eliminate was the Civil Aeronautics Board, which didn't have much to do after the Carter administration deregulated the airline industry. Fittingly, the Ronald Reagan Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, completed 10 years after Reagan left office, today houses 5,000 government employees and is the largest government building in Washington.

In the saber-rattling department, here's what Reagan said in his first inaugural address:

As for the enemies of freedom, those who are potential adversaries, they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it; we will not surrender for it—now or ever. Our forbearance should never be misunderstood. Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will.

But the only hot war waged during the Reagan administration was to remove a comic-opera Marxist government from the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. The United States retreated from Lebanon after a suicide bomber killed more than 200 American soldiers. It is seldom observed that Saddam's gassing of the Kurds, which George W. Bush rightly denounced prior to the Iraq war, occurred on Reagan's watch. In 1984, when the Reagan administration got its first inkling that Iraq was engaged in chemical warfare, it chose not to make a fuss. The most ambitious foreign intervention during the Reagan administration—the funnelling of aid to the Nicaraguan contras—was done illegally and, after it was discovered, embroiled Reagan's second term in a scandal from which it never recovered.

Reagan can probably claim some credit for ending the Cold War, but his principal weapon, characteristically, was spending—the Soviets bankrupted themselves trying to keep up with the Pentagon's weapons-buying binge through the 1980s. Reagan's greatest achievement in foreign affairs was therefore linked to his greatest achievement in domestic affairs. He taught Republicans that they could be even less responsible than Democrats.

Government spending is not (at least in my view) inherently irresponsible. What is irresponsible is spending money you don't have. Perhaps the most poignant passage in Reagan's first inaugural address is the one expressing what today seems a very old-fashioned Republican concern about deficit spending:

For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.

You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?

You know the rest of the story. The deficit, which stood at $74 billion in Carter's final year, ballooned to $155 billion in Reagan's final year. In the words of Vice President Dick Cheney, "Reagan taught us deficits don't matter."

Today, what does it mean to be a Republican? It means you can cut taxes indiscriminately and needn't worry about the debt you're piling up. It certainly doesn't mean that you want to shrink the federal government. Indeed, government spending under George W. Bush has increased faster than it did under Bill Clinton. Before Reagan, pandering was principally a Democratic vice. Today, it's principally a Republican vice. Ronald Reagan performed that transformation, and it remains his most enduring legacy.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
Photograph of President Reagan on the Slate home page by Wally McNamee/Corbis.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Ronald Reagan's significance does not lie in the usual conundrums of Ronald Reagan the man or Ronald Reagan the President. Was Reagan a hypocrite or not? Was he intelligent or not? Did Reagan win the cold war? Did he take government irresponsibility to new heights? I have my opinions on these issues, but the issues matter little compared to Reagan's role as the tablet on which conservatives wrote their political dreams. In the mid and late seventies, young conservatives like Peggy Noonan were somewhat like James Dean's character in Rebel Without a Cause, disaffected with everything around them, full of a rage and a desire that they could not quite define themselves, wanting to make their mark on a society they saw as going in the wrong direction, but not knowing exactly what their particular mark would be or how they would go about it. What Ronald Reagan provided was a surface on which they could write answers to these questions. Reagan's face, his smile, his actor's good looks, his knowing gestures of condescension toward the enemies of conservatism--all of these qualities incited conservatives to invest their dreams of American strength, Manifest Destiny, male authority, rural authenticity, free enterprise, and private property into the figure of "Ronald Reagan."

This is why it is impossible to discuss Reagan as a person without also discussing what contemporary conservatism made of Reagan. Reagan was not a man in the same way that Jimmy Carter or his Vice-President George Bush were men or Libby Dole is a woman. Reagan had an unusual role in defining himself and apparently (according to Edmund Morris) little ability to give himself shape as a person. Rather than define himself in relation to his situation, Reagan instinctively allowed his personal to be initially determined by the poetry of conservative dream-life, then shaped that dream persona into the practical political decision-making and performative skills needed to play on the big stage of American politics.

However, it wasn't as a practical politician that Reagan had the most impact. Naturally cautious, intuitively perceptive about grasping the moment, and not particularly interested in the details of policy-making, Reagan was the kind of big-gesturing, carefully proceeding politician that has typified post-Watergate presidents before George W. Bush. He's more remembered for his gestures ("Tear Down This Wall") than his actions. Instead, Reagan should be remembered as the figure that allowed the conservative movement to gain its first real coherence as a political force.

--ElephantGun

(To reply, click here)


…As to the lasting effects of Reagan's legacy, in 1993, after a disastrous mid-term election when the Republicans permanently took back the House of Representatives for the first time since FDR ruled, Bill Clinton was forced to cynically state: "the era of big government is over." Fending off Bob Dole two years later, Clinton signed a Republican welfare reform bill he'd vetoed twice; an action that would have been unimaginable for a Democratic president before Reagan's time in office.

Regarding foreign policy, Reagan brought America out of the malaise of Vietnam to confront the largest evil regime ever seen on this Earth- the Soviet government. Even former Soviet leaders admit that Reagan's military build-up was responsible for breaking the Soviet government and ending the cold war. How pathetic that America's own Socialists, like Tim Noah, can't be so generous of spirit.

Because of Ronald Reagan, we now live free of the threat of a nuclear war that would envelope the planet. Reagan appreciated that dealing with tyrants required a position of strength; not weakness. "Trust, but verify." The impotent Jimmy Carteresque American left still cannot understand Reagan's wisdom.

Finally, Ronald Reagan was a very intelligent man who had a knack for being right. He had guts and brought conservatism from the wilderness to the mainstream. He instilled confidence in Americans that they could succeed without the federal government acting as an overreaching nanny. Reagan also defined what it meant to be the only superpower that was dedicated to stamping out Communism and spreading freedom…

Like Abraham Lincoln, President Reagan was not perfect. Ronald Reagan was, however, our greatest president since President Lincoln. Hopefully, President Reagan's passing will lead to a reexamination of Reagan's principles and a rededication to conservatism by George W. Bush and other current Republican leaders.

--EFriedemann

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Regardless of how one feels about a public figure, it's in poor taste to trash him publicly mere hours after his death. The weeks and months ahead provide lots of opportunity to analyze Reagan's impact as president, but basic human decency requires us to avoid trashing the dead so close to the moment of their death.

I am in no way saying that Mr. Noah should have painted Reagan as a saint when it's clear that Mr. Noah thinks the very opposite. Instead, I am suggesting another track -- not saying anything at all…

--The_Curmudgeon

(To reply, click here)


…Many will say Noah is insensitive for criticizing Reagan on the day he died. I agree, it's impolite to speak ill of the recently departed. Reagan did not deserve the terrible illness he suffered in his final years, but at least now his struggle has reached its inevitable end and he is at peace. Nonetheless, history's not about praising the dead. There will be thousands of TV commentators, spokesmen, and editorials doing that over the next couple of days. History's about looking back at the past and asking "What really happened here?"

--Johnny_Canuck

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