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Article Excerpt
Although academia continues to debate Ronald Reagan's place in history, a Reagan legacy industry has been working, with some success, to enshrine the former president's memory in a host of public sites and symbols (Bjerre-Poulsen 2008). The man who fired the nation's air traffic controllers and thundered against the growth of the federal bureaucracy now has Washington's national airport and DC's largest federal office building named in his honor. Recently, conservative activists have borrowed from the evangelical Christian movement and urged each other to be guided by the question "What would Reagan do?" (Heritage Foundation 2008). And even Barack Obama invoked Ronald Reagan in the 2008 presidential campaign as a role model of transformative leadership.
From these and other indications, it would seem that Ronald Reagan is well on his way to becoming an iconographic figure in our politics.
Many academics and liberal groups understandably take a dim view of this development. But the fact of the matter is that ours would be a very dreary political society if citizens did not try to find ways to celebrate their departed heroes. Rather than pooh-poohing the idea of honoring important political figures, we would do better to recognize that there are significantly different ways of doing so.
One way of honoring is to memorialize a person. We do that by stamping his or her name on physical things--a street, building, piece of currency, and the like. Thus the Reagan Legacy Project, led by Grover Nordquist and his group, Americans for Tax Reform, aims to erect a Reagan monument in every state and to have something named after the former president in each of the nation's 3,054 counties.
Second, we can bestow honor by ritually praising the person who is to be remembered. This involves mounting celebrations, remembrances, or similar hortatory projects. Here, for example, one might think of the commemorations conducted by the Young America's Foundation at Reagan's Rancho del Cielo or the over 40 state governments that have now designated February 6 (the former president's birthday) as "Ronald Reagan Day."
Finally, there is the honor that comes from trying to appreciate a person. By "appreciate" I aim to use the term in its original sense--to evaluate or price out the worth of whatever is under consideration. In this sense, to appreciate does not mean simply to admire or be thankful. It means to be carefully attentive to understand, in a well-rounded way, the significance of someone or something. Applied to any major political figure, such an appreciative effort means striving to take the full measure of a person's presence on the public scene. That is far different from simply rendering a thumbs-up or thumbs-down approval rating.
It seems to me that this third category is the highest form of honor we can bestow on a person. That is because it puts the supreme value on the truth of things. We pay our greatest respect to a person by studiously and honestly weighing what it meant that he or she passed through this troubled world. It is true that Reagan has become an iconographic figure for many people. But this does not deny the value of striving for such an appreciation. Quite the contrary. Properly understood, an icon is not something to be worshipped but something to be seen into, a portal into deeper realities. Ideologically closed minds can have trouble seeing that an icon is not an idol.
Of course, even in the best of circumstances, honoring-as-truthful-appreciation is difficult work. A wise historian once said that "all history is contemporary history" (Collingwood 1994, 202). (1) In other words, you and I cannot avoid seeing the past in light of our present. Humanly speaking, that is the only light we have.
If that is the case in the best of circumstances, offering a fair account of Ronald Reagan's legacy in 2008 is especially difficult. Given that it is scarcely 20 years since he left office, we are only just now entering the middle distance where one can start gaining a reasonable historical perspective. Moreover, Ronald Reagan's memory is now a foil in today's partisan wars. Political activists know that shaping public understanding of the past is an essential part of contending for the future. Any fair appraisal of the Reagan legacy is difficult precisely because partisans on all sides want their listeners to believe that the truth of things must always be simple. A complex verdict on any subject is equated with a betrayal of political purpose.
And yet honoring a person by pursuing an honest appreciation necessarily requires the kind of complex thinking that today's ruthless partisanship disparages. The truth is that the political world is complicated. Partisanship aims to reduce to a minimum the number of things a person needs to think about. My aim in this essay is, within reason, to increase that number.
A good way to introduce a healthy complexity into one's thinking is to look more deeply into the initial question: What do we mean by a person's legacy?
By common usage, a legacy is the substance of things passed on. It is an inheritance that is not only handed on to the future but also handles and shapes the future. A person does not need to read learned tomes to understand the complexity of this seemingly simple idea. We experience it in our everyday family relationships, particularly between parents and children. For example, we know that parents are always teaching their children, explicitly by their words and even more importantly by their example. Thus we also know that what children are learning is often not what their parents intended. Likewise parents hand down a legacy for their children not only by what they do but also by what they fail to do, by what they give, as well as by what they withhold. And so the skein of bequeathing grows. It is simply a matter of practical experience and common sense to recognize that the idea of a legacy--presidential or otherwise--is inherently complicated. In other words,
* A legacy may entail something intended as well as unintended.
* It may involve conserving what we have as well as creating something new.
* It may consist of certain material conditions as well as the perception of those conditions.
* It may develop from what is accomplished, from what is unsuccessfully attempted, or from what is simply left undone.
So any person's legacy is a complex thing. Or perhaps better stated, it is a complex of things. To assess it requires pondering, as best one can, that intricate braid of ramifications we are pleased to call history. Such pondering should teach us to approach legacy analysis with a hearty dose of humility. Even our best efforts may not measure up to history's delight in irony and unintended consequences.
For all these reasons, I think it is more realistic to speak of the legacies rather than the legacy of Ronald Reagan--and of mixed legacies at that. Moreover, from what I have been able to learn about the man, I also think that Ronald Reagan would have recognized these difficulties in speaking and writing about him. Among other things, he was an essentially humble man--a man who developed a strong sense of self and powerful convictions but also a man with a very small sense of ego or need to defend it. If asked about his legacy, I think that rather than wanting hagiography, Ronald Reagan would give his cock of the head and that crinkled, twinkling smile and say, "Well, just do your best."
In what follows, I will try my best to draw a sketch of Ronald Reagan's complex legacies. The sketch consists of eight strokes under the headings of the welfare state, taxation, national security, the presidency, personnel, party politics, political leadership, and last, but by no means least, a final category called the person.
America's Welfare State
In declaring in his first inaugural address that government is the problem, not the solution, Ronald Reagan meant domestic government. And he meant not only the size of domestic government but its overbearing ambition to run people's lives. As Reagan put it in his famous 1964 endorsement of Barry Goldwater, Americans' fundamental choice was not between the political right or left. Rather it was the choice between up--the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down--to the anthill of centralized, all-controlling government. As he put it in a 1975 interview, "if you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism" (Reagan 1975).
In practice Ronald Reagan handed down to the future a combination of rhetorical and financial pressures that did restrain the growth of domestic government. But he and his administration did little to enact--or even prepare the groundwork for--an agenda of limited government. The overall result was to consolidate rather than roll back America's middle-class welfare state. Here we can only briefly summarize how this occurred (Davies 2003).
* The Reagan administration did carry forward the government deregulation that had begun under President Jimmy Carter. But it was deregulation that continued to be justified on grounds of economic efficiency and not a conservative/libertarian philosophy of limited government. And when deregulation produced obvious economic and social problems, as in the savings and loan scandal, reregulation quickly ensued without a nod to any principles of limited government.
* President Reagan's calls...
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