Ronald Reagan: Where Greatness Lies

In his December 8, 1986 journal entry, author Leo Lerman had this to say about Ronald Reagan:  “This man was shallow, a second-rate actor, utterly dependent on superficial Irish charm - the kind the morning milkman or letter carrier or any man in the street has.  He was destined to be used by strong, self-seeking, unscrupulous men wanting power not for state, but for self.  The man may be honest, but he is stupid, which in his position of highest power is criminal.”

Lerman had more to say about Reagan’s “smiling, good-fellow self” which I will not repeat here. No, I will confine myself to Mr. Lerman’s more moderate criticisms, i.e., the ones in the passage above.  

I’ve been thinking about Reagan these days because I’ve been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s latest book, Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.  Goodwin’s books have invariably been both enlightening and engaging to me and Bully Pulpit is no exception.  One of its main messages is the powerful effect that capable authors like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens had on public opinion in the early 1900s.  It’s hard to think who has such influence today.  I suppose Jon Stewart’s Daily Show comes close, but it’s kind of humiliating to realize that comedy shows today are where we have to go to find influential critical commentary about political and corporate shenanigans.  A hundred plus years ago, serious writers could generate a tidal wave of reform just by reporting what Standard Oil and its flunkeys in the Senate were up to.  How times have changed.  Sigh.

Equally fascinating is a second theme of Bully Pulpit: the way in which Theodore Roosevelt, working against the leadership of his own Republican Party, used government to make life better for Americans at the expense of the big corporations.  Before Roosevelt became president, corporate money thoroughly controlled the GOP and the GOP served those moneyed interests.  Roosevelt changed much of that by establishing regulations aimed at protecting citizens against their depredations.

Ronald Reagan, of course, did the opposite.  He initiated an era in which the government – long the protector of the people – came to be viewed as a hostile alien entity.  And by encouraging a belief in this bizarre notion, he enabled the corporations to once again exploit and abuse ordinary citizens in a way they had not done for decades.  That’s why middle class incomes have become stagnant while the one percent has basked in unprecedented wealth - since about 1980.

But I don’t believe that Reagan screwed middle class Americans on purpose.  I agree with Lerman that he was simply not very smart - and certainly not smart enough to be president.  He thought he was doing the right thing because he listened to the wrong people.

Reagan had been a Democrat in his youth, and for good reason.  His hometown was hit hard by the Depression, and his family, like many others, faced the prospect of poverty and homelessness.  Only government intervention - Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal - saved the Reagan family and many of its neighbors from this fate.

But later in life, once he was married to Nancy, Ronald Reagan bought into the right-wing Republican philosophy of his wealthy father-in-law.  Even though his well-being as a youth had depended on government intervention, he decided, once he was wealthy, that “the government is the problem.”  His very shallowness served him well here, allowing him to ignore the bizarre contradiction of his about-face.  His biographer, Lou Cannon, said that Reagan was always uncomfortable around intellectuals.  No wonder.  By the same token, I imagine snake oil salesmen must be uncomfortable around real doctors.

One of the least appealing qualities of Reagan was his bigotry.  Granted, he was a sort of good-natured dude, and he didn’t come across as a snarling bigot in the style of, say, Jesse Helms.  But bigot he was.  Two of his most outrageous and disgusting gestures along these lines were his touting of “states’ rights” in his 1980 Philadelphia, Mississippi, speech and his portrayal of an irresponsible “welfare queen” living high on honest taxpayers’ money as though she were a fair depiction of poor black families during his campaign.  Yuk.

Despite his stupidity, Reagan was not without talent, and herein we find the sources of his political success.  He was competent enough in backslapping bonhomie, but his real skill lay in public relations.  The “superficial Irish charm” of which Lerman wrote came to the fore when he was on television and through that medium he reached millions of Americans, many of whom were no more knowledgeable about the world than he was.  When he said “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” millions of people, many of whom depended heavily on government protection or support, believed him and they watched with approval as he dismantled many of the reforms that his predecessors had put in place.  

Of course Reagan didn’t bring about anti-government hostility single-handedly and he isn’t solely responsible for the rapacious way in which corporations have once again come to exploit ordinary citizens.  But more than any single individual, he, with his shallow but clueless charm, made greed-is-good corporate ruthlessness possible.

His anti-government policies were not born in the thin soil of his own consciousness; they came from those “strong, self-seeking, unscrupulous men” in the background about whom Lerman wrote.  Reagan was merely their public face.  He was, in fact, not so much a president as a press secretary, a spokesman for those who stood to benefit from a pro-corporate, small government philosophy.  And that’s why I think it’s reasonable to consider him “great” in some sense.  He was, in my opinion, the greatest presidential press secretary of modern times.

Let me wrap up by recommending Goodwin’s Bully Pulpit.  The book is a veritable inspiration.  It shows how an awakened citizenry can actually make government an active force that protects the weak – that is, almost all of us - against the strong - those we have come to know as “the one percent.”  In short, it points the way out of the dreadful era into which Ronald Reagan’s ingratiating charm has led us.

Nanny State? Pow!

The next time someone uses the phrase “Nanny State” in your presence, I recommend that you pop him sharply in the nose.

Why this sudden turn to violence? And why with a gender-specific direct object? Well (second things first), because the above-mentioned phrase is almost always used by males, and those males want to make their ideological foes feel like a bunch of weenies for relying on an entity that is just like a Nanny except that it is a complex of interlocking bureaucracies and does not have a soft, comforting bosom.

“Nanny State” is one of those phrases that just sits there and spews out dishonesty the way a stinkbug spews out stink. In this regard it is similar to other lie-o-matic phrases like “liberal media.”

Liberal media: Yes, we are actually asked to believe that the mainstream media, which is owned and controlled by wealthy capitalists, is liberal.

But back to Nanny State. It is a widespread conservative claim that liberals want to be taken care of or “coddled” by the state. Of course, conservatives at the same time claim that the state is an evil, dictatorial entity that will have a death panel snuff out Grandma's life as soon as she starts acting a bit forgetful.

I’m having a little trouble reconciling the conservatives’ Evil Death Panel State with their Coddling Nanny State, but there is a way to get to the root of this contradiction.  Consider that the dominant figures in the Republican Party (those who control most of the nation's corporate wealth) would like to reduce their taxes and so gain control over even more of the nation's wealth.  The policies of Reagan and George W. Bush have, in fact, allowed them to do just this, which is why middle class incomes have stagnated since 1980.

But, these corporate types obviously can't be honest about their aims.  They can't say, "Cut our taxes so we can get richer than ever and the hell with the rest of you!"  So, they have to dream up some narratives that middle class voters will buy.  What they've come up with are two narratives, and their idea seems to be that each story will appeal to a different segment of voters.  One narrative is designed to engender resentment and contempt toward families that depend on government-funded programs (as, for example, Ronald Reagan's family did in his youth).  Though these families are often desperately poor because Republican policies periodically wreck the economy (e.g., in 1929 and 2008), the Nanny State narrative is designed to promote the idea that they are poor because they are a bunch of good-for-nothing layabouts. 

The other narrative appeals to the paranoia that lurks in the hearts of many right-wingers.  This narrative claims that government should be shrunk and taxes cut because otherwise the evil machinations of a powerful, well-funded government will turn us all into slaves.

Obviously these narratives can't both be true.  The Government cannot be a big, soft Nanny that spoils us so we can enjoy our lives of ease without a care, AND, AT THE SAME TIME, an evil grasping  Monster that takes our guns away and turns us into miserable slaves forced to do its bidding.  But that is exactly what conservatives claim.


I suspect that the dominant Republican faction - the corporate wealthy or so-called one percent - will simply say anything they can to encourage ordinary people to hate and fear the government, so they randomly make stuff up about it. But never mind. Let's set aside the contradictions at the heart of conservative ideology, and take a look at what the liberals I know believe about the government.

First of all, we believe that the Constitution is a good thing, and that it has been improved by such amendments as those abolishing slavery and expanding voting rights. We believe that we are better off when the rules governing our everyday lives are in the hands of elected representatives instead of being in the hands of those wielders of great wealth who have traditionally dominated everyone’s lives. We believe, in other words, that conservatives are wrong to say we should weaken government so that BP, RJ Reynolds and ExxonMobil can decide what the rules are instead of our elected representatives.

A good way to get a sense of what our lives would be like were government to be suddenly made “small,” is to take a quick look at Doug Amy’s website Government is Good. (Now out in book form!)

The conservative myth holds that Americans should take care of themselves, just as we did in “the old days,” and not rely on the Evil Monster/Nanny State. By this reasoning, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, in the “old days,” individual Americans reached for their household arms and booked flights to Asia to fight the Japanese, not waiting for the stupid old Nanny State with its Army, Navy and Marines to take care of us.

Yeah, those were the good old days. When government was small and we were free to take care of ourselves.

The essence of liberal ideology is the idea that we Americans should be looking out for each other, and the best way to do this is through the instruments of democratic government. Whether the issue is going to war against those who attack us, or fighting back against a horrendous economic downturn, we will have more success if we take on these problems as a nation rather than expecting that each individual can solve these problems on his or her own.

Remember, by working together as a nation and pooling our resources, we virtually wiped out the horrifying, soul-crushing poverty that haunted the lives of the elderly in the 1930s. Thank you Social Security Administration. And, by the way, thank you again SSA for managing trillions and trillions of dollars for millions of Americans over the decades without a single serious incident of systemic fraud or corruption.

Hmm, I wonder if BP, Halliburton, Enron, Citibank, and the other champions of conservatism can match that record.

Anyway, next time your hear the phrase “Nanny State,” you know what to do.