Copyright 2000 P.G. Publishing Co.
Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette
July 30, 2000, Sunday, TWO STAR EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL, Pg. E-1
LENGTH: 1587 words
HEADLINE:
HOW REAGAN WORSHIP RUINS THE REPUBLICANS
BYLINE:
JONATHAN CHAIT
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
BODY:
The quest to venerate Ronald Reagan
began ignominiously. In the early ' 90s, conservatives set out to convey
Reagan's greatness to future generations by constructing a gleaming new
government building in downtown Washington, D.C. But plans for the Ronald Reagan
Building and International Trade Center went comically wrong. Construction ran
hundreds of millions of dollars and several years over budget, and, once
completed in 1998, the building was so manifestly useless that federal agencies
had to be coaxed to move into it. Liberals snickered that the trade center was a
perfect metaphor for the bloated deficits they saw as Reagan's real legacy.
Humiliated by the debacle, Reagan's acolytes set out in search of a more
suitable monument to their hero. In 1997, Grover Norquist -- a business lobbyist
and GOP strategist -- created the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project to campaign for
memorials to the Gipper. As its first task, the group proposed renaming
Washington National Airport.
Outside the conservative movement, the
notion was met with ridicule and disbelief. But Republicans in Congress,
politically frustrated and torn asunder by internecine strife, rallied to the
cause. Astonishingly, the renaming was enacted less than a year after it was
conceived. Michael Kamburowski, the debonair Australian whom Norquist tapped to
head the Reagan project, recalls, "The airport thing happened very, very
quickly, even more quickly than we expected."
The success only whetted
Kamburowski's appetite. In the summer of 1997, he declared that there should be
some significant public work named after Reagan in each of the 50 states. The
legacy project has already claimed the places most directly linked to the great
man's life. Last year, a train station in Des Moines, Iowa, installed a bronze
plaque commemorating the spot where the young Reagan left his job as a radio
announcer to set out for Hollywood. His hometown of Dixon, Ill., plans a 92-mile
Reagan Trail in addition to two new statues -- one of them depicting a muscular
young Reagan in a swimsuit, overlooking the park where he worked as a lifeguard.
There will also be a six-foot portrait, made of jelly beans, of the former
president.
Norquist and Kamburowski's campaign is only the most concrete
manifestation of a reflexive Reagan worship that has permeated every crevice of
the conservative movement. As the Republican Party convenes this week in
Philadelphia -- where paeans to the Gipper will no doubt echo from the rafters
once more -- it is more seized by adoration of Reagan than it was even at the
height of his presidency.
The Reagan presidency lives on in conservative
mythology as a bygone utopia peopled by titans against whom the mortals of today
must be measured. When conservatives debate the Reagan legacy, it is not to
dispute its merits but to lay competing claims to its mantle.
Witness
this year's intraconservative debate over expanding trade with
China. Proponents of permanent normal trading relations pointed
to Reagan's support for free trade; opponents invoked his anti-communism. Had
someone dug up a forgotten diary entry laying out Reagan's position for such a
future contingency, it might have settled the argument then and there.
The premise underlying such debates was explicated by Reagan
hagiographer Dinesh D'Souza, who wrote that "the right simply needs to approach
public policy questions by asking: What would Reagan have done?"
And
therein lies the problem. Once it is agreed that all wisdom resides in the canon
of Reagan, then the hard work of debate and self-examination and incorporating
new facts is no longer necessary. On economics, defense and morality, the
Republican Party has refused to adapt itself to a patently changed political
landscape for fear of acknowledging that the old ideas -the Reagan ideas -- no
longer work.
And those who have tried to adapt have been cast out as
heretics -anti-Reagan and therefore anti-conservative or even anti-Republican.
When Ronald Reagan was actually president, Republicans prided themselves
on being "the party of ideas." Now, as their hero fades into the twilight, his
memory sits at the heart of a deep intellectual ossification.
John
McCain was unquestionably right. Whatever one thinks of Reagan, conditions in
the country were vastly better suited to his ideals 20 years ago than they are
today. Reaganomics may have been fallacious, but it was born in fertile soil. In
1980 marginal tax rates reached 70 percent. This meant that workers at the
highest end of the income spectrum, unless they hid their income in a tax
shelter, could keep only 30 cents of every additional dollar they earned. You
didn't have to be a supply-sider to believe that, in a stagnant economy, these
rates depressed the entrepreneurial vigor of the business class.
But, by
the ' 90s, tax rates were down and concern about the deficit was up --
undermining both the economic and political rationales for tax-cutting. McCain
grasped this reality and reacted accordingly. Running for president at a time
when the top marginal tax rate had fallen by almost 50 percent from what it was
in 1980 and when, even more than in 1996, Americans seemed sold on fiscal
discipline and unnerved by the prospect of dramatic tax cuts, McCain refused to
walk the plank that Dole had walked four years before.
In New Hampshire,
he attacked Bush's huge tax cut proposal and called for paying down the debt to
save Social Security instead. This deviation from Reaganism was at least part of
the reason he attracted the support of large numbers of independents and
moderate Democrats. McCain said he was re-creating the Reagan coalition, but he
was doing so by eschewing the Reagan orthodoxy that had been tying Republican
presidential candidates in an electoral straitjacket for close to a decade.
In all of this, conservatives imagine they are paying tribute to their
hero. But the perversity of it is that the idea of Reagan to which they pay
obeisance is not true to the man. Indeed, the most powerful evidence that the
principles of Reaganism cannot be everywhere and always applied is that even
Reagan did not remain true to them.
As memories of his presidency recede
into a golden mist, it is easy to forget that, during the Gipper's days in
office, the right frequently bemoaned his infidelity to its cause. When in 1984
Policy Review -- the journal of the Heritage Foundation -- asked 11 conservative
activists and intellectuals to evaluate the president, eight gave him critical
reviews. To be sure, much of the blame was deflected from Reagan onto his
ostensibly weak-willed advisers. Yet the picture of wayward moderates pulling
the strings in the White House, while not completely false, was mainly a way for
conservatives to avoid acknowledging that Reagan himself was not monolithically
conservative.
And the right's denial has grown even stronger since
Reagan left office. It is widely known, for instance, that federal spending grew
substantially during Reagan's presidency, but conservatives explain this away as
an unavoidable by-product of Democratic control of Congress, conveniently
forgetting that Reagan's proposed budgets increased spending as well.
During the presidential campaign, Gary Bauer cloaked his right-wing
moralism in the Reagan mantle. But he didn't mention that Reagan appeared before
right-to-life rallies only by video, that he never expended much political
capital on abortion or school prayer, and that two of his three Supreme Court
appointments -- Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor -- have turned
out to be moderates.
In foreign policy, it is true that Reagan built up
the military and denounced the Soviet Union. But, by the end of his second term,
he had grown infatuated with the idea of making peace with the Russians (in
part, as biographer Lou Cannon notes, to provide a united front in case of alien
invasion).
In 1987, Reagan stunned Mikhail Gorbachev by proposing to
abolish nuclear weapons -- only to be restrained by his advisers, who in this
case pulled him to the right. On taxes, too, Reagan backpedaled from supply-side
purity. In 1983, he acceded to a tax increase to stanch the revenue lost in his
massive 1981 cut. In 1986, he pushed through a tax reform that, while lowering
rates, raised corporate taxes, ended preferential treatment for capital gains,
and made the tax code more progressive.
In the current political
atmosphere, such a reform would be unthinkably left-wing. Yet, despite all these
ideological compromises, the Reagan of the conservative imagination remains the
1980 version, frozen permanently in its most pristine form.
Ultimately,
hero worship breeds despair. The mortals of the present can never live up to the
icons of the past. In George W., the Reaganites appear to have everything they
have always wanted: a popular conservative poised to end the political exile
into which his father thrust them.
But at some point W.'s ideology will
smack up against the hard reality of today's very different world, and either
his popularity or his conservatism will give way. At that point the true
believers will discover ideological deviations and conclude bitterly that the
younger Bush is his father's son after all. And then, the verity of their
doctrine reaffirmed, they will begin once more their search for the true heir to
Ronald Reagan.
Jonathan Chait is an associate editor of The New
Republic, in which a longer version of this commentary appeared.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO, Photo: File photo: Gaga over the Gipper
LOAD-DATE: August 2, 2000 
