Reagan: An Antidote To Hero Worship
Now that Margaret Thatcher is being lifted to iconic status alongside Ronald Reagan in the right wing community, and with the news that Reagan would pummel Obama in a head to head election, I thought a few facts are in order. So here goes:
Reagan would have cut or privatized Social Security. No. Not at all. This is what he said in 1984:
“Social Security, let’s lay it to rest once in for all … Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. Social Security is totally funded by the payroll tax levied on employer and employee. If you reduce the outgo of Social Security, that money would not go into the general fund to reduce the deficit. It would go into the Social Security trust fund. So Social Security has nothing to do with balancing the budget or erasing or lowering the deficit.”
Ok. So he was definitely opposed to gun control. Not exactly. Governor Reagan of California supported and advocated the Mulford Act, which was a gun control law introduced by conservative Republicans in reaction to Black Panther groups policing parts of Oakland. Among other things, Reagan told the press that he saw:
“no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”
But he was a rabid tax cutter, right? Not exactly. True he cut income taxes by over 20% in 1981. The result was a ballooning deficit: the largest in US peacetime history. Reagan became addicted to deficit spending, but was convinced to raise revenues also to avert fiscal calamity. He subsequently went on a binge of closing tax loopholes to mitigate the fiscal damage his tax cutting had created. Indeed the 1982 Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act was the largest tax increase in four decades, and by the time he was done Reagan had clawed back around half his original tax cut.
Hmmm. How about immigration. He cracked down on that, right? Well, I’m glad you asked. The 1986 immigration reform law did indeed crack down on undocumented workers and set aside money for border security, but it also allowed a route to citizenship and gave amnesty to anyone who had entered the US before 1982. Yes. Amnesty. Try that out on latter day Republicans.
Well he didn’t like trade unions, so that makes him a conservative idol. Not so fast. Reagan was the only US president ever to be a union member. So committed to the actors union was he that he served as its president six times. He fought hard for worker rights. His legacy as a union leader lives on to this day in the form of ongoing pension and health benefit agreements in the entertainment industry. So he fought for things that modern Republicans want to get rid of. He also supported, very vocally, the role of unions in the struggle to throw off Soviet control in Eastern Europe.
Ouch. This is tough. Well he stood tall against our enemies. He would never have gone and talked to them the way liberals like to do. Oh dear. Remember Reykjavík? Remember all that Cold war diplomacy? All that outreach to Gorbachev? They became such buddies that when Reagan died in 2004, Gorbachev was visibly shaken and lauded Reagan as a great leader whose willingness to talk was crucial in ending the Cold War.
So Reagan was a liberal?
Well, no. He used all the usual right wing signals to get elected. He made up stories about welfare queens, and his election campaigns included overt appeals to red state racism.
He was no liberal. But he also wasn’t the person we read about in today’s right wing media accounts and speeches either. He was a die hard conservative with enough sense to reach across party lines and do deals when he needed to. He worked with Democrats even while he proselytized right wing radicalism. His rhetoric was extreme, but his actions more practical. His legacy has been betrayed by those who followed him. They bought the rhetoric and seek to act on it without regard for the practical.
The current version of Republicanism is tinged with Reagan-speak and Reagan worship, but it does not reflect Reagan reality.
Then again it lives in another world anyway. Why should it tell the truth about one of its heroes?
