"How did things ever get so far?" asked Don Corleone of the "Five Families" as he tried to understand how camaraderie among the leaders of the New York mafia had devolved into open warfare. "I don't know. It was so unfortunate, so unnecessary." If the Ghost of Ronald Reagan were with us now, he'd be asking the same question. No conversation about politics today can escape touching on our polarized and toxic society, which is rather rich since most who focus on this share in the blame. Democrats hate Republicans. Never Trumpers hate Trump. Trump World hates all Democrats, most Republicans, Never Trumpers, the Swamp, and the Deep State. Biden’s chatting with Mitterand.
It does make you long for the good old days when every liberal and virtually the entire GOP establishment in Washington, DC hated Ronald Reagan.
And they did. Upon his death, there were some beautiful tributes paid by journalists who didńt have the cojones to admit that they'd tried to take him down for the full eight years of his presidency, and a dozen years beforehand as he made his way to the top, and yet they'd failed so miserably that when he ran for reelection, he won by the largest margin in history.
Which brings me to my friend Craig Shirley, the Sherlock Holmes of Reagan historians. His research of Reagan’s career is exhaustive – four bestselling books tracing his political career, his presidency, and, perhaps most poignantly, his death - and in each one he delivers insights other historians miss. This comes true again in the new book The Search for Reagan: The Appealing Intellectual Conservatism of Ronald Reagan.
Democrats have exercised the politics of resentment and resignation for generations. During Reagan’s time, resentment was focused primarily on the “greedy rich,” while the resignation was epitomized by Jimmy Carter’s dour lamentation of a “national malaise.” Today these sentiments are on steroids. The left resents not just the rich, but also the middle class, and whites, and Asians, and Jews, and the educated, and the military and the religious – in short, every segment of American society that has contributed to American exceptionalism. It is no longer resigned to America’s demise, it is advancing the proposition.
What is missing in today’s politics - on all sides, and all sides know it - is Reagan’s optimism, and it’s a point Shirley drives home. It was the engine powering philosophy. Shirley reminds readers how Reagan fondly quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance,” in which he called America “the country of tomorrow.”
It took that optimism to convince America to reject détente, arm herself to the teeth, and envision the Soviet Union peacefully consigned to the ash heap of history; to convince Americans that they were better prepared to care for themselves if only they’d reject the yoke of government assistance, and in that “country of tomorrow,” America would shine as a beacon of hope for the free world.
It came at a price. Liberal shibboleths were being directly challenged and the left fought back – viciously and often dishonestly. Shirley cites the old saw from Napoleon Bonaparte that history is “a set of lies agreed upon,” and shows how this was applied to Reagan when he lived, and now entered into the history books in death.
As an example, Shirley revisits the Showtime alleged docudrama “The Reagans” and how it flat-out invented Reagan’s dismissal of the AIDS epidemic. “Those who live in sin will die in sin” is a statement he never made. Liberals charge that Reagan didn’t utter the word “AIDS” until 1987; Shirley notes that, among other things, Reagan discussed AIDS funding during a 1985 press conference. In fact, federal funding to fight AIDS skyrocketed during Reagan’s presidency, almost doubling each year from 1983 -- when the media started blaring headlines -- from $44 million to $103 million, $205 million, $508 million, $922 million, and then $1.6 billion in 1988. Reagan's secretary of Health and Human Services in 1983, Margaret Heckler, declared AIDS her department's "number one priority."
Another attempted rewrite of history is Reagan’s (and conservatives’) racism. Shirley recalls how Reagan pushed for and won reparations for Japanese-Americans who were interned by Franklin Roosevelt’s administration during World War II, and how the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King was signed by Reagan in 1983 over objections from conservative leaders like Sen. Jesse Helms.
As Shirley notes, George Will once said Reagan “did not shimmy to the top of the greasy pole of American politics by accident or lassitude.” But we’re lucky that in all of that campaign combat, voters were able to elevate Reagan over John Connally and Howard Baker and Bob Dole, and George Bush the Elder – all men who symbolized Nixon-Ford business as usual. These men might have made the 1980s a stale rerun of the 1970s, and the difference would have been monumental, to put it mildly.
So, conservatives, go do your homework. Read The Search for Reagan. Be of good cheer.
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