The deification of Ronald Reagan

2004.03.22 — Government | Business | Ronald Reagan | by Derek Jensen

Folks on the right like to make a big deal about how great a president Ronald Reagan was. Sean Hannity talked him up on his book tour for Deliver Us From Evil just recently. We've named an airport and an aircraft carrier after him. But before we start putting Reagan on a coin (Nancy just says no, anyway), we need to check the relentless praise and examine his contributions with some perspective.

Ronald Reagan began an era of supply-side Reanomics that has since proven to be wrong. Some like to claim that the prosperity of the Clinton era was owed to the policies of the Reagan era, but it's ridiculous to claim that policies take five or more years to affect the economy (the Fed says three months to two years). Reagan and his progeny, right down to George W Bush, believe that allowing rich people to keep more of their own money will fix an ailing economy. It's wrong; it isn't true; it doesn't make sense; and I've said so before.

Note: Lower taxes overall is always good, as long as you balance it with lower spending, but that's not what happened, either in the case of Reagan's or Bush 2's tax cuts.

Reagan also believed that a strong military was necessary to keep the Soviet Union in check. The Soviets thought the same thing about us. Supporters point to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 as the proof that Reagan's policies "won" the cold war. But in fact the Soviet bloc's collapse demonstrates the failure of Reagan's foreign policy.

Here was a huge, militarily-powerful nation aligned against the United States but teetering on the brink of complete economic collapse, and the Reagan administration couldn't see it. Reagan conservatives couldn't see the economic frailty of their enemy because they were so completely focused on its weapon strength. They greatly exaggerated the satellite evidence and their calculations of Russian missile stockpiles. And as a result they insisted on huge build-ups in America of nuclear and conventional weapons (as well as completely useless chemical and biological weapons that we never would have used).

In fact, the Reagan administration was completely obsessed with the idea of nuclear war, and a winnable nuclear war at that. They believed, without real evidence, that their enemy was on a path toward total war. Their rhetoric was nearly always framed in terms of a nuclear scenario, rarely in terms of a conventional war. It was on their minds constantly as they armed Israel, Afghan fanatics, Iraqi dictators, Iranian fanatics, Nicaraguan terrorists, and others against each other and their only enemy: communism. They ignored the rise of anti-American Islamic fundamentalism that was fueled in part by a lopsided pro-Israel policy, and thereby failed to slow the rise of terrorism out of the Middle East.

Note: I don't blame Reagan for the rise of terrorism. It was a complicated set of conditions that gave rise to it. But American policy in the region won us few friends, both before and after Reagan's presidency.

With this obsession over nuclear war, Reagan and his advisers continued their tough-guy foreign policy toward Russia instead of cooling their cannons and trying to bargain Gorbachev down. What the Kremlin needed in the late 80s was quiet diplomacy and confidence that America was not going to attack them. What they got was evil empire rhetoric and jokes about the bombing beginning "in five minutes."

Does anyone really believe that Ronald Reagan demanding "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" actually helped bring down the wall? Public demands from their enemies could only serve to strengthen the resolve of hard-line communists against America for fear of looking weak. It is a wonder that this strongman posing did not spark a Prague-Spring-style Soviet version of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Conservatives often claim that this military buildup was a plus for the American economy because it helped us out of the slump of the 1970s. But the reality is that money spent on weapons that are not needed and never used is virtually wasted. It would have been better spent on improving the roads and bridges, the electrical transmission system, and other parts of our social infrastructure. This would have stimulated the economy and left us with real goods of value, instead of rusting ICBMs that present a security and environmental risk.

Ronald Reagan wasn't all bad. He was eventually willing to negotiate with Gorbechev over missile treaties, which finally gave Gorbachev an excuse to stop wasting money on them in spite of the hardliners. His free-trade agreement with Canada was another step in the right direction (and one that conservatives retracted when Clinton championed NAFTA).

But Reagan's attempts at deregulating many industries were not so successful. This was a good idea gone wrong, as has been proven by numerous financial and environmental scandals, starting with the savings & loan crisis and continuing today with Worldcom and Enron. But Bush 1 and Clinton had their chances at fixing many of these, so their failures obscure Reagan's.

Ronald Reagan may have presided over an end to the cold war, but he watched communism fall in spite of his red-baiting rhetoric—and likely delayed it. And he may have presided over the beginning of a long period of economic expansion (third longest, not the longest, as is often claimed), but he did so with backward policies that sank us needlessly in debt and delayed the enormous benefits to be provided by the rise of personal computers and the Internet.

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