I think people are underestimating how quickly the terrain may begin to shift underneath our feet.
Mark takes issue with my short little reflection on what I take to be a strange persistence of Reaganism 41 years after the last time Reagan won an election. He emphasizes that Reagan was a winner, but I think he actually emphasizes and restates my point with more emphasis by doing so.
Reagan is remembered so fondly by Republicans because he was the last unambiguously successful two-term Republican president. That’s it. That’s the whole ball game.
But I wasn’t talking about remembering him fondly, exactly. I meant Reaganism as policy mix (often a kind of edited version of the real thing) and perhaps a persona, as the winning electoral formula, a “mantle” that can be picked up by Mike Pence or Nikki Haley.
We’re in a much much different world now. I could and should have gone on about how much more liberal the Republican Party was in the 1980s, and how Reagan often maintained his popularity therein by subtly and not so subtly disappointing conservatives. Think of his picks of Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy — both of whom would ensure Roe persisted for another 30 years.
Reagan’s success is not a living memory for most. The majority of people who voted in the 1980 election are now dead. The absolutely youngest voters then are 63 years old now. And that doesn’t even get into the dramatic realignments that have since happened. Reagan won places like Orange County Calif., (Goldwaterites whose kids supported Obama) and Fairfield County, Conn., (Prescott Bush Republicans whose descendants still have “I’m With Her” bumper stickers from 2016). That is why I focused on the Boomers, the last large living cohort that has a real political memory of Reagan, and who were partial to him, and who still vote Republican.
But Mark goes much further in accusing Reaganism, the policy mix, of being a museum piece than I did. He writes:
But haven’t conservatives become painfully aware over the ten years of Trumpism that many, if not most, Republican voters don’t care a fig about what think tanker-types in D.C. think about conservatism? What these voters really care about is defeating Democrats and the left — not advancing movement conservatism, however much they might agree with certain principles of the movement, especially when advanced by charismatic leaders.
Well!
If the voters don’t care, then yes, the conservative movement’s institutions, and the Boomer-and-older-controlled media outlets like the WSJ editorial page, are the ones carrying the Reagan mantle as if it were a divine relic. Although, perhaps what Mark is saying is that voters are indifferent to the policy details and will take the Reaganism mix once again if a sufficiently rebarbative and successful champion picks up on them.
I take the point from Mark and Dan (who also responded to my piece) that obviously Hoover ended in failure. But I’m not sure success explains Reagan. Ike was a very successful two-term Republican president. Notoriously, his victories were considered personal ones, with no coattails for the party. But, he still ended his second term with approval ratings similar to those of Reagan, and very high overall for any modern president. Nobody talked about his legacy or mantle after he left.
Dan argues that Reagan presents us with perennial truths, like the Founders or Lincoln. I’ll just lament that there’s a lot of wisdom in the Founders and Lincoln I wish the conservative movement would recover now that the Cold War and its exigencies are over.
Dan writes, “If Reagan’s foreign policy was more hawkish and internationalist than his predecessors, it was not dramatically out of line with the basic orientation of Republican foreign policy under Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford, and which continued for decades after Reagan.”
Here is where we get into the speculative. Many people claiming Reagan’s mantle today would say we have to confront Russia to the point of brinksmanship in order to maintain credibility for NATO. I don’t think we can know what Reagan would have thought. But the idea that such a project would be continuous and in line with Dwight Eisenhower is preposterous. “If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [NATO] will have failed,” Ike harrumphed. Ike was more strenuous than Trump or Bridge Colby about the need for the burden shifting to Europe.
I suppose the point of my post is that the pillars holding up Reaganism don’t seem steady for the medium or long term. I think people are underestimating how quickly the terrain may begin to shift underneath our feet.