Ronald Reagan Rip - Road to the Middle Class

I LOVED RONALD Reagan, eventually. But in the winter of 1980 I went to my local precinct caucus as a Bush supporter. Over in the corner were the Reagan supporters. They were lower middle class types, technicians with long sideburns, and they looked like they ought to be Democrats. But David Brooks is right. Politics is tribal, and I walked out of the caucus a Reagan supporter.

The opinion polls tell us that conservatives are happier than liberals, and by quite a significant margin. I don’t know what the reason may be, but one reason must be that it is forty years since Democrats had a leader they could be proud of. They loved JFK, but they had to have been embarrassed by Carter and ashamed of Clinton, even if they will go to their graves before admitting it. That’s why they have to be so angry at Bush. It cannot be, it must not be that Bush will turn out to be a great president that transformed the world.

But we Republicans can still bask in the afterglow of Reagan: the bold initiatives, the stirring words, the charm, and the sense of humor. And in George W. Bush we have a president who has transformed American foreign policy with the forward strategy to fight World War IV and who has somehow cut the taxes on capital in half in the teeth of outraged opposition from Democrats

The moment when Ronald Reagan burned himself into the heart of every Republican must have been his great swansong at the 1992 Republican Convention when, with exquisite timing, he advised Americans what do with candidate Bill Clinton. “Don’t. Inhale.” And he brought down the house.

It was a moment of quintessential Reagan, making a deadly serious point with a twinkle in the eye and a charming sense of humor. And we loved him for it, making politics full of light and hope.

They said he was a lightweight, and we believed them, even as we pulled the lever and voted for him. We believed them and we hoped and prayed that despite it all he would muddle through. We hoped that he would somehow be able to handle the Soviets, even if he was only an actor. We hoped that somehow he would manage to sneak the Kemp-Roth tax cut through Congress, though we didn’t see how he could outfox the wily Tip O’Neill and the powerful Democratic barons in the House of Representatives.

Oh we of little faith, how foolish we were. Now we know better. We’ve read the biographies, checked through his radio addresses, learned of his courage, how he stood up to the commie Hollywood unions, realized that the man was a work-horse, not the show-horse he pretended to be. We know now that he was a man of great compassion, always anxious to respond to people that wrote to him about their troubles.

We know now that he was not a dumb actor just reading the cue cards his handlers put up for him. We know now that his cue cards were part of a careful system that he had set up for himself, that the ideas were his ideas and the speeches his speeches.

We know now why Ronald Reagan struggled for forty years against the “evil empire.” He got mugged by reality in the late 1940s when fighting to keep Communists from taking over the Screen Actors Guild. Threats of physical violence have a way of changing your life. Forty years later t led to the great cartel and challenge flung over the Berlin Wall: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And at the Brandenburg Gate: “Open this gate.” Those were the historic words that Justin Kaplan, editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, didn’t think warranted inclusion in the 1992 edition.

As we look back at the extraordinary men that have held the presidency of the United States in its hours of need: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and now perhaps George W. Bush, we can only ask, in awe, how it could be possible? How is it possible that again and again American presidents have answered the call of greatness? Were they born great, did they achieve greatness, or did they merely have greatness thrust upon them?

In Ronald Reagan’s case, he brought to an end five hundred years of European civil war with a grand strategy of penetrating brilliance that still has not penetrated to the highly educated minds of America’s bien-pensants, if Sunday’s New York Times is any indication.

But we know that Ronald Reagan was a great man and a great president, and that we shall not see his like again. And we loved him for it.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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