gorkay
Jr. Member
Posts: 995
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« on: September 12, 2007, 02:43:26 PM » |
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Where to start with Ronald Reagan? Well, first of all, he was a master politician. He came to the game late, but mastered it quickly and completely. I have a similar question about him as I had about Teddy Roosevelt: did he change his views to suit the prevailing mood of the times, or did he just happen to capture it perfectly at various moments? I'm not sure. One thing I know is that when you discuss Reagan, you have to separate the mythic Reagan from the real Reagan. This happens to some extent with all popular political leaders, but I think to a greater extent with him than most, and I can hardly think of any other case in which the mythic version of the man diverged so broadly from the real one.
The mythic Reagan is the one who rescued the federal government from the tax-and-spend liberals, restored our national defense after it had been left to rust by same, and scaled back government spending and social programs drastically; in foreign policy he ground the Soviets into dust, lit the spark that led to the fall of the Berlin wall, and won the cold war for the U.S. It's interesting that in many cases his severest critics agree with the mythic version; they give him credit for his foreign-policy successes and deplore the way he gutted domestic programs.
The interesting thing about all this, of course, is that virtually none of it is true. But he was such a Great Communicator that he convinced people, almost hypnotized them, into believing he was doing things that he wasn't, simply by saying that he was over and over. There weren't any big cuts in domestic spending during his administration; in fact, that was one of the problems, since he was cutting taxes without cutting spending, leading to an enormous increase in the federal budget deficit and the national debt. He increased defense spending, but much of the increase went into ill-conceived programs that never panned out, and there isn't any evidence that all that money improved the power or efficiency of the military.
But those myths pale to the ones that have been constructed about his foreign policy. There may be some truth to the claim that under Reagan we spent the USSR into the ground militarily; if so, however, it was our folly, because we wasted billions building weapons to defend ourselves against an enemy that was no longer much, if any, of a threat. And the claims that he "won" the Cold War are nonsensical. Yes, he talked a lot about how bad the Soviets were, and how they should tear down that wall, but that's like saying if I go outside right now and shout at the sun to go down, I'm responsible when it does. It's a great insult to the people of Eastern Europe who fought, suffered, and even died to liberate themselves and their countries to ignore their heroism and instead ascribe all their triumphs to Ronald Reagan. It's like giving the cheerleading crew credit for winning the game.
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