Obama in Reagan's shadow
David Frum
Shrum proclaims “end times” for Reaganism. Wise Democrats will want to handle that prediction with care.
If the chapter is closing on the Reagan era in U.S. politics—and I think it is—it is not closing because Reaganism has been repudiated (as Shrum would wish). It is closing because Reaganism has been accepted and digested.
A little history.
In the years after 1965, a generation of bold liberal politicians tried to out-Roosevelt Franklin Roosevelt. With the federal treasury overflowing from the 1960s boom, they launched huge new spending programs like Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare, Medicaid, and the War on Poverty.
These liberals quickly discovered that they had been over-optimistic. The programs they had launched cost much more than expected—and a slowing economy yielded much less revenue than expected. Jolted by inflation, energy shortages, and other crises, politicians began to interfere more and more in the innermost workings of the economy: freezing prices and managing industries. It didn’t work, and the dominant liberalism of the years 1930-1965 began to unravel. Ironically enough, the most extreme of these interventionists was Richard Nixon—the conservative’s conservative on cultural issues, but very much an adherent of the postwar consensus on economic issues.
The unraveling was accelerated by the social disintegration that set in after 1965. Crime, family breakup and urban decay at home and weakness in the face of Soviet provocations abroad all took their toll. As Jonathan Rieder wistfully observed in his famous 1975 anthropological study of the Jewish and Italian-American voters of the Canarsie neighborhood of New York City, the word “liberalism” had come to acquire connotations of “profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness.”
The collapse of liberalism brought Reagan to power. Indeed, the turnaround began even before his election, as neoclassical economics began to win converts even among some Democrats. Gerald Ford launched the deregulation of the economy by repealing New Deal controls on gold ownership and stockbrokers’ fees. After suffering losses in the congressional elections of 1978, Democrats in Congress joined Republicans in deregulating transportation industries. Congress compelled a reluctant Jimmy Carter to pave the way for deregulation of the prices of oil and natural gas (which Reagan would accelerate in 1981).
When Reagan arrived in Washington, he cut taxes, supported the Federal Reserve in its anti-inflation struggle, revised labor laws to restrain the excessive power of trade unions, and generally set a tone reassuring to business and investment. His actions were matched by ideological cognates around the world: Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Brian Mulroney in Canada, and Helmut Kohl in Germany. In true tribute to their success, they were eventually imitated, in part, even by left-of-center parties in Australia, New Zealand, France, and elsewhere.
In the 1990s, conservative Republicans in Congress and the states launched a new wave of reforms. Their crime control and welfare reform programs curbed and corrected harms bequeathed by the social engineers of the 1960s.
Now notice what Reagan and his successors did not do. They did not abolish wholesale New Deal—or even Great Society—programs. Medicaid and Medicare remain in business. They did not repudiate Franklin Roosevelt; indeed Reagan always presented himself as a fulfillment of Roosevelt’s vision. They set limits on liberalism: thus far and no farther.
The Reagan Revolution bookended the New Deal. It did not repeal it. Not all of Reagan’s heirs were so modest, and they usually paid a political price for it. It took him some time, but Bill Clinton made his peace with the legacy of Reagan. He signed welfare reform, accepted balanced budgets, acceded to a cut in the capital gains tax. Just as President Eisenhower accommodated himself to his gigantic liberal predecessor, FDR, so Clinton accommodated himself to Reagan.
Now it is Obama’s turn. He can try (as Shrum recommends) to overthrow the Reagan legacy, to establish himself as a new historical bookend, hurling himself into the kind of great campaign for economic redistribution hinted at by his own early rhetoric. If he does, his career will likely be tumultuous and ultimately doomed. This remains a basically conservative country.
Or Obama can fit himself into the American story, seeking continuity with all that came before, accepting institutional limits on his actions, innovating by inches. That may disappoint his most ardent followers, who long for a second coming of FDR. But it will emulate his wisest predecessors.
Show: Oldest | Newest
22 Comments
Posted by James, Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 11:57 pm For all the McCain talk of the "radical" Obama, he consistently comes across as a thoughtful moderate in person. I think most Americans see this and will vote accordingly.
Posted by David, Thursday, October 30, 2008, 12:03 am I am not sure you can have Clinton "made peace with the Reagan legacy" and "accepted balanced budgets" in the same paragraph. While there are plenty of remnants of the Reagan era, balanced budgets are not one of them. I don't think it is Obama's goal to "overthrow the Reagan legacy" but rather overthrow the George W. Bush legacy. I think it is the result of the Bush legacy, however, that much of the Reagan legacy will be overthrown.
Posted by Don, Thursday, October 30, 2008, 12:18 am There is some truth here. But I fear that it is outdated. If conservativism is to regain its vitality, it has to be rethought in terms of our own age, not Reagan's. Reagan's real strength was his ability to speak to his own times. In trying to parrot Reagan, McCain only proves himself a midget. LIberalism is reborn, although Frum is right that we remain very conservative in many respects. But a new less ideological, more pragmatic liberalism is poised to make its contribution to shaping our country and there is no way to predict how that will turn out. All we really know for sure is that the way to the future is not found by looking back over our shoulders.
Posted by Steve HVH, Thursday, October 30, 2008, 8:32 am It's a bit precious to declare that Clinton "accepted" balanced budgets. In fact, he achieved them-- after Reagan ran up the largest deficits in US history (until the record was broken by another Republican, GW Bush).
Posted by Al Rogers, Thursday, October 30, 2008, 8:35 am In 1980 the U.S. curent acoount (balance of payments) was + $106 billion. By the end of Reagan's persidency , it was - $494 billion. The Reagan Recovery was bought by draining the world's savings pool! Fed Chariman Volcker oversaw the beginning of the de-industrialization of the U.S. economy and chronicically large trade deficits in 1979. Today the net U.S. international liabilities amount to $10 trillion and the lack of appetite of our foreign creditors to continue to finance U.S. overconsumption and the free-wheeling and unregulated U.S. debt instruments ignited the financial crisis. It is the financial crisis which has repudiated Reaganism - 20 years overdue.
Posted by dsk, Thursday, October 30, 2008, 8:35 am Republicans are so funny. They assume that because they behave like complete jerkwads any time they think they can get away with it that everyone else is like them. It's kind of like the white people who assume that if there are more brown people than white people in the US that the brown people are going to enslave the whites or otherwise punish them for slavery. Just because your instincts are base and depraved, don't assume everyone else is the same.
Posted by EGB, Thursday, October 30, 2008, 8:41 am Ideology fails in America, which is a nation of pragmatists. I think it likely that this election will turn on this statement more than on personalities, perceived readiness for the office or Joe the Plumber's world view. In the face of the economic disaster brought on by unregulated greed and dishonest, unregulated accounting of talmudically complex derivative securities, what are the solutions offered by the candidates? McCain proposes the catechism of encouraging investment "to create jobs." His vehicle is tax cuts for those wealthy enough to invest. This is a bit ethereal for people having trouble meeting their most basic economic obligations - gasoline and food, for example. Obama, on the other hand, has looked at the individual components of our national problem - health care, indebtedness and dependence of foreign oil among them - and proposes specific, non-ideologically driven solutions. This is why he will win. Problem-solving, not economic theory, is America's long suit. Voters recognize it when they see it.
Posted by Matt, Thursday, October 30, 2008, 8:59 am Mr. Frum aided and abetted the most noxious, arrogant, incompetent administration in living memory. Nobody can be that wrong and/or without integrity, to ever be taken seriously again.
Post a Comment