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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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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”

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

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

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

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