Title: Reaganland
Rating: 4 Stars
Having now completed this mammoth book, I see a couple of through lines. One is the rise of the religious right. Another is corporations using their financial power to start muscling candidates to rollback the previous decades of workplace reform. There is the downright ineptness of Jimmy Carter as a President. His economic policies were woefully misguided, but his messaging was even worse. He managed to turn people against him that actually agreed with his policies. Finally, although he made many wrong turns and missteps, Ronald Reagan was the perfect candidate to run against the hapless Carter.
The end result of this was an electoral landslide for Reagan. Although he only carried a bit under 51 percent of the popular vote (and only some 52 percent of eligible voters actually voted), he carried forty-four states in the electoral college. He beat Carter in the popular vote by nearly ten percent. The Republican John Anderson running as a third party candidate carried over six percent. Reagan won by winning the blue collar union vote and sweeping nearly all of the Southern states. The Southern state sweep is amazing because, for the previous century, Republicans had barely campaigned there (you know, the whole Civil War thing). The union vote is tragic because the 1980s ushered in the decimation of the union movement. The air traffic controllers union actually endorsed Reagan for President. He ended up firing all of them about six months into his term.
In partial defense of Carter, his Presidential term did pretty much suck. From 1977 to 1980, there was the nuclear accident at 3 Mile Island, the discovery of industrial pollution at Love Canal, the assassination of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, Jim Jones’ massacre in Guyana, an oil crisis, serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, Skylab falling, the Iranian revolution, a trucker strike that shut down the country, attacks on abortion clinics, the fall of the dollar, and stagflation (the seemingly impossible slow growth, high unemployment, and high interest rates).
Carter took bold action on many of these things. He brought in Paul Volcker as the fed chairman. Volcker promptly took action to bring down the inflation rate by dramatically reducing credit. Considering that at the time of this writing, the fed rate is .25, under Volcker it went as high as twenty percent. Imagine that. To get a loan, you’d have to pay something north of twenty percent a year.
On top of that, Carter took the seriously misguided advice that another approach to solving the problem was austerity. He advocated deep cuts to the federal budget. When in a low growth economic crisis, this is precisely the wrong path to take. This austerity along with his well meaning advice to Americans to conserve energy (to an American audience thoroughly not used to such sacrifices) made him seem to be more of a Scrooge in Chief than anything else.
And then of course, there was the Iranian hostage crisis. Looking back, letting the Shah come to the US was easily the dumbest mistake that Carter made. He even knew it at the time. When they were considering the decision, Carter asked his staff what would be his options if the Iranians took hostages in reprisal. No one had answers. Even so, powerful men like Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller put immense pressure upon Carter to let him in. Jimmy Carter is always portrayed as an outsider, but the fact is he was a member of the insider Trilateral Commission that Rockefeller founded. He let the Shah in for medical treatment and just a few short weeks later the hostages were taken in a chaotic scene in Iran.
Although Carter never used the word malaise in a speech, that seemed to sum up the nation’s attitude. Into this environment Reagan was a bright ray of optimistic sunshine. Even though he had a long history of saying incredibly conservative, saber rattling things, for the most part the media didn’t really emphasize his past. Knowing his penchant for expressing extreme or even bizarre beliefs to innocuous questions, he was purposefully kept away from the press. In fact, in their quest to show how reasonable he was, there was a whole department in his campaign that was responsible for sending out notes to important personages in his name. Someone in that department would read a book that a prominent person wrote and would then write a thoughtful analysis of it. The message would be sent to Reagan (with a note not to bother reading the book) for his signature. Inevitably, the original author, flattered that Reagan would take the time and effort to send such an impressive note, would publish it. This led to a general attitude that, really, Reagan wasn’t such an unreasonable guy after all.
However, let’s not lose sight of who Ronald Reagan was. There’s no shortage of anecdotes where he said things that made for wonderful anecdotes but were completely factually false. No matter how many times he was corrected, he would just keep repeating the same anecdotes. That is bad for a politician but not fatal. What is fatal is the comment that Reagan said to Nixon when a number of African nations voted to have Beijing assume China’s UN seat instead of Taiwan. He said, “To see those monkeys from those African countries – damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Behind the genial, charming, twinkly-eyed demeanor, that is the real measure of the man.
Also keep in mind that the voter suppression attempts that the Republican party is currently attempting is not new to them. It’s not random that this election only had 52 percent participation. By making the election as ugly, vicious, and mean as possible, the Republicans actively tried to drive down voter participation. As Paul Weyrich said, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people: they have never been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now.”
From this debacle, the Democratic somehow Party internalized the lesson that the New Deal was dead. This was so even though a large majority of Americans actually still supported its policies. Specifically, Bill Clinton lost his re-election bid for Governor of Arkansas in 1980. He learned the lessons that he thought needed to be learned and ran for President in 1992 as a third way centrist.
An argument can be made that we are just now possibly emerging out of the shadow cast by the 1980 election.
dorkenstein 