by Henry Olsen
Keeping with his mantra that fights between Republicans helped the enemy, Reagan took aim at Brown over these issues even before his primary was over. Staying on message, Reagan drew a sharp contrast between a governor and government that failed to listen to the people and a citizen-politician who would.
Reagan’s kickoff speech raised what would in years hence become conservative staples: crime, taxes, and morality. Saying that California’s streets “became jungle paths after dark”—another line opponents seized on to allege he was stoking racial prejudice—he called for more power for cities and counties to fight crime.26 The student demonstrations had begun to spin out of control, sometimes leading to violence and disruption of classes. He criticized the demonstrations and attempts to stop classes at UC Berkeley, arguing that everyone had the right to free speech, including the students who wanted to take classes but were prevented by the campus disruptions from doing so. He later supported a voter initiative that would have restricted pornography sales.27 The relatively large state budget and correspondingly high tax burden was criticized; notably absent was any mention of specific budget cuts or programs that would be repealed.
Reagan continued to stress these themes throughout the spring, adding a couple as the campaign progressed. He argued against political corruption and the power of special interests, telling Californians that he would take politics out of judicial selection by handing the power to appoint judges to a nonpolitical commission.28 He attacked the then-common practice of requiring government employees to contribute to the party in power, and also, perhaps surprisingly, supported making California’s part-time legislature into a full-time body—with commensurately higher full-time salaries and levels of staff support.29 After a state senate report accused the UC system of turning a blind eye to Communist infiltration of its ranks, Reagan pledged to create a commission to investigate the charges.30
Governor Brown’s weak political status had encouraged a significant primary challenger, Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty. Yorty attacked Brown from his right, making many of the same points on crime and big government as Reagan. While ultimately unsuccessful, the mayor’s challenge diverted Brown’s attention from Reagan at a time when Reagan was only beginning to become known to the average California voter. Ominously for Brown, Yorty also attracted a large degree of support in white working-class communities in Southern and Central California. He received nearly one million votes—one million people whose general-election votes would decide who won.
Reagan made his aims clear to all immediately after the primary. He told a press conference the following day that “the Yorty people are a target for our attention.”31 He had a witty reply to reporters who said Yorty’s vote represented a “white backlash”; it instead had demonstrated a strong “Brown backlash.”32 In this film, Yorty voters were the girl and the leading man would ardently pursue her until he had won her favor.
A more doctrinaire antigovernment conservative would have found this difficult. Such a person, like Goldwater, would have had to live down, distinguish, or reject a host of statements opposing things these voters liked or promoting ideas they scorned. Reagan, as we have seen, was different. He had always maintained even in his most angry, pre-1964 speeches that the goals of the public New Deal were morally sound and worthy. He had always made clear declarations that programs and policies that efficiently promoted those goals were the proper province of government, even in some cases the federal government. His “New Deal conservatism” was fresh, novel, and very appealing.
Governor Brown, like many liberals and conservatives before and after, missed these cues. He tried desperately to use Reagan’s support of Goldwater against him and charged that his opponent was just as conventionally conservative. These efforts took two primary forms: tying Reagan to the extreme John Birch Society and charging that Reagan opposed or intended to restrict many popular government programs.
Neither effort was successful, because they had no basis in fact. Reagan had never been a member of the society and had never endorsed its aims. He made clear in a statement that he repeated throughout the campaign that he would not reject the support of individuals associated with the society because their votes would represent their agreement with his philosophy, not his endorsement of theirs.33 The second attempt failed both because specific charges contrary to Reagan’s speeches could be easily denied, but also because Reagan took pains to inoculate himself against the charges by preemptively rejecting some well-known conservative positions.
This approach was clearly on display in his September 9 speech kicking off the fall general election campaign. Reagan reminded Californians he had opposed the 1958 right-to-work initiative and continued to do so.34 He specifically rejected cuts to the state’s unemployment insurance program.35 He called for strengthening Social Security and restated his long-held belief that those “in need” deserved state-financed welfare.36 Expenses could be lowered primarily by removing those not in need from the welfare rolls and by employing the talents of businesspeople and other private-sector experts to find ways to reduce the cost of delivering needed services.
All these ideas were fleshed out in a speech that laid out his vision for government, “The Creative Society.” Intended to draw a contrast with President Lyndon Johnson’s government-expanding Great Society, the Creative Society could have been a paean to private enterprise and charity, a positive and ingenious way to market a Goldwater-inspired conservatism. It certainly lauded individual initiative and action, but what is striking is how little its vision of the government’s role differed from that of the public New Deal.
Reagan makes this clear at the outset. His major critique of liberalism had always been, as we saw in the prior chapters, its tendency to place rule by government-selected experts at the heart of American life. These bureaucrats, in Reagan’s view, had a tendency to acquire power for its own sake and to mistake their interests for those of the people they purported to serve. Thus, Reagan’s speeches always strained to prove that genuine humanitarian interests could be met with much less intrusion, and a much lower cost in terms of both money and relinquished freedom, than the statist methods liberals advocated.
Nowhere in Reagan’s long catalog of speeches did he make these points so clearly and so sharply than in the opening paragraphs of the “Creative Society” speech. Let’s read those sections in full before analyzing them in detail:
I think it’s time now for dreamers—practical dreamers—willing to re-implement the original dream which became this nation—the idea that had never been fully tried before in the world—that you and I have the capacity for self-government—the dignity and the ability and the God-given freedom to make our own decisions, to plan our own lives and to control our own destiny.
Now it has been said that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time had come. This took place some 200 years ago in this country. But there is another such idea abroad in the land today. Americans, divided in so many ways, are united in their determination that no area of human need should be ignored. A people that can reach out to the stars has decided that the problem of human misery can be solved and they’ll settle for nothing less.
The big question is not whether—but how, and at what price. We can’t accept the negative philosophy of those who close their eyes, hoping the problems will disappear, or that the questions of unemployment, inequality of opportunity, or the needs of the elderly and the sick will take care of themselves. But, neither should we unquestioningly follow those others who pass the problem along to the Federal government, abdicating their personal and local responsibility.
The trouble with that solution is that for every ounce of federal help we get, we surrender an ounce of personal freedom. The Great Society grows greater every day—greater in cost, greater in inefficiency and greater in waste. Now this is not to quarrel with its humanitarian goals or to deny that it can achieve these goals. But, I do deny that it offers the only—or even the best—method of achieving these go
als.37
Reagan’s words are clear: he plans to interpret Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy, not reject it.
Reagan’s thought had three central concepts, each of which is on display here. The first was “self-government”; the second, “need”; the third, “dignity.” Let’s examine each in turn in the context of this passage.
Self-government has a clear but wide meaning for Reagan. It certainly applies to the ability of the people to set the course of their government through elections. We have seen how that idea led him to reject the bureaucratic liberalism that led to social planning. Self-government also had a narrower, personal meaning for Reagan—the capacity of an individual to set his or her individual course through choice and initiative. Certainly no conservative would object to either of these notions.
Reagan’s sense of self-government, however, had two other implications to which mid-1960s conservatives did often object. Reagan rarely speaks of limits to the people’s power as expressed through elections. Unlike Goldwater and other strict constitutionalists, Reagan did not believe the New Deal was illegitimate because no constitutional amendments had been passed to grant Congress the power to make the decisions it did. For Reagan, it was sufficient that Congress had decided—and once it had decided, the only questions were whether it had decided wisely and whether its will was truly being carried out.
Reagan also rarely spoke of individual rights even as he championed individual freedom, and he never made their defense the centerpiece of his public philosophy. Freedom, yes; that he believed was crucial to a person’s pursuit of happiness. But the idea of a right that could never be infringed for any reason and under any circumstance even by the wisest and the most transparently democratic election—that concept was alien to Reagan’s way of thinking. Accordingly, Reagan was always willing to entertain a host of governmental actions to achieve humanitarian goals, provided that the people and not the self-anointed few were doing the choosing.
Self-government also involved a notion of obligation for Reagan. To govern one’s self did not mean, as it often does for libertarians and some conservatives, that one’s own choices have moral weight simply because one makes them. A self-governing individual should care for his or her community and all of those in it, even—perhaps especially—those who “through no fault of their own” cannot take care of themselves.
This was what attracted Reagan to Barry Goldwater, the fact that Goldwater did personally undertake his obligations to his employees, his neighborhood, and his community of his own volition. On the level of abstract thought, the two men had important, if subtle, disagreements. Indeed, Reagan once called Goldwater a “fascist SOB” to his face when they were just getting to know one another in the mid-1950s.38 But on the human level, Reagan could see that Goldwater cared about people and sacrificed money and time to help them. For Reagan, this was true self-government in action.
Of course, not everyone is as noble as Barry Goldwater. As James Madison said in the Federalist number 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”39 Thus, Reagan always recognized that government could and should legitimately act to ensure that every American had sufficient material goods and opportunity such that his or her ability to engage in self-government was real and not simply an empty promise.
Hence his easy acceptance of the second idea “whose time had come,” that “no area of human need should be ignored.” This was the public New Deal’s central teaching, that neither tradition nor constitutional text prevented America’s governments, federal or state, from acting to pay attention to those needs. Rejection of this concept formed the heart of Hoover’s critique and pre-Reaganite conservatism, and forms the heart of libertarianism today.
Most conservatives and libertarians read those words and see no limitation on governmental power. Reagan, however, disagreed. For him, “need” was an objective, not a subjective, concept. Much as we can know the weight of a block of iron or the height of a man, Reagan believed we could know whether a person “needed” help to live a life of dignity, comfort, and freedom.
This idea was at the heart of his argument in the 1950s and 1960s that so-called liberals must really be socialists. Time and again he showed how their purported aims could be met through less prescriptive, less expensive, and less mandatory approaches. We saw this clearly in prior chapters in his discussion of why he opposed Medicare: since only 10 percent of seniors “needed” help and the Kerr-Mills Act gave them that, the continued pressure for Medicare must mean that Medicare’s advocates were using humanitarian ends to justify a massive power grab. They must, Reagan logically deduced, be more interested in the power of the state than in the happiness of the individual. And this belief that the state ought to hold and wield power for its own purposes, he contended, was the central concept that united American liberalism, socialism, and communism, a belief that made the liberal—against his or her own intent—unable to clearly see the Communist threat.
Reagan never defined “need” in his speeches or his private writings. We can, however, get a sense of what he meant by looking at those instances in which he approved of governmental action.
Sometimes those instances were rather narrow. Take, for instance, his oft-repeated statement that society had an obligation to take care of those “who through no fault of their own” could not care for themselves. This phrase always meant at least people who were disabled or physically or mentally unable to work. It also was used to refer to the elderly or the sick. In practice, it also referred to single mothers with minor children, as they were the primary beneficiaries of the AFDC program that was the major “welfare” program in the mid-1960s.
Reagan often, however, made much broader claims for legitimate government action. In the area of medical care, he told an audience in 1962 that “any person in the United States who requires medical attention and cannot provide it for himself should have it provided for him.”40 Lest one think this statement was inspired by the political need to react to the heady liberalism of the 1960s, Reagan repeated and expanded on this sentiment in a private letter in 1979.41
We can infer from his discussion of the governmental provision of medical care for the poor that Reagan thought financial need—poverty and near poverty—justified governmental action. This inference starts to get at the heart of Reagan’s thinking, as he expressed an identical thought in the context of other programs.
Social Security, for example, was needed to solve the problem of “unemployment caused by old age.” He rarely discussed Social Security in detail publicly after 1964, but when he did he always maintained that people who needed it would get it. In private letters he was more direct. He often wrote, for example, that Social Security should always have had a means test.42 Those who needed it to live on should get it, but those who did not should not.
Reagan also applied the concept of financial need to public education at all levels. He told the libertarian magazine Reason in 1975 that “tuition should never be a block to anyone getting an education who could not afford to go the university.”43 Earlier in the same interview he implicitly backed universal public K–12 education. He also noted without argument that society “then extended [public education financing] to higher education because there was a segment of our society that could not get education.” His only question with respect to this decision was “why government didn’t think in terms of saying, ‘We will provide an education for the individual that can’t provide for himself, but we’ll do it by way of the private sector universities.’”
One could argue that higher education is more of a want than a need. Food to live on, housing to live in, and the money to buy either: those things most people could agree are needs rather than wants. But one can live, and often quite nicely, without going to college. How can that constitute a need that government can legitimately provide to all?
Here we get to the most obscure but most important of Reagan’s core principles: human dignity. For Reagan, it was not enough that a person have
the legal right to be free, or that he or she have the physical sustenance to survive. He or she must also have the means to live with dignity, a state that involved possessing both the ability to choose for one’s self and sufficient material goods to enable those choices to become a reality.
The first point is clear from Reagan’s frequent invocation of freedom to choose one’s life destiny as America’s cardinal virtue. As early as 1957, for example, he told the graduates of Eureka College that the Cold War was “a simple struggle between those of us who believe that man has the dignity and sacred right and the ability to choose and shape his own destiny and those who do not so believe.”44 He told the Los Angeles County Young Republicans in 1964 that conservatives were for “freedom, self-reliance, and dignity.”45 Dignity extended to the destitute too. Reagan had a problem with welfare only when it “substitute[ed] a permanent dole for a paycheck,”46 thereby “destroy[ing] self-reliance, dignity, and self-respect.” His welfare reform program was intended, he said, to “maximize human dignity.”47 If people could not choose how they wanted to live their life, if they relied on another’s beck and call for their livelihood, then those people could not live with dignity.
He stressed the second point more obliquely, but no less clearly, in a host of speeches. He told the Conservative League of Minneapolis in 1962 that he believed “comfort, and even a few luxuries, should be provided” for people who could not earn enough in their working life to support themselves in old age.48 He often spoke about his support for public housing by saying no American should be “forced to live in degradation.” Indeed, he said in the “Creative Society” speech that for those who must depend on society, “our goal should be not only to provide the necessities of life, but those comforts such as we can afford that will make their life worth living.”