by Henry Olsen
Such views were increasingly unpopular within the Democratic Party, however. The 1972 Democratic nominee, George McGovern, had defeated the heir of the old Truman wing, former vice president Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey’s backers lined up behind Washington senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson in 1976 only to see him trounced by former governor Jimmy Carter. As president, Carter quickly angered Jackson backers with a number of high-profile foreign policy moves and appointments that showed them the Democratic Party no longer shared their views. As the Carter presidency lurched from crisis to crisis, including the loss of an important ally when the Shiite cleric the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the shah of Iran, these “neoconservatives” increasingly turned a longing eye at the GOP to see if they could find a new home.
“Neoconservative” meant something much different in the 1970s. Today the term primarily refers to people who argued for and supported President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Back then, it meant people who had been ardent New Dealers and had remained staunch anti-Communists while becoming less enamored of the continued expansion of government advocated by the increasingly dominant progressive Democrats. These men and women did not want to repeal most if any of the New Deal’s substantive achievements, and hence looked askance on traditional Goldwaterite conservatives.
These intellectuals, activists, and academics were themselves important, but they acquired even more importance because their concerns mirrored those of an increasing number of working-class Democratic voters. These people had supported Nixon over the liberal McGovern in 1972, but remained leery of a conservatism they associated with anti-FDR sentiments and a corporate Republicanism they believed did not care about people like them. California’s working-class Democrats had found a kindred soul in Reagan, however, and men and women like them in the rest of the country would get to examine him themselves over the next few years.
Reagan’s radio messages broadcast the same, New Deal–friendly view of economic and domestic policy that he had been sharing for over twenty years. Not only were his principles indistinguishable from those he held in the 1950s, even some of the specific items he promoted came straight out of his old mashed-potato-circuit talks.
Fighting “bracket creep” is an excellent example of an idea Reagan had been promoting for decades. “Bracket creep” is an unintended by-product of a progressive income tax system that assesses higher income tax rates across ranges of incomes (“brackets”) as income increases. If a worker gets a salary increase that covers only the cost of inflation, he might be worse off because his new income would be taxed at a higher rate if the increase forced him to move into a new tax bracket. So, for example, if incomes are taxed at 10 percent between $5,000 and $10,000 but at 20 percent between $10,000 and $15,000, a worker making $9,500 who gets a salary hike to $10,500 to offset high inflation would pay a much higher rate of tax on his income even though he is in fact no better off.
This was a big issue in the late 1970s, as America faced unusually high inflation. Workers would get 5 or 10 percent annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) to offset inflation’s effects, but end up worse off because they would be pushed into new tax brackets with higher income tax rates. Reagan proposed solving this by indexing the brackets for inflation, meaning that the ranges at which tax rates were imposed would rise with inflation.50 This commonsense idea was quite popular and in fact was included in the tax cut legislation Reagan signed into law in 1981.
What few people realize is that Reagan had been proposing indexing for decades. He had argued against inflation as far back as his 1958 speech before the California Fertilizer Association51 and specifically proposed indexation as a solution for bracket creep in his 1961 speech to the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce.52 Few people cared back then, when inflation was only about 1 or 2 percent a year.53 But when inflation rose to between 5 and 15 percent a year as it did in the mid- to late 1970s, suddenly Reagan’s old idea seemed very relevant indeed.
Reagan’s views on social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicaid also had not changed. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, before there was a uniform federal health program for the poor (which is what Medicaid is), he had specifically said that any American without the money to pay for needed medical care should have it provided for him or her.54 He espoused the same idea in his radio broadcasts, telling listeners that “we all want to insure [sic] that no one is denied needed medical care because of poverty.”55 Similarly, he had told Americans in his famous “Time for Choosing” speech that they could do better if they were allowed to invest their Social Security tax money themselves; he made the identical argument for his radio audience in the late 1970s.56
This is not to say that he never changed his mind on anything. By the late 1970s the union man who had long opposed right-to-work laws had changed his tune.57 He said he “wholeheartedly” supported right to work, arguing that the “rank-and-file union member” felt that labor union leaders no longer represented his or her interests.58 But this is the exception that proved the rule.
Reagan’s core principles were no less changed than his specific ideas. We have already seen that he believed as passionately in a muscular defense of freedom abroad in the 1970s as he had in the 1940s or 1950s. With respect to his other core principles, he believed as much as he ever had in the goodness and the inherent dignity of the average American, the dangers of government planning, and the way in which legitimate need both required and limited government action.59
Government planning was always the ultimate foe, the manner by which America’s unique fire of liberty could be stamped out and the rule of the many of themselves replaced by the rule of a self-appointed and unaccountable few. Those who encountered Reagan for the first time in these talks heard him say: “Our problem is a permanent structure of government insulated from the thinking and wishes of the people; a structure which for all practical purposes is more powerful than our elected representatives.”60
Once that power is installed, people would be forced to conform to the dictates of others who were not accountable to anyone and accumulated power without regret.
Note that here, as throughout his career, the enemy is the unelected bureaucrat, not government itself. Reagan had been attacking this for decades because he believed free people could rule both themselves and their communities, choosing for themselves how best to live and what level of services to tax themselves to support. Individual freedom and collective, responsible government were not incompatible in Reagan’s thought.
American government taxed too much, he thought, because it was aiding too many people who did not really need the aid, or encouraging otherwise decent people to avoid responsibility for their own fates. In his own retelling of the fable of the little red hen, Reagan describes a productive hen who is forced by government to share the proceeds of her baking with people who want the benefits of work without working themselves.61 Reagan applied this insight to critique unemployment insurance, because lax standards62 allowed people who didn’t deserve it to get “generous tax free benefits.”63 Welfare taxed people to support “unconscionable administrative overhead”64 while “injuring their diligence or providence.”65 Free food stamps were intended for the poor but instead were available to people in the lower middle class.66 The result was a government that had gotten away from its legitimate function to support the “needy and disabled”67 or “those who can’t help themselves”68 to one dedicated to “bigger government, less and less liberty, [and] redistribution of earnings through confiscatory taxation.”69
No one familiar with Reagan’s thought throughout the years can fail to see his remarkable continuity. He saw the same challenges and the same threats, and prescribed the same mode of addressing them in 1978 as he had in 1958. His values, moreover, were no different than they had been in 1938. He still believed in the possibility of a free America, of free Americans living lives of their own choosing, undergirded by a democratic and compassionate government unafraid to champion—and fight for—justice a
nd peace at home and abroad.
His framework was flexible enough to permit him to incorporate new political issues into his worldview. American culture had changed a lot from that of his youth, and by the late 1970s the beginnings of what we now call the “culture wars” had arisen. Now-familiar debates over abortion, religious liberty, homosexuality, and the role of the sexes were then new. Reagan had largely not addressed those issues in the tamer, more cloistered days in which he formed his political opinions.70 He was well aware, however, of the political possibilities these issues had, as his “New Republican Party” speech demonstrated. How to incorporate an appeal to voters concerned with these issues, however, may have perplexed a less thoughtful man. Not so Reagan.
Most social issues were, for Reagan, primarily another example of the self-appointed social planners ignoring the American people. Racial desegregation was fine, but forced busing of children to obtain a more even racial mix in public schools was not.71 The Supreme Court ruling prohibiting prayer in schools was wrong,72 as was federal involvement in K–12 education generally, because it removed power from local school boards and made public schools “society’s agreed upon vehicle for social change.”73 Similarly, while laws barring discrimination “by virtue of sex or anything else for that matter” were acceptable, the Equal Rights Amendment was a bad idea.74 “I’m for the E and the R but not the A” Reagan said in an October 1984 debate with the Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale.75 In each case, he avoided making the issue about race or about Christian religion, rather viewing each action through the lens of an individual’s or a family’s right to live as they pleased.
Reagan’s approach to homosexuality is an excellent example of his thinking on social issues. He did not support “the movement to abolish or lessen the present laws concerning sexual conduct,” but he wrote an op-ed opposing an antigay ballot initiative in the 1978 California general election.76 Proposition 6, known as the Briggs Initiative after its sponsor, State Senator John Briggs, would have permitted public schools to fire any teacher who “advocated” a homosexual lifestyle whether inside or outside the classroom. Reagan argued that this was “more government” and could lead to “over-enforcement.”77 He went on to disprove some of the assertions Briggs made about homosexuals, such as their alleged predisposition for child molestation, and contended that gay teachers could not model homosexuality for their students because “prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very young age.” Reagan took this position even though the initiative was part of a national antigay movement powered by the then-young Christian Right.
Reagan’s stance toward the Briggs Initiative is indicative of how he approached social issues and the Christian Right more generally. His analysis of issues like abortion, prayer in schools, and the family always rested on his long-held principles rather than religion. He rarely if ever said America was a Christian nation or that Christian principles were essential to American identity or national well-being. He might speak about his own belief in God, but he almost never invoked Jesus. For Reagan, Christian conservatives were simply another group of citizens whose beliefs and values were being ignored or disparaged by the remote bureaucracy intent on imposing its views on America.
Reagan’s voluminous private correspondence from this period shows he said the same things in private as he did in public. He would praise his ability as governor to increase “support for public schools eight times as much as the increase in enrollment” as much as his ability to “cut, squeeze, and trim” government spending.78 He supported returning many programs to the states so that their citizens could decide whether to retain or eliminate them, not because he believed those programs were inherently not within the province of any government to address.79 His discussion of issues of morality would mention God but not Christianity.80
There are a couple of letters that could be interpreted as showing a private Reagan who was more antigovernment than he let on. In a few notes, he said that the direction of America changed after FDR’s election in 1932. He told “Philip,” an otherwise unidentified young man, that “the Roosevelt era was characterized by a government takeover to an extent we’ve never known.”81 He also told his college girlfriend’s father that he later realized “that we took a turning point back there in 1932 that has led to our present troubles.”82 Taken out of context, these lines could be said to indicate that Reagan now regretted his support for Roosevelt and had become an opponent of FDR’s New Deal.
These views should be read in the broader context of Reagan’s long public record. That record unequivocally stood behind the many public programs that legitimately helped people in need, provided for more opportunity, or prevented government from unfairly hindering a group of people from making their way in life. As we have seen, even Reagan’s support of Goldwater was couched in the terms of a disappointed New Dealer looking to return to the true promise of that era rather than use the language of Roosevelt to implement the program of Lenin. The “government knows best” approach of the Henry Wallace Progressives was brought into being by that “turning point back there in 1932,” but it was not the only interpretation one could give to that point.
Reagan’s letters on health care coverage make that distinction crystal clear. Starting with a note to his longtime pen pal Lorraine Wagner in July 1961, Reagan specifically endorsed the idea that government—even the federal government—should pay for medical care for people who need help paying for it. His letter to Wagner was sent in response to hers asking about a record Reagan had made for the American Medical Association opposing proposals for Medicare. He told Wagner he was opposed to socialized medicine defined as “a compulsory medical-insurance program tied to Social Security for all senior citizens whether they need it or not.” (Emphasis in original.)83 Reagan went on to describe his full views in more detail:
Very simply I’m in favor of helping those who need help. In the last session of Congress before this one we adopted a measure introduced by Senator Kerr (Democrat) and Congressman W. Mills (Democrat) known as the “Kerr-Mills” bill. This provides federal funds to the states to furnish medical care for the aged. The bill isn’t actually working yet having only been passed eight months ago. Now I’m in favor of this bill—and if the money isn’t enough I think we should put up more. . . . I am not opposed to providing medical care for those who really need it and can’t pay for it but I do not believe in compulsory health insurance through a government bureau for people who don’t need it or who have incomes or even a few million dollars tucked away. [Emphasis added.]
This was not an idea endorsed by all conservatives then, as we saw with Steffgen’s opposition to Medicaid as itself “socialized medicine” in the last chapter. For Reagan, taxing Peter to pay for Paul’s health care was all right so long as Paul really needed it.
This remained Reagan’s view even as he was on the verge of announcing his 1980 presidential candidacy. Reagan wrote a letter in mid-1979 to Professor Vsevolod Nikolaev, a Russian American who had written him about his views on health insurance and Social Security. Reagan replied:
While I am opposed to socialized medicine, I have always felt that medical care should be available for those who cannot otherwise afford it. I have been looking into a program whereby government might pay for the premiums for health insurance for those who cannot afford it and, at the same time, make such premiums for others a tax credit or deduction, preferably a credit to encourage more use of private health insurance. There is also the problem of insurance for those catastrophic cases where the medical care goes on for years at a tremendously high cost. I proposed a form of government insurance for that in California when I was governor, but we couldn’t get any legislative support for it. I do believe this is a particular problem which must be faced and where government could have a hand.84
Pre-FDR conservatives and those who coalesced around Barry Goldwater in the early 1960s had always opposed federal funding for health care, except
in the cases of veterans and federal employees. Taxing Peter to pay for Paul’s doctor seemed both unconstitutional and unjust to them. Reagan had always quietly, but clearly, disagreed with them, and remained committed to his contrary conservatism throughout his political life.
That contrary conservatism had always formed the basis for his popular appeal, and it would be the basis on which his 1980 campaign would be founded. Reagan made this clear in his announcement speech, given on national television on November 13, 1979.85 His first point was the poor economy of the period, which suffered from slow growth and high inflation now called “stagflation.” While Reagan blamed the federal government’s size and growth for this and said cutting taxes would restore economic health, he was careful to exempt a great deal of spending from his criticism. Getting “the waste out of federal spending,” he said, “does not mean sacrificing essential services, nor do we need to destroy the system of benefits which flow to the poor, the elderly, the sick and the handicapped. We have long since committed ourselves, as a people, to help those among us who cannot take care of themselves.” (Emphasis added.)
That basic thrust, interpreting the New Deal’s fundamental innovations to provide for less bureaucratic and government direction of American life, pervaded Reagan’s other ideas. He proposed to solve the energy crisis not by adopting the bureaucracy’s proposal that Americans make do with less but by getting government out of the way so individuals could produce more. Removing “government obstacles” to the increased “domestic production of oil and gas” would be accompanied, however, by continued efforts to create “more efficient automobiles.” Reagan did not propose completely removing government from any role in addressing energy shortages; he merely proposed giving private companies and individuals the chance to solve those shortages through their own initiative in the marketplace.