The Working Class Republican

by Henry Olsen

  Reagan’s attitude toward El Salvador is a perfect example of his New Deal conservatism in action in the foreign sphere. In chapter 5 we discussed how the ultraconservative senator Jesse Helms opposed Reagan’s support for the El Salvadoran president Jose Napoleon Duarte because Duarte had initiated land reform. Land reform is simply the curtailing of the freedom of some who are wealthy to provide enough land to the average person so they can have the “dignity of some control over their individual destiny” and be “fairly rewarded” for their work. Reagan went so far as to write that he would not have supported Duarte without his land reforms.31 Reagan pushed El Salvador to adopt reforms such as this in order to give the average person a reason to support democratic regimes, exactly the argument he made in the 1940s to build public support against the resurgence of fascism.

  The following year, 1982, was difficult for Reagan. The country lapsed into another recession as the tough monetary policy the Federal Reserve Bank had adopted, with Reagan’s support, baked inflation out of the economy at the expense of jobs. Reagan had back-loaded his tax cut in order to gain congressional support, so the largest rate reductions had yet to occur. Unemployment rose, and with it Reagan’s approval rating dropped.

  For the most part Reagan toughed it out. He was under enormous pressure from his staff (especially Stockman, who kept his position after Reagan forgave him), the press, and congressional leaders from both parties to repeal much of his tax rate cuts.32 But he had fought too long and too hard for his ideas to give up that easily. He resisted their efforts, but did agree to a compromise in which he agreed to increase tax revenues by closing some loopholes in exchange for promises to cut three times as much in domestic spending.33 This, along with the continued economic doldrums, sparked the biggest revolt on the right Reagan would face until his 1987 arms-control treaty.

  The conservative revolt was essentially one of ideology versus principle. Supply-siders like Congressman Jack Kemp were angry that Reagan would even consider raising taxes, much less push them through Congress. The fact that the deficit was exploding did not matter to them at all. Other conservatives such as the strategist Richard Viguerie were angry about a range of issues from the proposed tax hike to supposed failures to push the social conservative agenda.34 Viguerie even devoted the entire July 1982 issue of his magazine, Conservative Digest, to attacking Reagan for his alleged leftward drift.35 This in particular enraged Reagan, especially as Viguerie had first backed Phil Crane over him and then supported John Connally,36 and had even tried to persuade General Alexander Haig to run against Reagan.37

  This dispute was yet another example of what Reagan called “ultra-pure conservatives” coming to the belated realization that Reagan was not one of them. Reagan had always said it was better to get some of what you want and then come back for more, but that sort of reasoning never worked with these ideologues. Reagan could not convince Kemp to back his tax hike even though he told Kemp “the tax increase is the price we have to pay to get the budget cuts.”38 In fact, Kemp at this time believed wholeheartedly in the supply-side idea that tax cuts alone would generate so much revenue the budget could be balanced without any spending cuts. Reagan had never agreed with Kemp on this, and the fact of ballooning deficits had convinced Reagan that he needed to slightly change course.39 But new facts never influence an ideologue, as Reagan had noted to CPAC in 1977, and Kemp was nothing if not ideological when it came to taxes.

  It was also true, however, that Reagan’s principles were always different from those of these people. Viguerie, for example, attacked Reagan for signing an extension of the Voting Rights Act that guaranteed blacks the right to vote in the South. As we have seen, Reagan himself was always unprejudiced and came to understand that government action was needed to ensure that African Americans had the same opportunities to live dignified lives of their own choosing as other Americans. He was proud of his role as governor in changing civil service rules to help blacks rise in state employ and in increasing the share of blacks employed by state government.40 Reagan had changed his mind about government’s role in the fight to eradicate race and sex discrimination decades earlier when he decided not to back full repeal of the Rumford Act, even though such repeal enjoyed overwhelming popular support from whites. He was not going to change his mind back now.

  These ideologues blamed Reagan’s staff for leading him astray, but in fact they failed to see that Reagan himself was the “problem.” Many of the participants in the revolt were former Reagan White House staffers, but note that these people were all former Reagan Administration staffers who had left only a bit more than a year after he had taken office.41 Former assistant treasury secretary Paul Craig Roberts claimed “there were more Reaganites in that room [a meeting of the revolting conservatives] than there are in the Administration, and ten times as many as there are in the White House.”42 They believed the president had not assembled a winning team. But perhaps, to paraphrase what Reagan had said so many years before, it’s not that his conservative friends were wrong, it’s that so much they knew just wasn’t so.

  Reagan had always been a man who interpreted rather than opposed Franklin Roosevelt. He had always been a man who conciliated different factions rather than drove people apart. He had always been a man who changed course when it seemed to be appropriate, a man who was more wedded to his goal than his method. The fact that these people were on the outside while others, purportedly more “liberal” were on the inside, may have been a clue that Ronald Reagan just wasn’t that into them or their ideologies. The California conservative who saw this first, Kent Steffgen, would not have been surprised.

  Reagan’s lobbying won the day and his tax bill passed narrowly. He noted drily in his diary that “again some of our ultra-pure conservatives deserted.”43 He won another tax hike battle later in the year, a five-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax increase, again over a Senate filibuster waged by hard-core conservatives such as Jesse Helms.44 The failure of Democrats to keep their commitment to him to reduce spending, however, meant that he would never again back a tax hike without his priorities written into the same bill.

  Reagan’s beliefs about communism were much less nuanced and thus much less susceptible of misunderstanding. Conservatives were always thrilled to hear him denounce the “evil empire,” and so it is that even today conservatives love to quote the speech he gave before the British Parliament in June 1982 at the Palace of Westminster.

  That speech is best remembered for his belief that “the march of freedom and democracy” would leave “Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.”45 That, however, is merely his conclusion, reached after he provided an acute and prescient analysis of human nature and politics. It is to that which we now turn.

  Reagan made clear that he both believed that human nature desired freedom and that there could be many interpretations of how that freedom could be exercised. He noted that none of the Soviet-supported client states in Central and Eastern Europe were immune from unrest, as the brutal suppression in December 1981 of Poland’s drive for some freedom had shown. “Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.”

  They could not take root because of the natural human desires he had told Brezhnev about in his private letter just months before. People want to be free to choose their own way of life, and those who are denied this do not produce for those who make the choices for them. Thus, the Soviet Union was faced with its own inevitable conflict between a political order and an economic one, only this time it was the reverse of what Karl Marx had predicted. It would not be the democratic nations that would succumb because of the internal contradictions of capitalism; those nations had shown themselves able to adapt through free elections such that even the least skilled person had hope and dignity. It was the Soviet Union itself that faced the internal contradiction of its order, one caused by the inability of an unfree people to produce enough to compete militarily with the free nations of the West.

  Thus Reagan told Britain to remain strong and cou
rageous. If the West maintained its resolve, its faith in the inviolate nature of human rights, and kept the military strength to resist Soviet threats, then victory was inevitable. “The Soviet Union is not immune from the reality of what is going on in the world. It has happened in the past—a small ruling elite either mistakenly attempts to ease domestic unrest through greater repression and foreign adventure, or it chooses a wiser course. It begins to allow its people a voice in their own destiny.”

  It is easy today to see the wisdom in his words. Less than a decade later the Soviet Union had collapsed under the weight of its contradictions, just as Reagan had foretold. But at the time it seemed to many to be hopelessly naive. Reagan’s call for international efforts to plant democracy was scoffed at; his honest assessment of Soviet intentions called a throwback to the 1950s.46 But Reagan was never one to shrink from conflict when his core beliefs were challenged.

  The freedom that Reagan spoke of, however, was not the sort that libertarians champion. Reagan knew that even the American government that he thought was too big was small in comparison to that of Britain and the other European allies. And so he was careful to note that his criticisms of government and collectivism did not include them:

  Now, I’m aware that among us here and throughout Europe there is legitimate disagreement over the extent to which the public sector should play a role in a nation’s economy and life. But on one point all of us are united—our abhorrence of dictatorship in all its forms, but most particularly totalitarianism and the terrible inhumanities it has caused in our time—the great purge, Auschwitz and Dachau, the Gulag, and Cambodia.

  This was surely a politic thing to do, but it was also a principled one. By noting that disagreement over the exact role of the state in public life was legitimate, Reagan demonstrated that he did not share the libertarian allergy to government. And by noting that all democracies shared an opposition to ideological dictatorship, he established once again that this, not the specific tax level or whether any particular government program existed, was the primary target in his decades-long warnings about government power.

  The next two years contained many political challenges for Reagan, but none that really tested or illuminated his core beliefs. Each year he would propose more spending cuts than Congress would pass. Each year he would resist urging from Congress and his staff to cut military spending or increase tax rates.47 Each year he would be told that he was provoking the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union by forcefully resisting its expansion. Each year he would go on carefully and skillfully to do the best he could under the circumstances to see his vision through.

  It’s not that he wasn’t making important decisions. He rejected intense public pressure for a freeze on nuclear weapons development (the so-called nuclear freeze), an idea he said would lock in a Soviet advantage. He and the NATO allies followed through on their scheduled deployment of Pershing II intermediate-range nuclear missiles to combat Soviet SS-20 intermediate missiles even as the Soviets stormed out of arms-control talks in protest. Reagan announced a research effort to build a defense against nuclear missile attack, an idea the press labeled “Star Wars.” He even ordered an invasion of the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada in October 1983 when a bloody Marxist coup threatened to install another Communist regime in America’s backyard. It’s just that each of these decisions, as important as they were, simply demonstrated to the nation and the world that Reagan had meant what he had said for the past three decades about fighting communism.

  Reagan’s major domestic achievement during this period also showed fidelity to principle. Reagan’s original budget had included a plan to reduce Social Security benefits for people who retired before age sixty-five, but Congress rejected that idea overwhelmingly. Since Social Security was on the verge of bankruptcy, Reagan proposed creating a bipartisan commission to create a comprehensive plan to save the popular program. The commission’s plan was a classic compromise, including increases in tax rates for workers, eventual benefit cuts for retirees by raising the retirement age in small stages to reach age 67 in 2027, and taxing some Social Security benefits for the first time for retirees with above-average incomes from sources other than Social Security.48 With Reagan’s support, the bill quickly sailed through both houses of Congress in less than two months.49

  Reagan had promised Americans he would not jeopardize core New Deal programs like Social Security. The compromise showed that he was true to his word even if it meant increasing taxes. Indeed, he believed one part of the tax hike, the taxation of Social Security benefits for wealthier adults, was a welcome change. This tax, he wrote Mr. Phillip Robertson, was “a step toward correcting a mistake in the program—there should have been a means test from the beginning.”50 Reagan again showed that his opposition to government was not an absolute, and that his belief in tax cuts was not a barrier to financing the social safety net Americans had come to depend on.

  The economy was already improving by the time this compromise passed. Unemployment peaked in early 1983 and plummeted throughout the year. When the final installment of Reagan’s three-year tax cut took effect midyear, the economy was turbocharged. Real GDP growth was over 7 percent in 1983. Unemployment had dropped from 10.4 percent to 8 percent, and the inflation that had peaked at nearly 15 percent in the winter of 1980 had dropped to a mere 3 percent by year’s end. Reaganomics had worked so well that Reagan noted “they don’t call it Reaganomics anymore.”51

  The roaring economy helped Reagan’s reelection campaign immensely. Reagan’s approval rating rose from a low of 35 percent in January 1983 to break the 50 percent barrier by November.52 This dramatic turnaround put him in the driver’s seat for the 1984 campaign. By January 1984 he led the likely Democratic nominee, former vice president Walter Mondale, by 10 percent.53 The man once regarded as an extremist washed-up actor was on the cusp of a historic reelection.

  It’s easy to credit material factors for his political success. People do vote their pocketbooks, and presidents rarely if ever lose when the economy is growing quickly. But Reagan had always said that what troubled him most about America in the late 1970s was its spiritual, not its material, malaise. He was proud, therefore, when he saw America’s confidence springing back. “The spiritual rebirth I had hoped for was under way, as vigorous and as robust as the nation’s economic turnaround. America was coming back, becoming proud of itself again, becoming confident about the future,” Reagan wrote in his autobiography.54 He noted this was happening, but rarely claimed direct credit for helping nurture this spiritual renewal. He was too modest.

  Throughout his life Reagan’s guiding light was a genuine love for the American people. In private he could be remote and difficult to know, but that masked a deep love for individuals, which came through in the politics he professed. Reagan had always opposed the rule of a self-proclaimed elite few whether those people were tyrants, bureaucrats, or tyrannical bosses. Unlike ideologues of the Left, who placed their hopes in government planning, or ideologues of the Right, who placed their hopes in the entrepreneur or the successful businessperson, Reagan always viewed America’s people as the source of its greatness and its potential.

  We have seen this throughout his career already, how he extolled average people as “heroes” in his first inaugural address and said conservatives represented “the forgotten American” after Goldwater’s 1964 defeat. Reagan displayed this love of the common person again and again in the run-up to the 1984 election. It was the crucial element that let people know he was on their side even when things were looking bad, the element that allowed his popularity to rebound so quickly when things started to turn up even a little.

  Reagan’s faith in and love for the average American is on full display in his best-known speech from this era, the speech given on the shores of Normandy to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the successful D-day invasion.55 He could have focused on the great issues at stake in that war and spoken of abstract principles of freedom, slavery, a
nd tyranny. Instead, he started by recounting the individual feats of bravery that Americans and soldiers of other countries had performed in storming the cliffs under withering enemy fire. “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” he said. “These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”

  One could say that this was an obvious political move that any president would have made. But that’s just not so. Compare Reagan’s focus on individual courage with the words President George W. Bush made when he thought the war in Iraq was “mission accomplished.”56 Bush focused on the objectives of the war, the love of liberty that animates Americans and people everywhere, and the continuing resolve of America to fight al Qaida. He does mention the soldiers’ “courage” and their “willingness to face danger for your country,” but there is no mention of individual courage. The soldiers are important because they are part of a “we,” part of a plan they did not create. For Reagan, it was only the uncommon acts of individual bravery accomplished by common people that made the “we” possible.

  Reagan’s deep belief in the uncommon heights that common men and women could surmount was a recurring theme of his. In his 1982 State of the Union speech, he praised the heroism of a government employee, Lenny Skutnik, who had jumped into the icy waters of the Potomac to save someone trying to survive an airline crash.57 He spoke of the “countless, quiet, everyday heroes of American life,” the parents who sacrifice for their children, the volunteers who “feed, clothe, nurse, and teach the needy,” and the “millions who have made our nation and our nation’s destiny so very special.” He would tell attendees at the ninth annual CPAC convention that “‘Main Street’ Americans . . . blue-collar workers, blacks, Hispanic, shopkeepers, scholars, service people, housewives, and professional men and women” were “the backbone of America.”58 He would conclude his 1983 State of the Union address by telling Congress that it was the ordinary American who was “laying the foundation” for recovery and “a better tomorrow.”59