American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  Reagan spent decades denouncing excessive government and government bureaucrats, but when he left office the federal bureaucracy was bigger than when he came in. Even agencies he specifically targeted for elimination chugged on. Reagan abandoned his campaign pledge to get rid of the Departments of Energy and Education, which turned out to have powerful constituencies he had no interest in taking on. He did make a serious attempt to first eliminate and then reform the Legal Services Corporation, a Great Society descendant that infuriated conservatives by advocating for the poor and minorities not only in individual cases but also by challenging laws and government policies. Resistance in Congress and court suits stymied his effort. Reagan’s attempt to roll back regulation of health and safety and the environment also largely failed, cementing a consensus in favor of at least a mild version of environmentalism (though he did push the government further along the path of economic deregulation). The federal government, with its multiple branches and many constituencies, proved remarkably resistant to institutional change.

  Reagan left a profound mark on one aspect of the state, the judiciary. By the time he left office, he had appointed more than half of the sitting federal judges, a higher percentage than any president other than FDR. His administration worked systematically to identify conservative appointees, generally selecting well-qualified candidates to ensure their confirmation. To fill the first opening he had on the Supreme Court, he appointed Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female justice, whom some Reagan backers opposed for being insufficiently conservative on social issues. His other Supreme Court appointees were solid conservatives who furthered the rightward push of the Court that had begun under Nixon.

  But no judicial counterrevolution occurred. In spite of fierce conservative attacks on Roe v. Wade, the decision remained in force long after Reagan died and his Court nominees began to retire. Similarly, school prayer remained illegal long after the end of the Reagan administration. Nor was there a cultural counterrevolution. Though many conservatives had hoped that Reagan’s ascendancy might reverse the drift of public attitudes toward greater tolerance of homosexuality, pornography, sexuality outside of marriage, and expanded roles for women, no such rollback occurred.

  Reagan proved more effective in weakening organized labor, arguably the greatest practical success of the conservative reign. Reagan’s encouragement of strikebreaking through his handling of the air traffic controllers’ strike, his appointment of pro-business members to the NLRB, and his general tilt toward employer interests contributed to a sharp decline in union membership, as did factory closings and other economic shifts that in many cases were caused or facilitated by his administration’s policies. By 1989, only 16 percent of the workforce carried a union card, down from 25 percent in 1980. With public employee unions making modest membership gains, all of the loss was in the private sector. By the start of the 1990s, fewer than 12 percent of privately employed workers belonged to a union.

  Reagan’s paramount achievement was to shift the values, language, and assumptions of the country, fostering an ideological break with the New Deal order, if not an institutional disjuncture. From the most powerful pulpit in the country, Reagan promoted the message he had been perfecting since his GE days, that freedom had its natural home in the marketplace and that government undermined freedom rather than extended it. Until a decade before he took office, the notion of freedom had been strongly associated with the fight for racial equality and the use of state power to protect individual rights, but by the time he left the presidency it had become closely linked to free enterprise.

  Conservative, Reagan-era ideas about freedom had an underside of indifference, callousness, or outright hostility to the poor and those left behind. Tax changes shifted more of the burden for financing the federal government from the wealthy to the less well-off even as government programs aimed at low-income families were cut. The decline of organized labor and the shift in the mix of working-class jobs away from manufacturing to service industries contributed to the growth of income inequality and an increased concentration of wealth by exerting downward pressure on wages at a time when jumps in interest and dividend income, stock prices, finance industry profits, and pay rates for upper executives boosted income at the top. Between 1980 and 1988, the top 20 percent of wage earners saw their share of national income go from 41.6 to 44.0 percent, while the bottom 60 percent saw their share drop. The very wealthiest made out the best, with the top 1 percent of earners seeing their national income share go from 9 percent to 11 percent. A new group of hyper-rich emerged during the 1980s, including several dozen billionaires, the economic winners in a new gilded age.

  Americans disadvantaged by patterns of discrimination also found themselves a low priority for the Reagan administration, which reduced funding for civil rights agencies, filed fewer suits against segregated school systems, and launched a rhetorical and legal assault on affirmative action. Reagan’s civil rights policy in part reflected a desire to reward white constituencies that had supported him out of disenchantment with the Democratic Party’s promotion of black advancement. But the shift in civil rights policy, especially the attack on affirmative action, had a strong ideological component. Reagan conservatives rejected the idea that the government had any obligation to groups that historically had suffered from discrimination other than opposing contemporary acts of discrimination against particular individuals. They portrayed their position as a form of egalitarianism, in which every individual would be treated equally and no special favors or advantages, in the form of quotas, set-asides, or affirmative action, would be granted to particular ethnic, religious, or racial groups, a formulation that proved very popular among whites across the economic spectrum. Actually ending affirmative action programs proved difficult because of resistance in the courts and Congress, which had a more expansive conception of civil rights that took into account the disadvantages groups faced in the job market and in access to education because of prior discrimination. But after Reagan left office, the Supreme Court, with the support of his appointees, began to narrow the circumstances in which affirmative action and set-aside programs could be used as remedies.

  A similar indifference and callousness could be seen in the Reagan administration’s handling of the AIDS epidemic. The first cases of AIDS in the United States were observed in 1980. By 1982, many doctors had become convinced—correctly as it turned out—that an infectious agent which could be sexually transmitted was responsible for the new disease. Yet during his first term, Reagan made neither the study of AIDS nor its prevention a high priority. Cutbacks in funding to federal health agencies slowed research in general, while the close association of AIDS with gay men, who at first made up the majority of its victims, diminished the interest of the administration (and much of the medical, political, and media establishments too) in making it a major public issue. By the end of Reagan’s first term, thirty-seven hundred people had died of AIDS, but not until the 1986 death of Rock Hudson, a Hollywood friend of the president’s who never publicly admitted his homosexuality, did Reagan begin to pay some attention to the epidemic, and even then it was another year before he gave his first major address on the subject, which avoided frank discussion of how the disease was transmitted and how its spread might be slowed.

  During Reagan’s second term, the federal government devoted more resources and attention to AIDS. Many conservatives, inside and outside of the administration, opposed sex education and the promotion of condom use, which would have slowed the spread of the infection. But some administration conservatives, including Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, advocated frank discussion of sexual practices, the distribution of condoms, and bolstered federal heath efforts aimed at drug users and the poor, groups disproportionately hit by the epidemic (an approach followed by the State Department in its international AIDS-related activities). Belatedly, public health needs began counterbalancing ideology.

  Reaganism represented
a kind of cheerful Social Darwinism, a celebration of the possibilities for economic and social mobility and those who achieved it. As much a cultural mood as a set of policies, its animating spirit held, as the Reaganites’ favorite Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, once put it, “To be rich is glorious.” Reagan helped complete the discrediting of liberalism by associating it with special favors for particular groups and the coddling of people unwilling to help themselves at the expense of hardworking taxpayers. Many Americans credited Reagan with restoring national pride, decreasing social instability, and promoting firmer moral codes.

  Reagan helped make conservative thought hegemonic, change public attitudes toward government (more than changing government itself ), and boost the national standing of the Republican Party to full equality with the Democrats. But perhaps his most important political legacy lay in his blithe disregard for consequences. Reagan often proved unwilling to confront or even acknowledge problematic effects of his policies or his responsibility for misbehavior or failure by his administration. He seemed to believe the country to be blessed, exempt from the need to consider the long-term effects of its policies and way of life. In this, he represented the spirit that had come to animate elite circles, particularly in the corporate world, as probity, foresight, and stewardship were nudged aside in the quest for quick profits and indulgent consumption. When Tom Paine proclaimed, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he had been calling on colonial Americans to make a revolutionary break from the old world of hereditary rule and inequality and create a new republic as an act of social responsibility. For Reagan, faith in the ability to continually reshape the world became a road to irresponsibility, a way of evading the consequences of one’s actions. It proved to be a troubling bequest for the nation and the world.

  CHAPTER 16

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  Cold War Redux

  On February 4, 1980, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, looked through the sights of a Chinese-made AK-47 rifle at a Pakistani army observation post high up in the Khyber Pass, just a few miles from the border with Afghanistan. Brzezinski’s visit came during a week of meetings with leaders of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to discuss the recent Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. At a refugee camp near the border, Brzezinski told Afghan fighters, “That land over there is yours and you will go back one day because your cause is right and God is on your side.”

  The reporters accompanying Brzezinski did not know that six months before Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, on Christmas Eve 1979, the United States had begun a secret program of propaganda, psychological operations, and logistical support for Afghan groups fighting the communist government that had recently taken power. After the Soviet Union sent its military into Afghanistan to bolster its shaky ally, Brzezinski laid out a plan for more extensive clandestine intervention. He proposed channeling money and advice to the anticommunist forces, working with and through the Pakistani dictatorship of President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. He hoped that with the American aid, the Soviets could be driven out of Afghanistan. “Even if this is not attainable,” he wrote to Carter, “we should make Soviet involvement as costly as possible.” Brzezinski’s plan soon became U.S. policy, first under Carter and then under Ronald Reagan. As he hoped, funneling American resources to the Afghan anticommunists proved very costly to the Soviet Union. Ultimately, it also proved very costly to the United States.

  Afghanistan marked a heating up of the Cold War, after years of improved Soviet-American relations. The 1980s brought increasingly tense relations between the two superpowers, an accelerated arms race, and a series of proxy battles in the developing world, before the Cold War dramatically and rather suddenly came to an end. But international conflict and threats to U.S. security continued. Afghanistan ultimately made clear the fragility of the new world order that the United States tried to construct after the Cold War ended and the continuities in the country’s conception of its role in the world before and after the collapse of communism.

  Hot Cold War

  During the Ford and Carter administrations, the defeat of the United States in Vietnam led to a rethinking of American foreign policy, without much questioning of its fundamental postulates. Across the political spectrum, policymakers continued to believe that the security and prosperity of the United States depended on an active, anticommunist, internationalist foreign policy; that the spread of American investment, ideas, and power around the globe benefited both the United States and the countries with which it engaged; that the Soviet Union remained a dangerous ideological, political, and military enemy; and that the United States had to maintain a very large military to protect itself, its allies, and its interests. But the erosion of public support for the military effort in Vietnam and its ultimate failure did make leaders reluctant, for a while, to use armed force in pursuit of foreign policy objectives, the so-called Vietnam syndrome.

  As the foreign policy establishment adopted a more measured approach to advancing traditionally defined American interests, it faced criticism from elements inside and outside of the state apparatus seeking a more militant anti-Soviet, anti-left stance and a remilitarization of foreign policy. Neoconservatives and conservative nationalists led the way in arguing for a hard-edged Wilsonianism that pushed American economic and political systems onto the rest of the world. Like Henry Luce in earlier years, they believed that the United States was justified in using its power as it saw fit.

  The Iranian Revolution and the growth of left-wing and anti-Western forces around the world strengthened the hand of the foreign policy hard-liners. In Africa, the Near East, and Latin America, economic growth all but ended following the downturn of the 1970s. Growing poverty provided fertile soil for movements challenging the status quo. High oil prices enabled the Soviet Union, the world’s largest oil producer, to fund groups in Africa (including in Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia) and elsewhere with which it felt political kinship. In some cases it worked in alliance with Cuba, which had its own program of political and military support for left-wing groups in Africa and Latin America. At the same time, wealthy families and state agencies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, awash in petrodollars, began funding Islamic fundamentalist schools, mosques, and movements across the Middle East and Asia.

  Jimmy Carter’s moves during his last year in office—the acceleration of his defense buildup, his steps against the Soviet Union, and his cutoff of aid to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua—steered the country toward a set of policies reminiscent of the early years of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan continued Carter’s neo–Cold War policies, amplifying the funding, rhetoric, and, in some arenas, action behind them. In one of the greatest peacetime armament programs in history, Reagan revived the B-1 bomber project that Carter had canceled; proceeded with the development of the B-2 (Stealth) bomber, designed to evade radar detection (at a cost of over a half billion dollars a plane); increased the number of Navy ships by a third; and developed new land- and submarine-based nuclear-armed missiles. In speech after speech, Reagan harshly criticized the Soviet Union, portraying the Cold War as a clash of ideas and values, a Manichean battle between freedom and oppression, a sharply different tone than that used by American policymakers during the 1970s. “So far détente’s been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims,” Reagan said at his very first presidential press conference. The Soviets “have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that.”

  Even while cranking up the war-making power of the country and throwing rhetorical bombs, Reagan made occasional gestures toward the Soviet Union that he hoped might open the door for fruitful discussions and arms limitation. Early in his administration, he ended the embargo on grain sales that Carter had imposed after the occupation of Afghanistan and began writing a series of private
letters to Soviet leaders suggesting that they work together to find “lasting peace.” But his episodic efforts failed to engage the Soviet leadership. The declining health of Communist Party head Leonid Brezhnev and the rapid succession of aged leaders after his death contributed to a freeze in Soviet policy toward the United States. Soviet military and civilian leaders lacked the trust in Reagan to join in serious talks, as they came to fear that the United States might initiate a nuclear attack on their country. Reagan’s blunt language, including his description of the Soviet Union, in a March 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, as “the focus of evil in the modern world” and “an evil empire,” led them to see him as a very hard-line Cold Warrior.

  Especially frightening to Soviet officials was Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a plan to develop a system to defend against ballistic missiles, which he announced in a nationally televised address two weeks after the “evil empire” speech. Appalled by the idea of mutually assured destruction as the main check on nuclear war, Reagan had long been intrigued by the idea of an antiballistic missile defense system. He had faith (not shared by many scientists) that the formidable technical challenges to stopping incoming missiles could be overcome. The Soviets saw SDI not as a defensive measure but as a prelude to an attack. The sheer number of Soviet missiles, they believed, would overcome a defensive shield if they themselves launched a first strike, so the only purpose of SDI, in their analysis, would be to stop the smaller number of missiles they could launch in retaliation after an attack from the United States.

  The beleaguered mind-set of Soviet leaders might have contributed to their decision to shoot down a South Korean passenger jet, KAL flight 007, that in September 1983 strayed over Soviet territory, killing all 269 people aboard, including sixty-one Americans. Their action—based on the false assumption that the airliner was engaged in spying—horrified much of the world and brought new denunciations from the United States, with Reagan calling it “an act of barbarism.” The successful U.S. effort to convince its European allies to accept intermediate-range Pershing nuclear missiles aimed at the Soviet Union further increased tensions between the two countries. The United States presented the Pershings as a defensive response to the Soviet deployment of hundreds of SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear missiles targeted at Western Europe. The Soviets had a very different view, seeing the SS-20s as a routine modernization of their defenses while fearing the offensive possibilities of the new NATO missiles, which could reach Soviet territory in just seven minutes.