Over the years, I have pondered the question of what made Reagan so successful. I have three answers. First, he had a Euclidean certainty about what he believed and where he wanted to take the country. Not only was he a man of conviction but he was a man whose convictions were not open to change. This is a key point, so let me elaborate a bit. When I was a student at Dartmouth, I was informed again and again that a liberally educated man has an open mind. Having an open mind means making only provisional judgments and always being open to new evidence that might change your mind. I realized, with some stupefaction, that Reagan did not share this view. He knew in advance what he wanted to do—say, lower taxes. If his aides informed him that the facts went in the other direction, Reagan’s basic attitude was, “Okay, get me new facts.”
In this, Reagan was right. In a certain sense, it is important for a president to be closed-minded. The reason is that when you are elected president and come to Washington with an agenda, you are immediately surrounded by highly competent and experienced people who tell you, “Sorry, Mr. President, but you simply cannot do that. The Congress will never go for it. There is opposition within your own party. The Supreme Court is sure to strike it down. The General Accounting Office has serious reservations. What are we going to tell the American Association of Retired People?” And so on. The open-minded person is quickly drowned in a sea of facts. Only the man with a firm rudder, only the man who has already decided where he is going is confident enough to keep going when the political waters get rough.
Second, Reagan instinctively understood that the president, powerful as he is, cannot change the world in sixty-five ways. He can change the world in only two or three ways. And so Reagan set his priorities. He wanted to defeat inflation, revive the economy, arrest the advance of the Soviet empire—and that’s about it. The other stuff Reagan didn’t care about. In the White House we were sometimes frustrated when Reagan avoided issues such as affirmative action and conceded to the liberals on farm subsidies and such. But Reagan understood, better than we did, that a president has to choose his fights. Early in Reagan’s first term, he was criticized for failing to recognize one of his own cabinet secretaries. This was Sam Pierce, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Reagan saw the guy at a meeting of big-city mayors and greeted him by saying, “And how are things in your city, Mr. Mayor?” This was a bit of a gaffe, yet the reason for it was that Reagan didn’t really care about the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He saw it as a rat-hole of public policy. He knew that if he went in, he might never come out. And this was probably a correct perception.
Third, and perhaps most important, Reagan was successful because he didn’t care about what the elite culture said about him. Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp are similar to Reagan in some ways, but they differ from him in that they are both anxious to win the approval of elites. As Speaker of the House, Gingrich was always troubled when he was excoriated by Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News. Kemp yearned for the plaudits of the editors of Time and the Washington Post. But Reagan genuinely didn’t care. He had the same attitude when he was governor of California. During the late 1960s, Reagan was repeatedly attacked in the San Francisco Chronicle by the influential columnist Herb Caen. On one occasion, Reagan’s aide, Michael Deaver, said to him, “Governor, have you seen these vicious attacks by Herb Caen?” And Reagan’s response was, “Yeah. What’s eating that guy?” Reagan’s assumption was that something was obviously wrong with Herb Caen. He did not for an instant consider the possibility that Caen’s criticisms might have some merit. This liberation from the tyranny of elite opinion gave Reagan the freedom to operate outside the bounds of what is normally permissible.
None of this is to say that Reagan refused to acknowledge any moral or intellectual authority. But his authorities were drawn from, let us say, outside the bounds of the policymaking world. The economist Arthur Laffer recalls that shortly after the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983, he met Reagan at a conference. He told Reagan that the newspapers had reported that the administration had gone back and forth on whether to go with the invasion. Laffer asked, “What made you finally decide to do it?” Reagan said, “Well, Art, finally I asked myself, what would John Wayne have done?” Somewhere deep down, Reagan knew that John Wayne was a better guide on this occasion than the collective wisdom of the Washington establishment.
Reagan’s firm convictions and his indifference to elite opinion were responsible for the biggest and boldest decision of his presidency: the decision to cut taxes and raise defense spending even in the face of a ballooning federal deficit. The deficits not only raised the ire of Democrats but also fears within Reagan’s own camp. Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, and the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, called on Reagan to scale back the tax cut and moderate the defense increase. Reagan’s reply was almost farcical. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I believe the deficit is big enough to take care of itself.” At this point, the national media went apoplectic! But Reagan was making a considered gamble. He strongly believed that the tax cuts would energize the economy, which in turn would increase the tax base and swell the revenues of the treasury. He was determined to have his defense increase to curb—and, he could only hope, topple—the “evil empire.” Reagan knew that if this happened, America would be able to spend less on defense in the future. So there was a kind of logic, albeit a risky logic, behind Reagan’s assertion that “if we cannot balance the budget now, we’ll have to do it later.”
But the Reagan gamble paid off. Although the pundits wailed for more than a decade about the Reagan deficits, the country moved into the 1990s only to discover that the annual deficit had vanished. Poof! Suddenly America was running big budget surpluses. Of course, the shameless Clinton repeatedly bowed and claimed credit for the surpluses, but what did he do to produce them? Absolutely nothing. It was the juggernaut of economic growth that began around 1983 and continued virtually uninterrupted through the 1990s that proved to be a tax bonanza for the treasury. Moreover, huge defense savings from the end of the cold war contributed to making the dreaded deficits disappear.
On the left, revisionist historians try to deny Reagan credit for his role in ending the cold war. “The Soviet Union collapsed by itself,” they say. Or, “Gorbachev did it.” Neither of these explanations is believable. First, the Soviet Union undoubtedly had economic problems in the 1980s, but it also had such problems in the 1970s, and the 1960s, and the 1950s. Come to think of it, the Soviets had faced economic problems ever since the Bolsheviks took power. Admittedly, these sufferings imposed continual hardships on the Soviet people, but there were no signs during the 1980s that the people were up-in-arms. No mass demonstrations, no popular revolt. Moreover, the ruling class was living comfortably, as it had since Lenin’s day. So why would this group relinquish power? No empire in history has called it quits, freed its colonies, and dissolved itself just because its economy was ailing.
Nor does it make sense to say that Gorbachev brought about the change. First, Gorbachev did not want to end Communism but to save it. Gorbachev went to the Soviet military and said, in effect, Give me my economic reforms and I will have more resources for you to spend on weapons. Today, Gorbachev claims that he was always a democrat and a liberal, but go back and read Gorbachev’s speeches and his book Perestroika, published during the 1980s. Gorbachev sought to “reform” Communism, but the system imploded because it was too rigid to adapt to the reforms. So Gorbachev was a decent bungler who ended up producing a result that he did not intend. Curiously, it was an outcome that Reagan sought and predicted when he said, in 1982, that Soviet Communism would end up on “the ash heap of history.”
Another point to remember, Chris, is that Reagan was largely responsible for the Soviet Politburo’s elevating Gorbachev to power. Gorbachev was completely different from the Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko types. So why did the Politburo choose him? The reason is that the Soviet strategy that had worked so well during the 1970s
had stopped working during the 1980s. Between 1974 and 1980, ten countries fell into the Soviet orbit, starting with the fall of Vietnam and ending with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After 1981, when Reagan came to power, no more real estate fell into Soviet hands; and in 1983, thanks to an American invasion, Grenada became the first country in history to be liberated from the clutches of Soviet Communism. Moreover, Reagan deployed Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe to meet the Soviet threat there. He announced the strategic missile defense program. When Chernenko died, the Politburo concluded that they needed a new type of leader to cope with this fellow Reagan. And so they put Gorbachev into the ring, where he was outmaneuvered by Reagan and ended up taking himself, and Soviet Communism, over the precipice of history.
I have emphasized left-wing revisionism about the cold war, but there is also a right-wing revisionism that focuses on Reagan’s domestic policy. Some libertarians give Reagan credit for cutting taxes, but they blame him for not slashing domestic spending. Indeed, they point out, the percentage of the gross national product consumed by the federal government grew under Reagan. How could this happen? Reagan made a prudential judgment early on that he could not get his tax cuts and his defense increases through a Democratic Congress, controlled by Tip O’Neill, if at the same time he demanded substantial cutbacks in domestic spending. Reagan knew how impractical it would be for him to say, “I want billions of dollars for MX missiles and B-1 bombers, and I want to take the money out of Medicare and food stamps.” Much as Reagan would have liked to see domestic cuts, he decided to leave the welfare state alone while he focused on his tax program and his foreign policy program. It is easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to second-guess Reagan about whether he could have managed some domestic reductions, but in the world of practical politics, leaders have to make hard choices about what is feasible at a given time.
The diplomat Clare Booth Luce once said that history, which has no room for clutter, remembers every president by one line only: “Washington was the father of the country.” “Lincoln freed the slaves.” And so on. It is interesting to speculate on how recent presidents will be remembered. So what about Reagan? Margaret Thatcher said several years ago that “Reagan won the cold war without firing a shot.” This is a pretty good epitaph, but I think Reagan did more than that. So my line for him is the following: “Reagan won the cold war and revived the American economy and the American spirit.” For this, all Americans owe Reagan a profound debt of gratitude.
9
Why Government Is the Problem
Dear Chris,
I am delighted that you enjoyed my Reagan book so much. You cite Reagan’s quip comparing the government to a baby: “It is an alimentary canal with an appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.” This view, you say, is radically different from the one that prevails on your campus. The regnant ethos says, “But how can you be against government programs? The government is simply there to help people.”
Yes, but which people? And with whose money? And with whose consent? And with what result?
It is one thing for the government to provide the basic necessities of life to the “truly needy,” a group that would include the poor, the sick, and the disabled. It is another thing for government to take resources from one middle-class family and give them to another middle-class family. This happens when, for example, the government builds a mass transit system: People who prefer to drive cars must pay for the transportation preferences of people who prefer to take the subway. A similar redistribution is under way when the government funds the National Endowment for the Arts: Everybody has to subsidize the recreation of those Americans who want to listen to Papuan folk music, or view photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s portraits of his own genitals. I do not deny that many government programs aimed at the middle class enjoy considerable political support. As George Bernard Shaw put it, “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on Paul’s support.”
Many such programs corrupt our politics by making it a contest for who gets to feed at the public trough. Moreover, they do not promote the common welfare or the public good. Rather, they promote the good of some people at the expense of other people. To see why this is bad, recall the basic theory of a liberal society as articulated by early modern philosophers such as John Locke. In this view, we enter into a social contract and place ourselves under the jurisdiction of government to protect ourselves from foreign and domestic thugs, and to secure our basic rights, such as the rights to liberty and property. Why would we agree to join a society that routinely seized our resources without our consent and bestowed them on other people?
This is not to deny that the government has an important role to play. We need the government to fight terrorists and to secure the borders against illegal immigrants. We need the government to get criminals off the street. While we can debate the means to achieve this, government can and should ensure that all Americans have access to basic education and healthcare. The government is responsible for building the highways and administering the space program. Government help is needed to protect the environment because, without such help, some companies would pollute the air and water with impunity. The government also supports basic research, provides patent protections, and establishes criteria for product safety. Conservatives should not be embarrassed to support government action in its legitimate sphere.
But at the same time, we recognize that whatever the government does, it usually does it badly. (I know of only one exception to this rule: the writing of parking tickets.) This is not to suggest that the people who work in government are less competent than those who work in the private sector. The problem is that, unlike the private sector, the government doesn’t have a “bottom line.” There are no clear criteria to determine whether a government program is working. Some years ago, a bureaucrat in the Washington, D.C., public school system said, “How can you say that our public school system is a failure? Lots of people work here.” By his standard, the school system was impressively fulfilling its function of providing employment to lots of people.
Conservatives know that government continues to do things that aren’t needed, or that could be done better by someone else. Some liberals now recognize this, too; but I must say, they are slow learners. Frequently they must be dragged, kicking and howling, to conclusions that are patently obvious. The reason for the liberal’s obstinacy and reluctance is that the miserable fellow is painfully discovering that his basic theory is wrong.
Wrong in what sense? When I was in college, I learned from my political science textbooks that the government simply must run the lighthouses, because if it didn’t, no one would. I also learned that the government must deliver the mail, otherwise lots of people would never get a letter. Prisons, I was further informed, were a necessary government responsibility. Finally, my textbooks were insistent that, without public schools, millions of Americans would receive no education at all.
The experience of the past couple of decades has shown that every one of these assumptions is either dubious or demonstrably false. Today, there are many privately run lighthouses. The argument about government mail delivery has stumbled into a two-word rebuttal: Federal Express. Private mail carriers are now ubiquitous, and there is no reason to believe that they could not deliver regular mail as efficiently as they deliver packages and overnight mail. Prisons routinely contract out services to private contractors, and some prisons are entirely run by private companies. Moreover, there is no logical reason why private markets cannot provide education services through high school for all; the government’s role could then be limited to providing assistance to those who would not otherwise be able to afford those services.
“But,” I have heard many students ask, “Isn’t Big Government necessary to check the influence of Big Business?” In a few cases—such as the recent corporate accounting scandals—the answer is yes. In general, though, the power of big business over the average American is quite limite
d. To sell its shares and its products, the business must persuade investors and customers. It must win their consent before taking their money.
But this is not true of Big Government. Let me illustrate with an example, which I have drawn from economist Walter Williams. The federal government has a program called Social Security that is intended to help me save for my retirement. What if I were to say, “I appreciate the gesture, folks, but no thanks. I don’t want to be part of this program. I am not going to pay any Social Security taxes, and I forgo any future claim on benefits. When I am old and cannot support myself, I will draw on my private savings, or rely on relatives and friends, or appeal to private charities, and if all these measures fail I will endure my poverty.” How would the government respond to this?
The government would, of course, respond by killing me. This may strike you as an implausible or paranoid speculation on my part, so let’s explore the hypothesis further. I refuse to pay Social Security taxes. The government sends me notices and imposes fines. I ignore the notices and refuse to pay the fines. Federal agents then come to seize my property. I, taking my gun out of my desk drawer, make whatever attempts I can to protect what is mine. Since I am a poor shot and there are many more of them, the outcome can be told in advance. They will win, and I will be dead.
The purpose of this anecdote is to show that what distinguishes the government from the private sector is the power of coercion. In some ways the most insignificant government bureaucrat—the parking meter attendant, the IRS examiner, the guy at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the immigration official—has more power over me than the CEO of General Motors or General Electric. And this power of coercion, which is inherent in the nature of government, fundamentally undermines the liberal claim that the government is doing a moral thing by helping people.
Letters to a Young Conservative Page 6