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Not Even a Hedgehog: The stupidity of Ronald Reagan. (Christopher Hitchens, June 7, 2004, Slate)

The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.

However, there came a day when Mikhail Gorbachev visited Washington and when the Marriott Hotel—host of the summit press conferences—turned its restaurant into the "Glasnost Cafe." On the sidewalk, LaRouche supporters wearing Reagan masks paraded with umbrellas, in mimicry of Neville Chamberlain. I huddled from dawn to dusk with friends, wondering if it could be real. Many of those friends had twice my IQ, or let's say six times that of the then-chief executive. These friends had all deeply wanted either Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale to be, presumably successively, the president instead of Reagan. They would go on to put Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen bumper stickers on their vehicles. No doubt they wish that Mondale had been in the White House when the U.S.S.R. threw in the towel, just as they presumably yearn to have had Dukakis on watch when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I have been wondering ever since not just about the stupidity of American politics, but about the need of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by showing that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power, or the latest Republican at any rate.

Having gotten decent buzz out of his attack on a deceased Bob Hope, Mr. Hitchens casts this homage to Ronald Reagan in the form of a slam too. But if you do the math you can see that he's just boasting. Back in the 1980s, Mr. Hitchens was one of those super-smart rationalists who understood why Marxism trumped Americanism. Unlike many, when events handed him his keister in a sling he had sense enough to drift Right. But it's still only a drift. Thus the formulation that Ronald Reagan's IQ = 1; Christopher Hitchen's IQ = 3; the average Leftist intellectual's IQ = 6. Since we all know that conservatives are the Stupid Party, Mr. Hitchens is here claiming a distance from the Left that he did not enjoy at the time to which he refers. In a few years, after his inevitable conversion to Catholicism, he'll have a legitimate claim to a Reaganesque IQ.

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Reagan vs. the Intellectuals (Dinesh D'Souza)

“Who would have thought,” Ronald Reagan said a few years before his death, “that I would live to see the end of the Soviet Union.”  Reagan’s whole career was devoted to the defeat of Soviet Communism, and for him to witness the collapse, first of the Berlin Wall and of the Soviet empire itself, must have been a supreme vindication.

Yet many historians and pundits—who are writing the textbooks about the Reagan era—refuse to credit Reagan’s policies as instrumental in assuring America’s victory in the cold war.   Rather, they insist that Soviet Communism suffered from chronic economic problems and predictably collapsed, as Strobe Talbott, then a journalist at Time and now a senior official in the Clinton State Department, put it, “not because of anything the outside world has done or not done?but because of defects and inadequacies at its core.”

If so, it is reasonable to expect that the inevitable Soviet collapse would have been foreseen by these experts.  Let us see what some of them had to say about the Soviet system during the 1980s.  In l982, the learned Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability.”

This view was seconded that same year by the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who observed that “those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse” are “wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.”

John Kenneth Galbraith, the distinguished Harvard economist, wrote in l984:  “That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene?One sees it in the appearance of solid well-being of the people on the streets?and the general aspect of restaurants, theaters, and shops?Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”

Equally imaginative was the assessment of Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Nobel laureate in economics, writing in the l985 edition of his widely-used textbook.  “What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth?The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth.”

Columnist James Reston of the New York Times in June 1985 revealed his capacity for sophisticated even-handedness when he dismissed the possibility of the collapse of Communism on the grounds that Soviet problems were not different from those in the United States.  “It is clear that the ideologies of Communism, socialism and capitalism are all in trouble.”

But the genius award undoubtedly goes to Lester Thurow, another MIT economist and well-known author who, as late as l989, wrote, “Can economic command significantly?accelerate the growth process?  The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can?Today the Soviet Union is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States.”

Throughout the 1980s, most of these pundits derisively condemned Reagan’s policies.  Strobe Talbott faulted the Reagan administration for espousing “the early fifties goal of rolling back Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” an objective he considered misguided and unrealistic.   “Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end,” Talbott scoffed, adding that if the Soviet economy was in a crisis of any kind “it is a permanent, institutionalized crisis with which the U.S.S.R. has learned to live.”

Perhaps one should not be too hard on the wise men.  After all, explains Arthur Schlesinger in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, “History has an abiding capacity to outwit our certitudes.  No one foresaw these changes.”

Wrong again.  Reagan foresaw them.

Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism: Henry Kissinger's first book, on the Napoleonic Wars, explains Kissinger's foreign policy better than any of his memoirs, and is striking as an early display of brilliance and authority  (Robert D. Kaplan, June 1999, Atlantic Monthly)

He preserved what he saw as the legitimate order, in which the Soviet Union was both contained and accepted, so that revolutionary chaos was confined to the edges of the superpower battlefield, in the Third World. (In perceiving the Soviet Union as permanent, orderly, and legitimate, Kissinger shared a failure of analysis with the rest of the foreign-policy elite -- notably excepting the scholar and former head of the State Department's policy-planning staff George Kennan, the Harvard historian Richard Pipes, the British scholar and journalist Bernard Levin, and the Eureka College graduate Ronald Reagan.)

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 7, 2004 3:00 PM