REAGANISM = AMERICANISM:

Reaganism: The Gipper's brand of conservatism is unique to America. (JOHN MICKLETHWAIT AND ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE, June 8, 2004, Wall Street Journal

Traditional conservatism was based on six principles: a suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; unashamed patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; a pessimistic, backward-looking pragmatism; and elitism. This was the creed that Burke shaped into a philosophy in the 18th century--and that most famous conservatives, from Prince Metternich to Winston Churchill, understood in their bones. Mr. Reagan's conservatism exaggerated the first three of Burke's principles and contradicted the last three.

The exaggerations are the easiest to spot. Ronald Reagan did not merely dislike taxation in the manner of the East Coast Rockefeller Republicans who ran his party in the 1950s; he saw government as the enemy. An early patron of Freedom Forum bookshops in California (where they sold books with titles like "The Naked Communist"), he also took a Western approach to individual freedom, whether it was allowing people to carry guns or tolerating a high level of inequality. As for patriotism, conservatives are a nationalistic bunch, but Mr. Reagan celebrated his country in religious terms--as "the city on the hill" that God had chosen as the special agent of His purpose on earth.

If Reaganism had been merely a more vigorous form of old-style conservatism, then it would have been more predictable. In fact, Mr. Reagan-- who began his political life as a New Deal Democrat--took a resolutely liberal approach to Burke's last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism.

The heroes of Burke's conservatism were paternalist squires, who knew their place in society and made sure everybody else did as well. Mr. Reagan's heroes were rugged individualists, defined by the fact that they do not know their place. He packed his kitchen cabinet with entrepreneurs who built up businesses out of nothing and he worshipped the cowboy. He kept a bronze saddle in the Oval Office and--rather magnificently--rushed to appoint Malcolm Baldridge as commerce secretary when he discovered that he liked going to rodeos.

Mr. Reagan took an equally heretical attitude to the fifth attribute, pessimism. Churchill famously "preferred the past to the present and the present to the future." By contrast, Mr. Reagan was fond of Tom Paine's adage that "we have it in our power to begin the world over again." When Walter Mondale questioned the cost of America's space program, Mr. Reagan proclaimed that "the American people would rather reach for the stars than reach for excuses why we shouldn't."

As for the sixth characteristic, elitism, instead of dreaming about creating an educated "clerisy" (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did) Mr. Reagan was a populist who argued that "Bedtime for Bonzo made more sense than what they were doing in Washington." His was the conservatism not of country clubs and boardrooms, but of talk radio, precinct meetings and tax revolts.

Like all generalizations, ours come with exceptions. Mr. Reagan allied himself with authoritarian Evangelicals; some fairly feudal Southerners; elitist neoconservatives; and William Buckley, who founded The National Review in 1955 with the intention of standing "athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'" American conservatism, indeed, has many tributaries. Yet the mainstream that gathered around Mr. Reagan still looks distinct--not just from the more tepid Republicanism that preceded it, but also markedly from European conservatives.

The key to the differences is the Evangelical nature of not just Reaganism but Americanism. Indeed, it's hard to see how a nation that was explicitly Founded on the self-evident truth of the Creator and endowed rights could help but be imbued with a ferocious and enduring religiosity.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 8, 2004 9:10 PM