August 26, 2009
JUST BECAUSE HE WASN'T AS REVOLUTIONARY AS MAGGIE DOESN'T MEAN HE WASN'T WORTHWHILE:
The Reagan Revolution and Its Discontents: His presidency was better than expected, but worse than desired. (Steven F. Hayward, 8/26/09, National Review)
Reagan’s statecraft, at home and abroad, should be seen as a unity for one crucial reason: He saw it as a unity. Lincoln once wrote that all nations have a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate. The same can be said of leading statesmen. Reagan’s central idea can be summarized as the view that unlimited government is inimical to liberty, both in its vicious forms, such as Communism or socialism, and in its supposedly benign forms, such as bureaucracy.That Reagan regarded statism as a continuum, rather than a dichotomous problem of the East and West, was made clear in his 1982 speech in Westminster, where he said: “There is a threat posed to human freedom by the enormous power of the modern state. History teaches the dangers of government that overreaches — political control taking precedence over free economic growth, secret police, mindless bureaucracy all combining to stifle individual excellence and personal freedom.” Reagan’s conflation of “secret police” and “mindless bureaucracy” was no mere coincidence, as his next sentence made clear: “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” — in other words, “I know you’re not all as freedom-loving as me and Margaret Thatcher” — “but on one point all of us are united: our abhorrence of dictatorship in all its forms.”
The point is: The same principles that animated Reagan’s Cold War statecraft also directed his domestic-policy vision. Now, this isn’t especially remarkable to recall, and in fact the critics who nowadays want to consign Reaganism to the dustbin of history like to recall with scorn the part of his First Inaugural Address where he declared: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. . . . It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.”
However, I think both friend and critic have lost sight of the important way in which Reagan viewed his project as a restoration of constitutional government as the Founders intended it. In other words, Reagan conceived of his project not as a revolution but as a restoration.
This is made clear in the immediate sequel in his Inaugural Address. Reagan continued: “It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed” (emphasis added). Note here that Reagan didn’t rest his argument against the growth of government on grounds of efficiency or effectiveness, but on the constitutional ground of consent. This had been a constant theme of Reagan’s political rhetoric for more than 20 years, but one that was rarely heard from America’s political class — even from other conservatives. He was careful, though, to qualify his critique of government:
It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people. . . . Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it is not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work — work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back.
While this is not revolutionary, it is controversial, as it challenges the basic premises of the modern, centralized administrative state. Liberals in 1981 could scarcely have imagined hearing such heresy from the presidential podium. Although many liberals had been shaken by the disasters of the preceding 15 years, from Vietnam and the Great Society through President Carter’s ineffectual rule, there was never a point at which the fundamental premises of modern liberalism were attacked from the pinnacle of American power. The moment seemed very far removed from the days when a liberal intellectual such as Robert Maynard Hutchins could declare: “The notion that the sole concern of a free society is the limitation of governmental authority and that that government is best which governs least is certainly archaic. Our object today should not be to weaken government in competition with other centers of power, but rather to strengthen it as the agency charged with the responsibility for the common good.”
BACK TO THE FOUNDERS
Reagan was the first president since FDR who spoke frequently and substantively about the Founders and the Constitution. This is a remarkable and telling fact. Woodrow Wilson also spoke often on these subjects, but quite differently than FDR did. While Wilson was openly critical of the founding because of its emphasis on limited government, FDR’s invocations of it were mischievous — he appeared to be defending or proposing a restoration of the principles of the founding while in fact attempting a wholesale modification of our constitutional order. After FDR, our presidents practically ceased making reference to the founding or the Constitution — until Reagan arrived.It is also significant that Reagan rejected the reformist assertion that the presidency, or our democracy in general, was inadequate to the times.
From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?
Reagan had so fully internalized the thought of so many of his political forebears, such as Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, that it is not clear whether he knew he was paraphrasing them. Where he got his principles, though, is no mystery. In his First Inaugural Address, in 1801, Thomas Jefferson said: “Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.” Unlike Hutchins and other liberals, Reagan didn’t think Jefferson’s philosophy was “archaic.”
Did Reagan succeed in curbing the size and reach of the federal government? The answer appears to be no, at least if total federal spending or the size of the federal bureaucracy is used as the main metric. Although Reagan had some success in keeping the growth of government spending below what it would have been under a second term of Jimmy Carter (indeed, far below what Carter’s last five-year budget plan had projected), over the long run the Reagan years appear to have been a small speed bump on the road to serfdom. Between 1981 and 2006 (the last year for which I ran the numbers for my book), inflation-adjusted federal spending grew by 84 percent, while the population grew by only 30 percent. If per capita spending had grown only at the rate of inflation, federal outlays in 2006 would have been $800 billion lower than they actually were — under, remember, a Republican president and a Republican Congress.
On the other hand, in 1981 federal spending accounted for 22.2 percent of GDP; in 2006 it was 20.3 percent. So the growth in the economy over the last generation has allowed federal spending to soar way beyond the rate of population growth while falling slightly as a portion of GDP. William Voegeli commented on this in The Claremont Review of Books:
This measure hovered in a very narrow band for the whole era, never exceeding 23.5% or falling below 18.4%. Adding expenditures by states and localities confirms the picture of a rugby match between liberals and conservatives that is one interminable scrum in the middle of the field. Spending by all levels of government in America amounted to 31.6% of GDP in 1981, and 31.8% in 2006.
The difficulties Reagan had controlling spending and the growth of government were not lost on conservatives during and immediately after his presidency. The case for disappointment, verging at times on betrayal, was made often while Reagan was in office. For example, the Winter 1984 issue of Policy Review contained a symposium called “What Conservatives Think of Reagan.” Now recall that in early 1984 the Democrats were engaged in a spirited nomination battle to see who could best reestablish old-school liberalism and overthrow the Reagan usurpation. As late as December 1983 some polls found Reagan trailing the putative strongest Democratic challenger, Sen. John Glenn, and it was far from clear that the economic expansion that had shown signs of robustness in 1983 would continue.
In the midst of this uncertain political situation, conservatives such as Sen. William Armstrong (R., Colo.) said: “What’s the sense of having a Republican administration and a Republican Senate if the best we can do is a $200 billion deficit?” Terry Dolan, head of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, complained: “There has been no spending cut. There has been no turnover of control to the states. There has been no effort to dismantle the Washington bureaucratic elitist establishment. . . . The question when Reagan got elected was whether he was going to be closer to Eisenhower as a caretaker or to Roosevelt as a revolutionary. He’s been generally closer to Eisenhower, preserving the status quo established by previous liberal administrations.” On and on the conservative commentariat fulminated. Conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans: “This has been essentially another Ford administration. It has been business as usual, not much different from any other Republican administration in our lifetime.” Paul Weyrich: “The radical surgery that was required in Washington was not performed.”
In the early years after Reagan left office, the refrain of disappointment continued. Midge Decter wrote in Commentary in 1991: “There was no Reagan Revolution, not even a skeleton of one to hang in George Bush’s closet.” “In the end,” concurred William Niskanen, chairman of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, “there was no Reagan Revolution.” The late Thomas B. Silver argued: “Judged by the highest goal he set for himself, [Reagan] was not successful. That goal was nothing less than a realignment of the American political order, in which the primacy of the New Deal was to be challenged and overthrown. It cannot be said that Reagan in any fundamental way dismantled or even scaled back the administrative state created by FDR.”
The hatred of the Left for George W. Bush was amusing, but that of the Right was hilarious, especially when they compared him unfavorably to the Gipper, who they'd loathed in office and whose legacy they'd invented out of whole cloth.