Brave, Brave Sir Reagan
by Hunter
Tue May 08, 2007 at 01:29:47 PM PDT
Ten Republican presidential candidates wanting to succeed President Bush embraced a more popular president, conservative icon Ronald Reagan, at every turn in their first debate of the 2008 race.
-- AP
When it came to defeating the Soviets, Ronald Reagan made it simple: "We win, they lose." Now more than ever, the defeatists in Congress must hear that same message. America will never surrender.
I realize that the right is now in the middle of another bout of Reagan hagiography; he is, after all, the patron saint of all modern conservatism, a man who ballooned federal spending, created crushing deficits, and ended his term in the scandal of Iran-Contra, but had great hair and knew how to stand on his mark. He was the defining example of stern-sounding but goofily muddling father figure in the finest conservative mold, a man who with a cadre of speechwriters finely perfected the art of whittling the coarser stuff of conservatism into something that looked and sounded, you know, not entirely evil, and a man who, above all, would go where he was told, read what he was given, with panache, hand out platitudes like saltwater taffy, and then retreat back into the White House so that the hardcore conservatives in his administration could proceed with reforming the American government into corporate welfare state that looked nothing like that of his teary-eyed, well-vocalized speeches.
So believe me, I get why they like him. Reagan was made for the era: in the time of hair rock, when talent was completely and utterly indistinguishable from fashion, Ronald Reagan was the hair president. His coif was one of destiny: his hair glistened in ways that his soul never quite could. He was a handsome actor of middling quality at a time in American life when being a handsome actor of middling quality was the very best thing you could possibly be, in any profession, in any situation, in any corner of the national zeitgeist. And excesses of both rock and presidency were evolutions from what previously were dark days indeed -- while the fashions and rock of the eighties rapidly were evolving into clothes and hair so expansive that they required elaborate scaffolding, steelwork and cocaine to support them, the seventies had previously been so monstrous that the fashion-humiliated country was not only prepared but vaguely grateful for the gratuitously shallow (but nevertheless high-drama) change.
Ditto on the presidency, in which after two fairly lackluster transitional presidents Reagan and Reagan's glistening coif took over the conservative mantle from the disgraced, now-let-us-never-speak-of-him-again Nixon. Reagan succeeded in bringing the hard-right conservatives back into power, allowing them freer rein than Nixon himself ever did, and Reagan even managed to eclipse Nixon in the very, very important conservative presidential duty of doing something completely frigging illegal, extraconstitutional, and blasphemous against the very concept of America, giving seed to a new crop of conservative felons and near-felons to be worshiped as martyrs by the far right.
Nixon provided the movement with G. Gordon Liddy; Reagan gave us Oliver North. You can find them both, along with others, on Fox News and other conservative outlets to this day, neatly packaged reformed crooks, which in conservatism passes for nobility. And Reagan himself, of course, maintained plausible deniability, which from the multiple Bush eras we have now learned is the entire difference between conservative presidential hero and conservative presidential chump.
It is therefore moderately gratifying that we no longer have to listen to the various reasons why Bush is the heir of the Reagan hair, and the finest and most conservative president since Reagan, blah blah blah. Now that most conservatives are beginning to look at Bush not as great and inspiring leader, but instead are contemplating him as if he is a flaming paper bag left on the doorstep of their private club, we may finally be within eyeshot of a bright and shining post-presidential future in which we all can happily ignore the man, at least for twenty years or so until he, too, is mounted atop a pedestal and retroactively proclaimed another conservative king.
I would point out in passing, though, that Reagan and Bush are actually strikingly similar presidents, and for probably none of the reasons that conservatives were previously gloating among themselves about. Incoherent, voodoo-based tax policies; deficits; military obsession and incompetence, If Reagan was the president of big-haired, big-fashioned America, then Bush, too, fits the mold of his own times, which was in millennial America a sort of sloppy, nonchalant fatigue, an era that saw generational Americans finally tire of trying to slalom between all the various extremes they attempted in the previous decades -- 1970s fashions and war and drugs, 1980s big hair and drugs mixed with corporatism and drugs, and the 1990s devolution into slightly unkempt non-fashion, a little less of everything, but always with a cell phone; corporatism tempered with a new, studious banality. The boomers finally felt their age, and looked back with a wee bit of embarrassment at the last few decades of careening culture, and started thinking about their portfolios.
Bush arrived on the scene as a true heir of Reagan in many unflattering ways: a man of sparse substance, a purely corporate figure of no redeeming success or too-condemning failure, a man with the glassy stare of someone who had seen one bottle of Jack Daniels too many, or maybe had one glass-tabled line short of too many, during the narco-corporate boomer mini-apocalypse, and was tired of it all. He was the fashion of the moment, post-nineties style, and the fine bookended match for Reagan's own legacy of substancelessness; a carefully groomed empty suit that could be wheeled into whatever situation needed it with little argument on his part. The new figurehead for the same conservative schooner, filled with the very same conservative sailors that had always sailed that sea.
But enough of that. This is about Reagan, not Bush, and at the risk of jeopardizing visions of using Reagan to replace all other Presidents who currently appear on our money, and at the risk of disrupting a future in which Washington D.C. is renamed Reagan D.C., and spruce trees are known as Reagans, and Iraq is broken up into three strife-torn provinces known as Reaganland, New Ronaldia, and Kurdish Gippershire, I feel compelled to point something out.
Since hard-right conservatives are now petulantly holding Reagan up as some kind of anti-terrorism avatar too, on top of everything else -- a talisman against the obvious, which is the current abject failure of Bush and conservative policy in Iraq -- I think we should mention, here, very softly and gently, that when Reagan was faced with the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Lebanon, during the civil war there, in what was one of the most formative examples of Middle Eastern terrorism against Americans to that date, the much-vaunted Ronald Reagan ran away.
And I mean, he ran like a schoolgirl. He ran like butter on hot pancakes. He ran like a six-month-old with stomach problems. He ran like a high school boy from a Republican congressman. He ran like raindrops off the wing of a 737 at full cruising altitude. He ran like my dog when I say the word "bathtime". He ran like a conservative blogger from a military recruiting booth. He ran like a man who suddenly remembered that liberating a bunch of confused medical students from a Caribbean island was a hell of a lot easier than maintaining a coherent Middle East policy. He gave it a few months of saving-face time, and then he ran.
Now, perhaps leaving was the right thing to do. And perhaps it wasn't. But the point is that even the conservative uberhawk and presidential Blarney Stone, Ronald Reagan himself, was well and truly familiar with the concept of getting out when the getting was good, and that if conservatives are going to hold him up as an example of resolution in the face of terrorism, than it is truly part and parcel of everything else about Millennial Post-Reaganism: complete and utter horsecrap wrapped up in the usual fuzzy-eyed memories that conservatives manage to construct for themselves whenever they dream about any past era of conservative wholesomeness.
There's much more to be said about this new frantic conservative hold onto a failed Iraq policy, of course. I just wanted to interrupt with this little note. When it comes to terrorism, Ronald Reagan was abject failure. He wasn't a fighter against terrorism: if anything, the botched, Communist-menace-focused policy of that era was a source, not an extinguishing factor.
Less in the spirit of bipartisanship than the spirit of unvarnished truth, mind you, I will note that we have yet to have a modern President that has "managed" the Middle East competently. The region has been thought of as little more than proxy battleground for other world powers throughout the entirety of recent history: the evolution as proxy battleground now for nationalistic and sectarian religious wars counts as no progress at all. But using Reagan as a model for this particular fight truly ranks as among the more stubbornly ignorant premises, whether intended as hagiography or not.