The wrong time for the right man?
By Jonah Goldberg
web
posted April 3, 2000
Years ago, when I was a policy gnome at the American Enterprise Institute, I received a first-hand lesson in the brilliance of Ronald Reagan.
Generally regarded as maintaining the greatest collection of living neo-conservatives in captivity, AEI almost served as a Reaganite government in exile at the time. One Friday, Joshua Muravchik, probably the premier neo-con foreign-policy intellectual of his generation, was giving a "Brown Bag" talk (AEI now calls them, lamely, "Friday Forums") on the current state of neo-conservatism. A who's who of Reaganite intellectuals were in attendance (as well as a who's nobody roster of researchers and interns, which explains my attendance).
A different interpretation
During the Q&A I asked Muravchik to explain what exactly a neo-conservative is. His answer was a surprisingly unsatisfying bit of sophistry -- something like neo-conservatism is the body of beliefs held by people who call themselves neo-conservative. But, the ensuing discussion was fantastic, and I will always remember it.
In the course of his answer, Muravchik said that the Reagan movement was primarily a foreign-policy cause united around defeating Communism. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I recall he said, essentially, we let the economic and religious conservatives into the movement in order to get our agenda accomplished.
At this assertion, an "au contraire" was offered from Irwin Stelzer, Ronald Reagan's former director of regulatory affairs. He said that Reaganism was essentially an economic philosophy and while anti-Communism was surely a vital part, foreign-policy activists were simply another wing emanating from the core of the true Reagan coalition.
Seconds after Stelzer made his comments, my friend Michael Novak -- one of America's leading Catholic intellectuals, former Templeton Prize winner and an ambassador-at-large under Reagan -- begged to differ. While, of course, fighting for free markets and against the Red menace was vital to Reaganism, these policies were largely outgrowths of a moral and religious vision, which is why the Reagan movement was essentially a religious cause. An intellectual brouhaha ensued – and, I am proud to say, I started it.
Now all of these people are smarter than I am, so how is it they could each see a political insurgency that they were intimately involved in so differently?
'How we got here'
The answer lies at the heart of Reagan's success and conservatism's current doldrums. To paraphrase David Frum's engaging polemic How We Got Here: The 70's -- The Decade that Brought You Modern Life -- For Better or Worse, the 1970s were just plain awful: inflation, spiritual exhaustion and confusion, family dissolution, Vietnam, disco, terrorism, riots, drugs, mood rings, hostage takings and on and on and on.
In hindsight it seems that virtually every social and economic indicator went inexplicably wacky, like a compass near a hidden magnet. Divorce rates skyrocketed. Nina and George O'Neill, the authors of Open Marriage, wrote, "[I]f it comes down to your marriage or your identity, we think your identity is more important."
Meanwhile, the Dow average was lower in 1979 than it was in 1969. In 1975, Frum reminds us, economist Alan Greenspan told Congress that the economy had reached a "point of discontinuity," where America had to choose between socialism and capitalism. We began the decade losing a war in Southeast Asia while the Soviets boldly launched one in Central Asia at the end of it. As Frum asserts, some things did get better in the 1970s – women's rights, for example -- but that did not make the trends themselves any less confusing.
Along came Ronald Reagan.
Well, that's not quite right, as he had been there for years, offering his remedies to a nation that did not want them in much the same way that Winston Churchill had endured the 1930s. Reagan's program was decidedly simple and, therefore, completely out of step with elite wisdom. The "me decade" of personally defined morality rendered sweeping statements about the way things ought to be unacceptable in "enlightened" discourse. According to the establishment vision, everything was complicated. Reagan called for rearmament, lower taxes, less regulation, greater personal freedom and more personal responsibility and many other themes that sound so familiar today now that they have been co-opted by both parties for more than a decade.
It is not hard to imagine amid cancerous inflation, Watergate, "malaise" and our loss of prestige abroad, how Reagan's platform would not seem merely wise or attractive. It would seem like a return to normalcy. It is also unsurprising that the various social activists, Atari Democrats and social reformers -- who saw the chaos of the 1970s as evidence their programs needed to be driven further -- saw Reagan's program as simplistic and dangerous. But among the scattered tribes of the conservative movement, Reagan was as close to a messianic figure as a politician can be.
That is why so many intellectuals thought Reagan was their guy. Picture a sick person with many symptoms. One doctor treats the patient's cough, and another treats his bad legs, and another tends to his poor sight. If the patient took a pill that could cure him, the doctors might think the pill primarily cured what they were in charge of. The same thing works with sick societies and the intellectuals who emphasize certain aspects of them. The brilliance of Reagan was that he was essentially the cure-all for what ailed us.
Seizing the moment
Even as his campaign was going down in flames in February, former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley (D) explained that he wanted to be president because he thought he best exemplified the "national moment." In several interviews he compared himself to Lincoln and FDR as a man who could embody the times. Bradley was laughably wrong about his own prospects. But he was right about what makes great presidents great. They fit the moment. Barry Goldwater was Reagan's equal in many respects and even his superior in a few, but in 1964 the times were not ready for Goldwater. The same held true for Reagan in 1976. But by 1980 America was ready for Reagan in much the same way that Britain was finally ready for Churchill in 1940.
This fact often seems lost on today's Republican politicians and activists. Throughout the Republican primaries, the various candidates consistently jockeyed for the Reagan mantle. Gary Bauer, literally, invoked Reagan in every speech. John McCain made the argument that he was Reagan-like because he attracted moderates and Democrats. Steve Forbes made the credible claim that his policies were the most Reagan-esque. And so on.
What all of these people fail to recognize is that politics is about moments, and winning politicians are the ones who can best capitalize on them. Reagan was the perfect candidate for the times he lived in. McCain's campaign nearly unseated George W. Bush because it was so effective at exploiting a national mood for what voters perceive as reform. But that does not mean he would be equally successful today. Voters threw Winston Churchill out of office when the war ended largely because they felt he no longer fit the times. Reagan was a stabilizing force when one was sorely needed. Claiming to be his reincarnation is necessarily a nostalgic appeal and, therefore, of limited use.
The fact that political moods shift and moments end poses a distinct dilemma for conservatives. After all, conservatism is an ideology or philosophy that reveres eternal immutable ideas and tries to apply them to ever-changing human circumstances. Whittaker Chambers understood this when he called himself a dialectician in all things and, as a consequence, rejected the "conservative" label.
It may sound somewhat demeaning to the cause I hold dear, but conservatives
must countenance the fact that sometimes we serve as the broken clocks
of American history. We are right when the times catch up with what we
have to say. And we are still right when the times are wrong. Unfortunately,
it will appear otherwise to the public at large. And that is understandable.
Jonah Goldberg is a contributing editor and daily online columnist for National Review. Reprinted with the kind permission of Intellectual Capital.