Letters to the Editor
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ron didn't just suck
As they say on Marketplace, let's do the numbers:
Reagan:
1) pushed us dangerously close to nuclear war during his first term
2) ran up an unprecedented deficit
3) sponsored an illegal war in Nicaragua, backed dictators throughout central- and south america, and indirectly filled shallow graves throughout the continent
4) ignored the plight of the major urban areas
5) Ran roughshod over the environment via james watt
and last but not least:
6) stuck his head in the sand during the first four years of the AIDS crisis (which nobody has brought up yet).
As an equal opportunity offender, Clinton should never be forgiven for sitting on his hands when Bosnia and Rawanda get out of hand (they knew damn well what was going on). But having met political refugees from Reagan-backed regimes , saw friends die from HIV-infected blood, and saw cities rot from the inside-out, I apparently lived in a very different decade from those who continue to worship a guy who didn't understand the time he lived in.
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Apologist time (sigh)
Dubya may be a worse president than Reagan, but it was Reagan, far more than anyone else, who paved the way for the current presidency. By their fruit ye shall know them, and Reagan's fruit was and is rancid. In Dubya's deficits we see the continuation of Reaganomics; in his militarism we see Reagan's hawkishness; in his lawlessness we see the consequences of Reagan and his henchmen getting away with Iran-Contra. (Oliver North didn't even have to do his community service!)
The main difference between them is that Bush's (and America's) luck has run out. Truly, Americans don't appreciate how lucky their nation was in the '80s. (With obvious exceptions like homeless people, I grant you.) Reagan's failure to start World War III was due to luck as much as skill: if he ultimately became less hawkish than the other people in his administration that says a lot more about them than about him. His deficits created a debt problem still of worrisome proportions, but only luck prevented it from becoming far worse in his own time.
"Reagan didn't totally suck" is damning with faint praise, of course, yet even that is quite a generous judgement.
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end justifies the means, eh?
Snitching. Red-baiting. Mob sponsors. Lying to a grand jury. Deficit. Iran-Contra. What's not to like?
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I don't want sunshiney, blow-up dolls anymore for leaders
I don't want morning in America. I want my president ordering pizzas at midnight, getting sh*t done, thank you.
I'll take rumpled, imperfect, skirt-chasers if they have brains.
Darn right, Reagan looks great compared to the mean frat boy we've had dumped on us from these last 2 fraudulent elections.
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Sean Wilentz almost completely sucks.
and lately he hasn't really cared how much he trashed his own reputation with crap like this, and he recent specious apologia for Hillary Clinton.
What is it about these guys and their love of burning bridges.
Shame on you, Sean.
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@grubert
Is that as far as you read? There was more, you know.
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Only your third to last and penultimate paragraphs...
...brought equivocating evidence of why his era didn't suck. And even those were largely based on how he wasn't GWB. The only redeeming achievement I find herein was, indeed, keeping the hawks at bay while taking Gorbachev at his word, which may indeed have brought the end to Cold War I. However, if his lessons of supposed humility and vision are going to be trumpeted by those grappling w/ his bastardized spawn, w/out continued scrutiny of his horrible record on social and economic justice, said spawn have only another talking point in rationalizing their crassness.
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The scuttlebut was that Nancy sucked
In fact it was known that she gave the best blowjobs in Hollywood back in the day.
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One Big Thing
"How are we to proceed without Theory?" cries the world's oldest living Bolshevik in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America." "And what have you to offer now, children of this Theory? What have you to offer in its place?"
Well, for starters we could go back to, "Government of the people, by the people and for the people".
Instead of Reagan's,".....of rich people, by rich people and for rich people."
Theory isn't dead. There's a grand old theory at the heart of this country, and "Morning in America" wasn't a part of it. Time to dust off the real thing.
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Ronald Reagan
Reagen won the cold war? The Soviet Union's inflated overspending on it's defense brought Russian Communism to an end, not doddering old Ronald Reagan, Sean Wilentz my shithead friend.
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We went from an industrial to an information based economy
It has taken me 20 years to realize this but the reality is that if we had a left of center government during the 80's our economy would be dead. Many of the industries that propelled us forward would have gone elsewhere in search of cheaper capital and less regulations.
Europe went the other direction. For the first time in 400 years nothing new, either technological or cultural, has come out of there. They have a declining birth rate and are quickly living off of the last of the capital they had built up for centuries. It is a good place for freeloading hippies to loaf around but they are doomed.
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It depends on what suck means
If you are going to measure him by how much he defined a political movement, yes, he was more successful. Let's remember though that Jimmy Carter was anti-government, pro big business and got religion involved in government, so Reagan only gave this movement is greatest realization. Surely everything is different. America needed a change after Nixon and Watergate, and Reagan rode that wave, unfortunately I can find little that truly improved this country.
Now, once again our country is embarassed by its own actions, time will only show if Obama makes good on his message of change. His presidency can define a new post-Reagan era.
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He completely sucked.
Worst president in my lifetime, until the current war criminal stepped on stage. Reagan was shallow, mean, and a sucker for easy solutions. And much like the current inhabitant of the White House, he came to power under a cloud. The October Surprise should have earned Reagan a charge of treason.
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Not a very compelling review
Louis Bayard writes a fine review but fails to convincingly present Sean Wilentz' latest book in any sort of appealing light.
Basically, what Bayard boils down to is this: Wilentz presents this idea that Reagan was a great president because he was the embodiment of a putatively monumental idea. But the idea — a garden-variety manifestation of a forward-looking American optimism, part pragmatic and part exceptionalist, that would have been instantly recognizable to Tocqueville — is only noteworthy because its traditional exponents in American cultural history — liberals — had almost entirely abandoned it by the time Reagan came along.
The rest of Wilentz, by Bayard's estimation (and there's no reason to think he's somehow missing anything), is a series of caveats about what a cipher Reagan was for a radically destructive, exploitative, and fundamentally incompetent (or willfully indifferent) mode of government that completely contradicted the tenets of the monumental idea.
So basically we can sum up in one sentence:
Reagan was a complete tool, but since neoconservatism slipped into mainstream discourse under his flag his administration represents a major watershed in American political history.
For this we need a book?
(Not to mention that Bayard's case for how that constitutes "not completely sucking" is still not at all clear to me.)
When a "liberal historian" has something to tell us about what liberals were doing that whole time, and how they let the Big Ideas at the heart of American character and the American experience get co-opted by right wing dung-heads, then that will be something worth reading.