Revising Ronald Reagan

Was the 40th president a peace-loving moderate?

Daniel McCarthy from the June 2007 issue

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There’s a good deal of irony in the contrast between the free-spending “conservative” Reagan and the frugal “liberal” Jimmy Carter, who as Diggins rightly notes “was as antistatist as Reagan” and accomplished much of the federal deregulation—removing entry barriers in air travel, trucking, and other fields—for which Reagan would sometimes receive credit. While both the left and the right have made Reagan out to be a great scourge of government power, Diggins demonstrates that the president’s rhetoric was more anti-statist than his actions. Reagan’s conservatism, too, was not what his admirers and detractors often claimed that it was; the religious right flourished in the 1980s, but Reagan—a divorced, socially tolerant movie star—hardly embodied it. Both Carter and Reagan’s successor as governor of California, the former seminarian Jerry Brown, were much more traditionally Christian (and more fiscally parsimonious) than Reagan, who “opened the American mind to optimism and innocence, leaving it closed to sin and experience.” Reagan, a believer but not much of a churchgoer, “seemed to offer a Christianity without Christ and the crucifixion, a religion without reference to sin, evil, suffering, or sacrifice.”

Was this Emersonian Reagan a libertarian? Diggins connects Reagan with Tom Paine (whom the president was fond of quoting) and contends that “Reagan, like Paine, could neither bring himself to believe in the fall nor convince himself of any need for meaningful government.” But he also argues that Reagan’s unchecked spending planted the seeds of “big-government conservatism.” As Diggins tells it, Reagan’s failure to restrain the state arose from his unwillingness to rebuke the public for its addiction to entitlements, subsidies, and pork. Reagan had more of an anti-government vision than an anti-government program—something that might be said of contemporary conservatism as well.

Other areas that Diggins doesn’t discuss, such as Reagan’s escalation of the drug war, also complicate the picture of the president as a semi-libertarian or a “liberal romantic.” And unfortunately, while he’s very interested in the influence of Emerson and Paine on Reagan, Diggins slights the impact of Hayek, Mises, and other economists. He even confuses Hayek with Milton Friedman, telling us that “in the mid-1970s, Hayek won a Noble [sic] Prize in economics for his theory of monetarism.”

It’s a shame. Diggins has developed a compelling take on his subject, and Ronald Reagan is an engaging, thought-provoking, at times even lyrical assessment of the 40th president. But he can also be lazy and slipshod, given to overgeneralizations and unexamined assertions. Toward the end of his book, he makes the remarkable claim that communism could reform itself out of existence because it was a scientific doctrine and thus, unlike a religion, subject to “verification and revision.” Was communism really more subject to verification than a religion? The Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko’s Marxist genetics, which rejected the principle of heredity for doctrinal reasons, would seem to falsify that notion. For 70 years, Soviet communism was as resistant to innovation as any faith.

Ronald Reagan has some glaring faults. Yet the core of the book’s argument rings true: Emerson proves to be an invaluable touchstone for understanding Reagan, and Diggins ably shows that the president was neither the idiot his enemies made him out to be nor the hard-bitten Cold Warrior of conservative myth. Reagan is a figure well deserving of re-evaluation from all sides of the political spectrum, and Diggins’ book, despite its flaws, contributes usefully to that effort.

Daniel McCarthy is a contributing editor of The American Conservative.

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