Hist 221 Reagan

WEB CT SHOWDOWN: RONALD REAGAN

–William Greider, The Gipper’s Economy in The Nation, 28 June 2004

— Editorial, The Reagan Restoration, The Wall Street Journal, 7 June 2004

— Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton University Press, 2005), excerpt

Posted June 10, 2004  THE NATION, 28 JUNE 2004

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040628&s=greider

The Gipper’s Economy

by William Greider

The Gipper had a certain goofiness about him that was impossible not to like. He told “war stories” borrowed from old movies with such sincerity you were sure he must have been there. He was a famous football hero (“win this one for the Gipper”) and also a handsome cowboy depicted on horseback in his 1980 campaign posters (but without his six-shooters). He taught wacky science lessons (trees are a leading source of air pollution) and delivered many dewy-eyed tributes to American heroes, some plucked from yesterday’s headlines, some recycled from his rheumy memories of World War I. Whether you came to canonize the man or ridicule him, he was always great material. Historians, I think, will someday rank him right up there with Warren Harding.

Reagan was a fabulist. He told stories–often charming, sometimes loony–in which sentimental images triumphed over facts, warmth over light. So it is entirely appropriate today that the major media, draped in mourning, are solemnly fictionalizing his presidency. Reagan spun them around brilliantly, used the White House reporters and cameras as hapless props in his melodrama, ignored the tough questions and stuck unyieldingly to his scripted version of reality. This was partly conviction, partly the discipline of an “old pro” movie actor. It appears to have worked with the press. Their memorials to the “Ronald Reagan story” sound more like his fables than the events I witnessed.

What’s left out? For one thing, a chilling meanness lurked at the core of Reagan’s political agenda (always effectively concealed by the affability), and he used this meanness like a razor blade to advance his main purpose–delegitimizing the federal government. Race was one cutting edge, poverty was another. His famous metaphor–the “welfare queen” who rode around in her Cadillac collecting food stamps–was perfectly pitched to the smoldering social resentments but also a clever fit with his broader economic objectives. Stop wasting our money on those lazy, shiftless (and, always unspoken, black) people. Get government off our backs, encourage the strong, forget the weak. In case any white guys missed the point, Reagan opened his 1980 campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in the 1960s. His speech extolled states’ rights. The tone was sunny optimism.

The chemistry worked partly because it coincided with a historical shift already under way. Beyond movie scripts, Reagan was authentic in his convictions–he brought the flint-hearted libertarian doctrines of Hayek and Friedman to Washington and put a smiling face on the market orthodoxy of “every man for himself.” Democrats had lost their energy and inventiveness, they were associated with twenty years of contentious reforms, turmoil and conflict (and sought relief, not by rebuilding their popular base with new ideas but by cozying up to the business lobbies). In the end, the only folks who got truly liberated by Reaganomics were the same people who had financed his rise in politics, the Daddy Warbucks moguls from California and corporate behemoths like General Electric.

Reagan’s theory was really “trickle down” economics borrowed from the Republican 1920s (Harding-Coolidge-Hoover) and renamed “supply side.” Cut tax rates for the wealthy; everyone else will benefit. As Reagan’s budget director David Stockman confided to me at the time, the supply-side rhetoric “was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.” Many middle-class and poor citizens figured it out, even if reporters did not.

Reagan’s great accomplishment was ideological–propelling the ascendancy of the right–but the actual governing results always looked more like hoary old interest-group politics. Wealthy individuals, corporate and financial interests got extraordinary benefits (tax reductions and deregulation) while the bottom half got whacked whenever an opportunity arose. His original proposition–cut taxes regressively, double military spending, shrink government and balance the federal budget–looked cockeyed from the start. Yet when the logic self-destructed in practice, conservatives were remarkably content, since they had delivered the boodle to the right clients. After my notorious account of Reagan’s economic failure, based on my conversations with Stockman, was published in the December 1981 Atlantic Monthly, the Gipper likened me to John Hinckley, the would-be assassin who shot him. So much for Mr. Nice Guy.

Both parties would spend the next twenty years cleaning up after the Gipper’s big mistake. They collaborated in an ongoing politics of bait and switch–raising taxes massively on working people through the Social Security payroll tax while continuing to cut taxes for the more affluent and to whittle down government aid for anyone else. The Gipper had taught Washington an important new technique for governing–how to fog regressive tax cuts past the general public without arousing voter retribution (the media can be counted on to assist). The trickery continues to succeed. Pre-Reagan politics used to address various economic inequities. The great injustice confronted by George W. Bush was the estate tax on millionaires.

Reagan’s stubborn optimism did refresh the national spirit, no question, and it certainly powered his political successes. He gave us a television-era remake of Warren Harding’s “return to normalcy.” But in hindsight, I have come to think that the illusions fostered by his sunny messages perhaps did the gravest economic damage. Things were not normal, they were deteriorating and leading toward a chasm of growing inequalities. The rending of the American middle class, the stagnation of industrial wages, the relentless loss of US manufacturing–these great wounds to general prosperity were all visible during the Reagan era, but instead of addressing them honestly, his policies further aggravated the consequences. The Gipper insisted, no doubt sincerely, that it was “morning again in America.” People wanted to believe this, and politicians of both parties learned from his cue–wave the flag and avoid bad news. Ronald Reagan launched the great era of false triumphalism that continues to this day among American leaders. The current generation lacks his charm and is therefore less successful at hiding the truth.

WALL STREET JOURNAL

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

The Reagan Restoration
We forget how controversial his policies were in their day.

Monday, June 7, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

A striking fact about Ronald Reagan is that nearly a generation after he left the Presidency so many people still don’t comprehend the reasons for his success. The eulogies over this past weekend have stressed his many personal virtues: his fundamental good nature, his humor and optimism, his courage in coping with Alzheimer’s, and his skills as the “great communicator.”

These were all essential to the man and to his achievement, but they were not sufficient. Mr. Reagan was the most consequential President since FDR because of his ideas. His Presidency was at root about returning a country that was heading toward decline back to its founding principles of individual liberty and responsibility. At the time it was called a “revolution” but his era is better understood as a restoration.

Two days after his momentous election in November 1980, we wrote in these columns that Mr. Reagan “offers a foreign policy based on re-armament and an economic policy built by taking tax cuts first and making the rest of it fit.” If Mr. Reagan proceeded to give these principles clear legislative and administrative expression, we concluded, “we will look back on this election as the start of a new era for this nation and the world.”

Today we can see that that is precisely what his Presidency was. Most importantly, he and some fortuitous allies (Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II) rallied the West to renew its moral and military challenge to Communism and to win the Cold War. It is common now to speak of “the fall” of the Berlin Wall. But it did not fall on its own. It was pulled down–literally by the Germans on both sides, metaphorically by Mr. Reagan, who had chipped away at its moral and political foundation. And it did not occur without bloodshed.

The 1989 liberation of Eastern Europe was preceded by a host of actions designed to show American resolve: arms (including Stinger missiles) for the Afghan resistance, support for Latin American regimes faced with Communist insurgencies, the shooting down of two Libyan jets, the invasion of Grenada, the pursuit of missile defenses, the willingness to walk away at Reykjavik and at other times from an arms control process that had become an article of blind faith among U.S. elites, and above all his willingness to call the Soviet Union what it was–an “evil empire.”

One Reagan paradox is that although he was our oldest President he saw further ahead than most others. It was Mr. Reagan himself, and not the CIA, who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. As early as 1981, in his famous speech at Notre Dame, he called Communism “a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.” A year later he told the British House of Commons that “the march of freedom” and democracy “will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.” And in 1988, after Mikhail Gorbachev had conceded Soviet weakness by initiating perestroika, Mr. Reagan described for students at Moscow University the link between the microchip and expanding human freedom.

While less historically dramatic, Mr. Reagan’s domestic achievements were every bit as important to American revival. His agenda of tax cuts and deregulation ignited the boom that restored U.S. confidence and also forced Soviet leaders to confront the reality of their own weakness. By 1990 the U.S. economy had grown by a third, or roughly the size of Germany. The troubled economy of the 1970s would never have been able to finance the military buildup that helped to break Communism’s back.

Mr. Reagan’s economic policies get less credit than they deserve because of the budget deficits and the 1982 recession. In that year the Washington Post gleefully summed up the liberal consensus that “Reaganomics is now a grand failure for all to see.” But two decades later Mr. Reagan looks better than his critics on both points. The recession resulted from delaying the impact of the tax cuts until January 1, 1983, and from tighter monetary policy to break the back of inflation.

Mr. Reagan’s unique contribution was to stick to his economic program, and to support Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, in the face of enormous political pressure to turn tail on both. Growth resumed as he expected, and tax revenues actually increased faster than GDP from the low point in 1983 through 1989. As for the deficits, they did finally vanish once defense spending fell after the Cold War ended and a GOP Congress slowed the growth in other spending for at least a couple of years in the mid-1990s.

Prosperity has since helped us forget just how controversial Mr. Reagan’s policies were. Though there was strong precedent for the Reagan cuts (both JFK in the 1960s and Andrew Mellon in the 1920s had cut taxes to great effect), in 1980 they required considerable courage. Many of his own advisers–James Baker, Richard Darman, David Stockman–urged Mr. Reagan to bend. It’s notable that both Messrs. Baker and Stockman now concede that their former boss was right.

In the broader historical sweep, the Reagan tax cuts saved America from following Western Europe into welfare-state decline. In addition to igniting growth, his tax cuts put a brake on the expansion of government that had seemed unstoppable. Their success also sent a lesson to the world about the utility of free-market policies. Leaders everywhere, especially in China and now even India, have had to confront the example of American growth and free-market vitality.

When Mr. Reagan took office, the top marginal U.S. tax rate was 70%. When he left the top rate was 28%; it is now 35%, and even John Kerry has conceded with his proposal to cut some corporate taxes that the marginal rate of tax matters. Today Americans may disagree about what tax cuts are needed, how deep they should go, and what they ought to target. But the debate itself reflects Mr. Reagan’s central premise: that people respond to incentives, and that high taxes interfere with natural human creativity and drive.

Like all consequential Presidents, Mr. Reagan influenced a generation of followers in both political parties. In the GOP, his acolytes were the candidates who finally took Congress in 1994. As for Democrats, his success forced them to move right to regain power. Bill Clinton’s “New Democrat” agenda consolidated many of Mr. Reagan’s domestic gains, most notably on welfare reform and crime. When Mr. Reagan first proposed a work requirement for welfare recipients, he was roundly denounced as cruel and inhuman. By the time Mr. Clinton signed the reform in 1996, welfare without work was understood to rob the poor of their dignity.

Mr. Reagan himself always conceded that all of this was not merely the work of one man. The conservative ideas he brought from California to Washington had been percolating in think tanks and books for more than a generation. He rode the wind of a political movement that had begun in the 1960s with Barry Goldwater. And he came to power at a time when liberalism, the reigning political creed since FDR, was morally and intellectually spent.

But it is here where Mr. Reagan’s personal qualities contributed so decisively to his historical success. The TV encomiums this weekend portray Mr. Reagan as a kindly old grandpa not paying too much attention to an America he could see only through rose-colored lenses. In reality it was a bitter fight for every inch of progress. In his 1980 campaign, candidate Reagan did not shy away from unpleasant facts about American life. To the contrary, Mr. Reagan’s optimism was lined with steel. Some of the same commentators now praising him spent his entire Presidency assailing his policies.

Mr. Reagan’s sunny fortitude sometimes discomfited his friends as much as it did his enemies. Pre-Reagan, 20th-century American conservatism had been tinged with gloominess: Western civilization was in decline and the road to serfdom was inevitable. Mr. Reagan never signed on. Unlike some on the right (and almost all on the left), he had a deeper faith both in American principles and in a human nature that owed itself to a Divine hand that had made men free and made America to prove it.

This was the same vision that animated John Winthrop in 1630 as he beheld the New World from the tiny deck of the Arabella and dreamed of a shining “city upon a hill.” No wonder this was one of Mr. Reagan’s favorite images and became one of his Presidency’s signature lines. More than any President since Lincoln, Mr. Reagan embodied the exceptionalism that is an essential part of the American character and continues to motivate our politics.

This confidence in American purposes made it impossible for Mr. Reagan’s liberal critics to persuade the American people that he was the crazy right-wing cowboy of their descriptions. Having failed at that, his critics settled on the line that the Gipper was nothing but a Grade B movie actor. It was an oddly inconsistent theme, for the same people who dismissed Mr. Reagan’s Hollywood career attributed his popularity to what they supposed were his extraordinary acting abilities. The implication here was the P.T. Barnum notion that America was a country of fools. Today we see some of the same condescension in elite attitudes toward “red state” voters.

No doubt Mr. Reagan learned much about enhancing the dramatic moment from his days on the Warner Brothers lot. But the feature that truly distinguished Ronald Reagan was that he meant what he said. He communicated this to the Soviets early on, when in one of the first challenges of his Administration he fired all the country’s air-traffic controllers who had defied him by going on strike. As the crabbed old men in the Kremlin realized, there was a difference between this politician and all the others.

This one wasn’t acting.

RONALD REAGAN: THE WIZARD OF THE AMERICAN ID

(from Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s, pp . 338-347)

Ronald Reagan was the central figure of the 1980s, and of America’s restoration. Politically and culturally he dominated, and defined, the times. As the first president from suburbia, and presiding over an increasingly suburban nation, he epitomized and perpetuated many suburban values, ministering to a nation of individuals who were increasingly withdrawn into their little warrens and petty concerns. Ideologically, Reagan’s conservatism galvanized the country, shifting American attitudes and triggering a decades-long debate about the role of government, the strengths of capitalism, the meaning of morality, and the limits of individual compassion and charity. Tactically, his media savvy mastered and promoted the brave new media universe that was emerging. Culturally, he epitomized an odd synthesis that occurred between the ideals of the 1960s and the ambitions of the 1980s. He and his “revolution” did not repudiate as many social, political, and cultural trends as he intended. Reagan after all was the first divorced president, perhaps the first president to host a gay couple overnight in the Executive Mansion when his wife’s interior decorator slept over, and the father of a quarreling clan whose members, at various moments, did drugs, “shacked up,” and married multiple times. In fact, part of Reagan’s success stemmed from his ability to help Americans incorporate some of these changes into their lives, albeit sometimes unconsciously.

Perhaps Reagan’s greatest asset – and his greatest gift to Americans – was his optimism. His faith in America and in the future was contagious, and a welcome corrective to the traumatic Nixon years, the drifting Ford years, the despairing Carter years. His can-do optimism, his sense of America as a shining “city set upon a hill,” tapped into one of the nation’s most enduring character traits.  Americans wanted an Era of Good Feelings, and they got it.  Ironically, even as Reagan seemed to be repudiating the greatest legacies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, Reagan’s have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too politics echoed theirs. Like Reagan, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson all sought to conjure up a democratic Eden painlessly, with no tradeoffs. Neither the great conservative president of the 1980s nor the great liberal presidents who preceded him really demanded that Americans solve social problems through individual or collective sacrifice.

Paradoxically, Ronald Reagan’s odes to an older, simpler, more idealistic, more community-oriented America, helped spawn a new, sprawling, often selfish, deeply individualistic society. In reinvigorating American capitalism, Reagan helped unleash the American id. Many of the forces that triggered the boom to which Reagan claimed bragging rights were social solvents. Consumerism, materialism, individualism, entrepreneurship, the anti-government backlash, the information age, capitalism itself, the end of the Cold War, all helped dissolve traditional ties and certainly fostered an American hedonism. But all these centrifugal forces made Ronald Reagan’s centripetal force – his celebrity, his patriotism, his communal vision for modern America, in short his narrative – all the more important, then and now.

Whether spurring Americans to believe in themselves, their economy and their system again, elevating the liberation of tiny Grenada into the Greatest American Victory since Iwo Jima, or consoling Americans after the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, Reagan’s siren song of confidence and faith soothed Americans. It returned Americans to their basic political and cultural instincts, unleashing creativity and confidence, as well as the hedonism and selfishness that became so typical of the 1980s.

Thinking of Reagan as the Wizard of the American Id also helps explain why so many movement conservatives were so frustrated with him. His synthesis of Hollywood imagineering and Keynesian have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too-ism precluded the kind of moral crusade conservatives demanded to “take back” America. Reagan would not fight the hard fight on the conservatives’ “abc” agenda of abortion, busing, crime. As a result, many of the reforms and revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s ended up legitimized. At the same time, Reagan’s Dr. Feel Good approach frustrated the Democrats — and it is hard not to see Jimmy Carter in 1980 or Walter Mondale in 1984 as appealing to the national superego, while Reagan merrily appealed to the id. This idea also explains the great mystery of the Reagan years, of how, as a leader, his whole was greater than the sum of his parts, as one memo put it, how he remained personally more popular than his policies.

The Reagan celebration of American hedonism did not end with politics — it was also influential culturally. The great reconciliation, whereby the hippie elite and ethos matured into the Yuppie elite and ethos, was Reaganite. Consumerism, careerism, materialism, flashy designs spread as Reaganism set a social, cultural, and stylistic tone too. Reaganism helped make politics an extension of entertainment for a society already “immersed” in entertainment, with a people pursuing “pleasure first and fast,” in the words of the cultural critic Jacques Barzun.  Ironically, by releasing the American id, this conservative, who was calling, at least rhetorically, for a return to tradition, shaped an era whose cultural sensibility was shaped by Madonna and Michael Jackson, the man-child, rather than the more traditional Madonna and child.

Finally, one could also characterize the defining approach of Reaganite foreign policy as “egoistic.”  Reagan gleefully quoted his UN Ambassador Jeane Kirpatrick’s claim that in the 1980s America removed the “kick-me” sign on its back. Reagan’s approach to the Soviet Union, to Central America, the way he and his staff circumvented normal channels in Iran-contra, all speak to a national egoism, which many Americans found inspiring, and so many foreigners found exasperating. From the seeds of small symbolic actions such as Ronald Reagan’s insistence on lecturing his colleagues about freedom at the 1981 Cancun Summit to his proactive approach to the Soviets a new, less ambivalent American superpower emerged, best exemplified by George W. Bush’s with-us-or-against-us proactive approach to terrorism.

REAGAN’S THREE PROMISES: A SCORECARD

Regarding foreign policy, it is too facile to rely – as so many do – on the idea of Reagan’s “dumb luck.”  True, Reaganite foreign policy was a march of folly replete with an often disengaged president, warring advisers, poorly planned summits, and absurdly priced Pentagon gadgets. The murder of 241 marines in Lebanon went unavenged. The president of the United States tested his microphone by joking about bombing the Soviet Union. Reagan and his advisers celebrated the liberation of Grenada as if it balanced out the loss in Vietnam. And the tragic-comedy of Iran-contra made the United States — and its president — a laughingstock.

Yet, today, compared to George H.W. Bush’s dithering about the collapse of Communism, and Bill Clinton’s congenital waffling about almost everything, Reagan’s foreign policy course appears more resolute — and quite triumphal. Under Reagan’s reign, the United States effectively won the Cold War and experienced a resurgence of national pride. A decade-and-a-half after Ronald Reagan’s retirement, the United States is the world’s sole superpower. Twenty years after Reagan outraged liberals by squarely labelling the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire,” millions are freed:  the Iron Curtain is down, Germany is reunited, Eastern Europe is liberated, and even Nicaragua’s Sandanistas have been voted into retirement.

True, Mikhail Gorbachev was a blessing from heaven – more accurately, an astonishing ray of light emanating from the putrefying Soviet Communist system. But Reagan’s excessively personal approach to world affairs helped forge a warm bond with the Soviet reformer, and Reagan’s embrace buttressed, legitimized, and helped further the Gorbachev revolution. Reagan’s mix of sabre-rattling and pacifism worked. His naive faith in Star Wars terrified and helped bankrupt the Soviets; his aversion to the experts’ doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction motivated him to nurture his rapport with Gorbachev — and match the Soviet leader’s boldness. Clearly, it takes great skill to turn good luck into lasting good fortune.

At the same time, Reagan shares culpability with all the presidents from Jimmy Carter through the pre-September 11^th George W. Bush, for allowing the cancer of Islamicist terrorism to fester unchecked. And it is simplistic to say that Reagan won the Cold War singlehandedly. The Cold war victory was a joint achievement of all the presidents from Harry Truman through George Bush. It is a tribute to the bipartisan consensus that kept American strong but not too aggressive in the face of Communism.

In addition to defending America to defeat Communism, Reagan wanted to deregulate, and he wanted to cut the marginal tax rate. Both initiatives were rooted in the 1970s – deregulation began under Carter, and the tax revolt had spread in many states without Reagan’s involvement. Reagan’s victory raised expectations regarding this broad-based assault on the “Nanny State” – and achieved mixed results.  At most, Reagan slowed the growth of big government. He was too pragmatic, and too weak, to do much more. The Democratic Congress and the characteristic incrementalism of the American political system shackled Reagan.  He shifted course by a few degrees, but did not succeed in veering right overnight. It took time for the Reagan revolution to restrain the courts, weaken the bureaucracy, reorient the body politic. Yet, by the 1990s, even under a Democratic administration, America seemed further away from the Great Society than it did at the end of Reagan’s reign. And it was Reagan’s appointments that revolutionized the judiciary; it was Reagan’s small-government rhetoric along with his astronomical deficits that kept Americans budget conscious. The deregulation was slower and less systematic than he would have liked, the tax cuts came with a host of “user fees,” and the resulting “pride” also had an overlay of cynicism. Still, it was an impressive tribute to one man’s unrelenting focus amid the hurly burly of the presidency.

At Ronald Reagan’s funeral, the tableau of presidential and vice presidential couples captured the generational politics that defined the last quarter of the twentieth century, as well as the ideals of civility and unity Reagan championed. The elder George Bushes, the Jimmy Carters, the Gerald Fords, were all seated in one row. All veterans of World War II, part of the “Greatest Generation” that also included John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, each of the three ex-Presidents had fought Reagan politically —  Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, George Bush for the nomination in 1980, and Jimmy Carter for the presidency in 1980. The youngsters in the front row, the George W. Bushes, the Dick Cheneys, the Bill Clintons, had also fought Reagan, albeit less directly: the junior President Bush had commiserated with his father during the elder Bush’s frustrating vice-presidential years, Dick Cheney had been Ford’s Chief of Staff during the 1976 nomination fight, and Bill Clinton had launched his winning 1992 campaign by denouncing Reaganism. Still, all gathered to mourn Reagan’s death, and celebrate his life.

The three thousand mourners in the National Cathedral, the handful of participants in the service, the hundreds gathered for the California burial, together painted a pointillist portrait of Reagan’s era – and testified to many of the changes he helped trigger. When Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was an unknown Arizona lawyer not yet called to become the first female Supreme Court judge; Rabbi Harold Kushner was a grieving Massachusetts Rabbi just about to publish “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” Brian Mulroney was running the Iron Ore Company in Quebec, two years away from even being elected to Parliament. Margaret Thatcher, however, was already advancing her own Reaganesque revolution” as British Prime Minister. Among the Washington guests, in 1981, Natan Sharansky, now an Israeli Cabinet member, was still Anatoly Sharansky, and imprisoned in the gulag, Mikhail Gorbachev was a Soviet apparatchik with the Agriculture portfolio, Lech Walesa was a union activist, with both years of arrests, and years as Poland’s President, ahead. At the time, Colin Powell was an unknown soldier, Peggy Noonan was a ghostwriter – for Dan Rather, and among the California mourners, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a body-builder just breaking into acting. Ronald Reagan and the Reagan idea shaped all these lives, directly and indirectly.

THE “SMITHS”: WEALTHIER, SAFER BUT ANXIOUS TOO

To revisit our fictional couple, the Smiths, from the introduction, 1990 would find them older, wealthier, more politically disillusioned, more wired into media mores and celebrity talk, and more complacent. Thickened a bit by aging, but still well-toned, thanks to their personal trainer – a 1980s invention — they would now be busily juggling the demands of two careers and two children – who eventually arrived after a tense stretch of infertility remedied by Clomid, the pregnancy wonder drug for thirtysomethings trying to start a family after years of relying on “The Pill” to avoid such a fate. Mr. Smith’s sideburns had receded along with his hairline; thanks to her $125-a-shot stylist, Mrs. Smith’s hair color was richer and shinier than ever.

The Smiths had traded up from their 1950s starter house in a suburb just bordering the city to a new, larger home an hour from downtown. Situated in a gated community providing tennis courts, a swimming pool, and 24-hour security, they lived in what would soon be called a “McMansion.” The sprawling, two-story home had a great room grander than their grandparents’ formal “parlors” or their parents’ cozy dens, a marble bathroom in the bedroom suite, and a huge, sun-splashed, chrome-filled kitchen with an “island” for chopping and cooking. In the 1987 stock market crash they lost “more money than I ever thought I’d have,” Mrs. Smith said, but they sustained only paper losses and had since partially recovered. Their stock portfolio, mutual funds and 401ks were still much higher than they had been in 1980, and were still climbing.   Every year at tax time, the Smiths felt a bit embarrassed by how much money they spent running a household, shopping, eating out in restaurants, maintaining the Honda Accord and the Dodge minivan – they had just bought American for the first time in years, thanks to the car-like trucks which debuted in 1983, and which, when they bought in 1987, now had V-6 engines for easy acceleration.  And even as they noticed the increasing outflow every year, all their costs seemed fixed. As with the federal budget, somehow there did not seem to be much room for cutting.

Most of their friends had married, a few already twice, but two seemed to be perpetually single – both women. Both resolutely career women, they tried to laugh off the ridiculous headlines shouting that they had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than actually getting married. One gay male friend was HIV-positive, optimistically following a daily regimen of multiple drug doses, blessed by the miraculous “AIDS cocktail.”  The Eighties boom had been good to the Smiths’ social circle. One lawyer friend earned a six-figure salary practicing entertainment law in New York for a few years, then joined the march of the committed conservatives into Ed Meese’s Justice Department in Washington, D.C.  – and settled permanently in the Maryland suburbs of the nation’s capital. Another stayed with his family’s real estate business, helping it grow from a thriving concern into an empire. A third, went the corporate route, earning a high salary, while suffering repeated career disruptions as mergers, consolidations, and downsizing buffeted her from place to place, from lucrative buyout to lucrative buyout. A fourth earned such high bonuses trading bonds on Wall Street that he retired with a multi-million-dollar stock portfolio at 39. Their lawyer friends and doctor friends, their entrepreneurial friends and their corporate friends, mostly floated to the top of Reagan’s money-making pyramid. Only their most idealistic and intellectual friends languished financially. Their social worker and professor friends watched the Great Inflation of the 1970s make the basics of an upper-middle class life unaffordable, without being able to benefit from the 1980s boom – unless their parents’ nest-eggs had grown sufficiently. In addition to their other collective traits, the baby boomers were emerging as the greatest heirs in history, awaiting — sometimes patiently, sometimes less so — the largest transfer of wealth ever from their parents.

The Smiths’ children, though cute, and very well-dressed, seemed more precocious, more worldly, and less disciplined than they remembered themselves being. But the family had just returned from a week-long jaunt to Disney World in Orlando, visiting the new EPCOT Center as well as the Magic Kingdom. The trip had gone smoothly, even with the undocumented Guatemalan nanny staying home.

Like so many Americans, the Smiths still had fond feelings for Ronald Reagan. They could still remember some stirring moments from his presidency, although they worried that too many important issues had been neglected on his watch. They liked George Bush’s “kinder, gentler” rhetoric but somehow were less enthusiastic about this administration. While they had not quite soured on politics, both were much less engaged. When reading the newspaper, Mr. Smith spent that much more time poring over the Business page, Mrs. Smith spent some extra time with the Style section, and both guiltily noticed that they read the “People” column in the Entertainment section a bit too carefully. With a mix of pride and shame, they noted how fluently they could speak about Michael Jackson’s latest look/ HUE or Madonna’s latest beau. In fact, each monitored Leona Helmsley’s tax troubles and the allegations that the Menendez brothers killed their father at their Beverly Hills home more closely on CNN than they had the Tiananmen Square crisis or the Berlin Wall’s fall.

Although Mr. and Mrs. Smith had an all-white social circle, they had some black colleagues at work. Neither could say “African American” without feeling self-conscious. Similarly, at work both said they supported affirmative action, and each had undergone “diversity training,” even as they confessed to each other at home that they preferred to hire people based on merit and found themselves resenting the multicultural mantra and the stultifying, increasingly politically correct, atmosphere at work.

But they had not forgotten or repudiated the 1960s.  Both told pollsters and friends that they were “pro-environment” and happily recycled newspapers and empty bottles – although neither would consider serious lifestyle adjustments such as giving up one car. Similarly, when the subject arose, Mrs. Smith still professed to be a feminist, and would defend feminism passionately when her husband or another man attacked the “movement.”  But her Ms. subscription had lapsed, and her enthusiasm had stilled. Both had duly signed petitions to oppose the expansion of a garbage dump in the neighboring township, but neither could get that enthusiastic about plunging into the campaign to protect their prerogatives. More globally, both were pleasantly surprised by the fall of Communism, with Mr. Smith giving Reagan more credit and Mrs. Smith crediting Gorbachev mostly.

And yet, both worried about the state of the world – and the country.  Both admitted that they never imagined in January 1981 that they would be living in such splendor or that the Soviet Union would be no more and the Eastern European states would be free. But they rarely ventured downtown anymore because they feared taking a wrong turn and ending up in the wrong neighborhood, as they had read in Bonfire of the Vanities. Both felt pressure to work hard and keep the cash flowing; neither had time to relax during the week. Both hated what their neighbors’ teenage kids looked like and listened to – with the boys slouching and dressing like ghetto gangsters and the girls revealing too much flesh and makeup. They also felt isolated. They socialized infrequently and disliked the rampant selfishness and “NIMBY” approach to politics in their town, even as they occasionally indulged in it.

When Frederick Lewis Allen conjured up the fictional Smiths in the 1930s, he instinctively made them upper-middle-class WASPs. To call such a couple “typical” in the 1980s was less obvious – and more controversial. Nevertheless, this sketch suggests trends and attitudes that reflected in millions of American lives.

REAGAN AS HISTORIAN AS WELL AS HISTORICAL FIGURE

Ronald Reagan needs to be appreciated as historian as well as history-maker. Reagan’s “Morning in America” resurrected pride in the past and faith in the future as well as confidence in the present. This simple, red, white, and blue, Glory, Glory Hallelujah reading of history delighted many Americans – especially when professional historians were painting a more complex, more critical, and less popular picture of America.

Reagan’s affirmative vision and definitive rhetoric continue to invite caricature. Consensus-oriented triumphalists from the Right use Reagan to celebrate America’s achievements and continuing promise, while conflict-obsessed critics from the Left use Reagan to berate America’s failures and myopic denial. In fact, studying Reagan and Reaganism requires a more synthetic, less politicized approach. American history combines pragmatism and idealism, selfishness and altruism, crassness and nobility, individualism and nationalism, populism and progressivism. The people of plenty have been lovers of liberty. It is a mistake to overlook either the flinty-eyed materialism or the misty-eyed high-mindedness.

Reagan and Reaganism left the country with a mixed legacy. At its best, Reaganism helped restore an idealism and entrepreneurial can-do-ism central to the American spirit. At its worst, Reaganism perpetuated self-righteousness mixed with selfishness. Like it or hate it, like him or hate him, nearly twenty-five years after the Reagan inauguration, Ronald Reagan’s legacy continues to define his country; he remains the greatest president since Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan saved the presidency from irrelevance, showing that the ability to shift the national conversation and set the national tone was in and of itself a valuable asset and a significant role, even at a time of increasingly sclerotic government.

Ronald Reagan’s influence continues because in so many ways, whatever his shortcomings and flaws, the vision he projected of himself was the vision of themselves most Americans wanted to see. Only by having such utter and complete faith in American ideals of freedom and democracy, has the United States been able to accomplish so much. Only by keeping such faith – tempered with just a bit of modesty and realism – will the United States continue to grow and to lead.

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