Adios to the Gipper

Republicans leave Reagan behind

I received a message from a reporter who wanted to know why Republicans had stopped invoking the name of Ronald Reagan. My initial response was to question his premise. Did he have evidence that Republicans these days mention Reagan less often than they used to? He acknowledged that he was speaking anecdotally. I accepted that explanation as the basis for continuing the conversation.

The first reason I suggested for the loss of the Reagan connection among Republicans was simply the passage of time. Reagan left office thirty-five years ago. So unless you were politically precocious, if you’re under fifty you don't have any active memory of his presidency. The Republicans who thrilled at Reagan's first inaugural address, in which he said that government is not the solution to our problems but the problem itself, are in their sixties and beyond. Time passes; new figures replace the old in public memory.

A second reason, more to the point of the reporter's question, I think, involves the recent domination of Republican politics by Donald Trump. For his most ardent supporters, the Republican party has become a cult of personality. They support what Trump supports and they oppose what Trump opposes. In personality cults there's room for only one personality. In the past the hero was Reagan; at present it's Trump.

A third reason reflects the changing nature of American politics. Until the 1960s, both the Democratic and Republican parties were coalitions of liberals and conservatives. The Democrats were mostly liberals but included some conservatives. The Republicans were mostly conservative but included some liberals. The mixing was a legacy of the Civil War, which made Democrats of nearly all white Southerners, mostly conservatives. The civil rights revolution of the 1960s triggered a mass migration of Southern conservatives out of the Democratic party and into the Republican.

Reagan became president when the migration was about half completed. This meant that a conservative president, Reagan, could find conservative Democrats to make common cause with on legislation. All the major reforms of his presidency—on taxes, immigration, Social Security, defense—were passed with significant Democratic support.

The migration continued after Reagan left office. It ended by the beginning of this century. Since then, there has been essentially no overlap between Republicans and Democrats on philosophy of governance. Republicans don't cooperate with Democratic presidents; Democrats don't cooperate with Republican presidents. There's no room for the pragmatic compromises that were Reagan's modus operandi. The rare members of Congress who reach across the aisle are invariably punished in the next primary election and are never heard from again.

A fourth reason for Reagan's irrelevance to today's Republicans is their abandonment of the causes he held dear. Two related principles guided everything Reagan did. He sought to defeat big government at home and vanquish communism abroad. The former required deregulation and spending cuts; the latter required stout opposition to Russia. Reagan made more progress on deregulation than on spending cuts, but he was singularly successful in driving the Russian empire to the brink of collapse. Today's Republicans pay mostly lip service to deregulation and spending; they focus instead on social issues that Reagan largely ignored. Following Trump’s lead, they demonstrate broad tolerance for bad behavior by Russia.

A fifth reason, perhaps the most important emotionally and psychologically, follows from Reagan's understanding of government. Speaking at that 1981 inauguration, he said that “in this present crisis,” government was the problem. He did not say that government was always the problem. And he never said or thought that democratic government was the enemy. Yet those who came after him, starting with Newt Gingrich in the 1990s and continuing through Donald Trump today, treat government as the enemy of the American people. They take pleasure in sabotaging government and undermining popular confidence in American democracy.

This reflects a sixth and final reason Reagan isn’t mentioned much today. Reagan was an irrepressible optimist when it came to America and its future. The smile on his face in every speech came partly from his training as an actor; no one has known better than Reagan how to perform the presidency. Yet it also revealed his abiding faith in America's future—and the world’s. “I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph,” he said in words that became his epitaph.

Today's Republicans manifest no such faith. Trump's characteristic expression is a glower or a sneer, and his followers glower and sneer with him. Almost every populist movement, including Trump's, is motivated by anger. Reagan was no populist, and anger was not part of his political repertoire.

Republicans today are smart to ignore him. He makes them look bad.