He Won the Cold War

My first memory of Ronald Reagan as politician is of his challenge to Jerry Ford’s renomination in 1976. As a 16-year-old, I rooted for Reagan and then, after Reagan’s defeat, urged my parents to vote against Carter, whose commitment to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea alarmed me. Not many Georgians shared my views, and Carter went on to become one of the most feckless presidents in history. I’ve always wished that Reagan had won the opportunity to oppose Carter then, both to save the country from Carter’s malaise and to allow him to hold office at a younger age – something that might have reduced the loss of momentum that marked his last years in office.

Like many observers, I am struck by the extraordinary praise heaped on Reagan in death by those who, in life, reviled him. I knew he was at death’s door but didn’t hear of his passing until Saturday afternoon when, turning on NPR in the car while running errands, I heard one reliably left-wing reporter after another speak of him in glowing terms. It was almost as if they’d lost a favorite old uncle or grandfather – someone with whom they agreed on little but nonetheless loved. Yet they openly credited him with winning the Cold War, playing again and again his famous speech calling on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.

If the left’s principal attacks on Reagan during the 1980s were more a reaction to his foreign policy than his domestic plans, and I think they were, then much of this postmortem praise stems from the simple fact that he was right about communism. Not that they embraced his attacks on the welfare state or government regulation – he was caricatured ad nauseum as heartless and uncaring. But the Cold War overshadowed those days to an extent that many have forgotten. It provided an opportunity, perhaps an obligation, to see the world as it was in clear, stark light. One system was, as Reagan said, based on evil: oppression, labor camps, mass executions. The other was based on hope, liberty, and the prospects for a better future. Reagan knew communism was a failure and said so at every opportunity.

When he called the Soviet Union the “evil empire,” professors swooned, Beltway elites fainted, and the lot of them rolled their eyes at the madman with his finger on the nuclear button. Yet only a few years later, the same gang engaged in posterior-covering as the dust settled from the Wall’s collapse by claiming, ex post facto, that of course everyone’s anti-communist. Humiliated by a plain-spoken populist without a graduate degree, what could they do but pretend to have agreed with that part of his vision all along? While the current campaign shows the reactionary left still has plenty of bile, media elites can’t get away with the type of Reagan-bashing they once employed. The ground has shifted markedly in the ensuing years; history has proved Reagan right, and everyone loves a winner.

All this matters because most people, including most Americans, want to be led, but not abused or condescended to. Ronald Reagan led by word and deed. He looked and talked like those we now call red state Americans because he was one. The crowds loved him because he told them what they knew was true instinctually even though many of them had never articulated it. Like a great novelist who carries along his readers by telling them something they didn’t know they already knew, Reagan tapped into that great center of the American psyche where the “shining city on a hill” isn’t mere metaphor. People wanted to believe him and follow him both because he revealed their own best side and because he was right. Their common sense and memories of wars taught them what intellectuals considered themselves too sophisticated to admit: America really was the home of the free, and it was worthy of our love and defense.

So what’s a member of the elite media to do in the immediate aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s death other than tacitly acknowledge the ground lost in the ensuing years? It’s not only tacky to attack the recently deceased, it’s a fool’s game to say he was wrong about communism. After all, except for those who still take The Nation and Eric Hobsbawm seriously, who’s left to disagree? It’s another matter to consider the strategies Reagan advocated to defeat communism on a worldwide basis, not to mention his faith in the innate decency of the American people and the domestic policies he advocated. But that’s another essay.