Amnesia Addendum

The forgetting continues, willfully and in force. I don't begrudge Reagan's admirers their desire to eulogize the man, but I find it disturbing when the tributes distort and selectively ignore his record or misrepresent his critics. The former is at least understandable under the seductive logic of not speaking ill of the dead; the latter has no excuse.

I hadn't intended to respond to any specific comments, but then J.W. Hastings directed me to this Tim Hulsey piece on Reagan:

[...] he advocated nothing so strongly as the individual's right, regardless of class or caste, to determine his or her destiny.

Unless that individual happened to be HIV-positive, or in need of an abortion, or an actor whose politics he disliked and whose blacklisting he supported, or a Central American villager or priest or a visiting American writer or labor consultant or nun who happened to run afoul of the "freedom fighters" he supported.

The list goes on, but we don't even need to look to these crucial gaps between advocacy and practice to disagree with Hulsey's statement. Hulsey deploys it in service of the myth that conservatives destroy hierarchy and elitism, when, in fact, their twenty-four-year ascendancy has produced a reconcentration of wealth and power among the elites to levels not seen since the 1920s. It's that larger myth, disproven by their own record, that has made conservatives so powerful, and that's where any challenge to their rhetoric ought to begin.

Other tributes seize on Reagan's death as an occasion to make some political hay against his opponents, like this comment from J.W.:

I don’t have too much to say about Reagan’s detractors, either [...] However, I do have to shake my head when people who give lip service to ideas like freedom, democracy, and individual liberty refuse to celebrate the achievements of a man who was instrumental in bringing about the downfall of what was perhaps the 20th Cnetury’s most horrible totalitarian empire. Too many people have bought into the intellectual fraud that Soviet Communism and American liberal-democratic capitalism were moral equivalents.

I might have more sympathy for a criticism that wasn't so dependent on misrepresenting its objects of critique.

The deck-stacking begins with J.W.'s identification of Reagan's detractors. Anyone who criticizes Reagan's record is, apparently, someone who only pays "lip service" to freedom, democracy, and individual liberty; those beliefs are presumably reserved for conservatives. The next sentence commits a deeply fraudulent elision, informing us that "Too many people" viewed Soviet communism and American democratic capitalism as moral equivalents, as if these people were somehow congruent with the subjects of the previous sentences ("Reagan's detractors"), and as if the only reason one could possibly dislike Reagan is the sinister belief in "moral equivalence" that so many conservatives would like to imagine burrows through everyone not of their ideology.

J.W., you might consider that it's precisely a belief in absolute morality, a belief in the absolute immorality of certain of the late President's actions, and a belief in freedom, democracy, and liberty extending far beyond mere lip service, that leads so many people, like me, to criticize Reagan for his administration's frightful abuses of Presidential power, Constitutional law, and basic human rights.

Comments

[Chad]

What amazes me is that a few times I heard pundits (outside of FOX News, no less) try to push the idea that Reagan left office with the highest approval rating of any president in history, something that can be objectively proven false.

[JJMcC]

As another quick addenda, I found myself wryly
amused over the weekend when NPR ran a piece
challenging the rhetorical record with the historical one. In particular, it seemed to cite many of the examples alluded to here and documented elsewhere. And I heard it here first!

At least, so concisely enumerated. I mean I was FEELING it earlier...so to speak.

[David Van Domelen]

"Hagiography" is a term that really should be brought into common discourse, as you're rarely going to see such a clear example of that process in action as you will with RWR RIP.

[Tim Hulsey]

True, Reagan opposed abortion, but I don't see how that contradicts the idea that he supported individual liberty. Reagan included fetuses under the definition of "individual" -- an intellectually valid and defensible position, albeit one with which I happen to disagree.

Reagan wasn't anti-Gay, either, as anyone who examines his record in California can plainly see. Quite a few people linked to his administration were homophobic, and perhaps Reagan should have denounced them. Perhaps he should also have mentioned AIDS as a national policy issue prior to '85, though by then the federal government had allocated several billion dollars for research and treatment. It's difficult to see what else could have been done.

As for wealth and power, it's true that the rich got richer under the Reagan administration. But we tend to forget that the poor got richer, too -- not just in terms of jobs and wages, but in terms of their buying power as well. Small-time farmers didn't fare so well in this new economy, of course: Low food prices led to the consolidation of family farms. I guess you could say Reagan didn't do well by them.

[Marc]

I wrote that Reagan's ostensible fealty to individual self-determination broke down if you were "HIV-positive," not "gay" - two very different categories, obviously! - for precisely the reason you cite, Tim. Although I'll also note that, while Reagan opposed the California proposition banning gays from teaching, he was perfectly willing to benefit politically from a surging anti-gay (and anti-feminist) backlash in the late 1970s and 1980s.

I also believe the funding Reagan allocated for AIDS in the early eighties was significantly less than what Congress requested, and at any rate it's easy to imagine quite a bit more that he could have done: mentioned AIDS sometime in the four years before it killed one of his personal friends, or not left it up to a conscientious Surgeon General to start advocating protections against it. (I did a bit of research on Reagan's AIDS policy prior to writing this piece, but left out the links and citations as my point was not to attack twenty-year-old policy but to deflate the revisionist canonization. Maybe I'll add them here once I'm back from vacation.)

In any case, these are just a few examples, and we haven't even gotten to the blacklists or death squads yet. My point is that while claiming Reagan as a champion of individual liberty makes for a polite epitaph, one perfectly in keeping with conservative ideology and the man's own carefully crafted image, it doesn't match up with his actions. Your piece suggested that Reagan was, by his very nature as an individualist, opposed to "hierarchy and control"; Ronald Reagan was a friend to both, and to those who wanted to reinstitute some of the most reactionary or brutal hierarchies.