Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 19801989 (Crown Forum, 2009).
What are we to think of Ronald Reagan today? What are we to think of Steven
Hayward’s treatment of Reagan? First to the easy question. Hayward’s two volume set
on Reagan has the ambition to match Arthur Schlesinger’s three volume Age of
Roosevelt, as the titles and subtitles make clear. A fair-minded comparison of the two
works reveals the deficiencies in Schlesinger’s magisterial narrative. If the Great
Depression was a crisis having its origins in economics and if FDR’s task, as he set it for
himself, was to help to solve the crisis, a historian of FDR must be grounded in economic
realities—their soundness and unsoundness, their effectiveness and ineffectiveness.
Schlesinger, however, confesses to incompetence on economic questions. Schlesinger
writes in his autobiography that he “was not much interested in economics,” though
readers of his Age of Roosevelt already knew that. His faith in central planning is
embarrassing in retrospect, the economic equivalent of believing in going to a barber
when one is sick.
Hayward does not suffer from the same deficiencies, and he spends much of volume one
of the Age of Reagan explaining the depths of the mess as Reagan would face it upon
ascending to the presidency in 1981. Age of Reagan I is an amazing achievement,
especially when read in light of Progressive theory. It shows how the Progressive theory
works out in practice, and the results were not pretty. The problem was both political and
economic. The rise of the administrative state led to an attempt to control and regulate
the economy, and the result was stagflation; an over-regulated economy; steep,
productivity-inhibiting levels of taxation; and a government that consumed ever-greater
levels of national wealth. Foreign policy détente, a policy of co-existence with the
Soviets and an attempt to take morality out of the battle of ideas with communism,
seemed bankrupt, and the Soviets were seemingly on the march from Nicaragua to
Afghanistan to Yemen and other hotspots, where the Soviets seemed to be jumping over
the line of containment. The Vietnam syndrome prevented America from taking forceful
actions in the face of this apparent aggression. Such were the facts on the ground when
Reagan took office.
Age of Reagan II is a terrific read, and Hayward is hardly a Reagan hack in the way
Schlesinger was an FDR hack, nor is Hayward the official historian of the Republican
party as the late Schlesinger was for the Democrats. Hayward provides an account of the
Reagan Presidency’s conflicts—from the fleeting to the profound—that defined his
attempt to respond to the problems of the old liberal order. We see Bob Dole dogging
Reagan’s tax cuts, David Stockman naively stabbing Reagan in the back, George Will
complaining about Reagan going soft on communism, and Ollie North free-lancing
American Middle East and Central American policy. And these were Reagan’s friends!
Reagan’s ostensible enemies—from Tip O’Neil to Ted Kennedy to Hollywood types
outside of government to the Soviet leadership—were not shy in labeling Reagan a
retrograde, a Fascist or worse. All of this is a genuine hoot! Who could not smile at the
comments of Susan Sontag, who, criticizing America’s bourgeois culture wrote: “It is
evident that the Reader’s Digest and Lawrence Welk and Hilton Hotels are organically
connected with the Special Forces napalming villages in Guatemala.” The book is full of
such belly-laugh inducing whoppers. Tip O’Neil told Union members that Reagan’s was
“a callous, right-wing administration committed to repealing the Great Society, the New
Frontier, the Fair Deal, and the New Deal. It has made a target of the politically weak,
the poor, the working people.” Despite all of this and sometimes even because of all of
this, Reagan achieved many of his ambitions as President and left the country better off in
many ways.
This review is not the place to recount how this happened. You should get your hands
around the book. Let us confine ourselves to judging Reagan’s achievement. Having
been a mere pup during the Reagan years, reading this book is a bit like reading New
Deal history for me. I have almost no living recollection of the Reagan years, and this
book has many of the charms of discovery for me. I imagine it will be the same for other
thirty-somethings. I did achieve a level of political consciousness after the Reagan years,
and I have been struck by a singular phenomenon: the transformation of Ronald Reagan
from a politician to a statesman. A politician seems to find his home in the daily giveand-take of politics; he is consumed by the scandals and the gossip of politics. A
statesman sets the context for that give-and-take; he shapes or redefines the environment
he exists in; he sees further and better and, even if this is not seen at the time, his
judgment is akin to that of a prophet—he is vindicated by events and proven right in the
face of inferior visionaries and mere politicians. Such a transformation happens once in a
generation or less (other examples are Lincoln and FDR), and Reagan’s achievements
have become more obvious, more widely praised, and more deeply entrenched as time
goes on.
What are those achievements? Hayward ends the book by relating two quotations from
Reagan’s intellectual supporters, Midge Decter and Gary McDowell. Decter claimed
“there was no Reagan Revolution,” but that the Rageanites left behind “a series of noisy
open debates about nothing less than the meaning of decency, the limits of government,
the salience of race, the nature of criminal behavior.” McDowell similarly contends that
“domestically Ronald Reagan did far less than he had hoped, he did far less than he had
promised, less than people wanted—and a hell of a lot more than people thought he
would.”
Consider these comments in light of Reagan’s six main policy goals: Deregulation;
Taming inflation; Tax-cutting; Restraint on government spending; Ending Communism;
Transforming the judiciary. Only in defeating communism was Reagan wholly
successful and vindicated by events, so now even his critics are neutered or muted.
Defeating communism wasn’t just the work of Reagan, but near the end of the Cold War,
Reagan was almost alone in taking on communism rhetorically, and the Soviets and
Democrats that opposed Reagan now realize that his approach was indispensable.
In other venues, Reagan was less successful or his successes were ambiguous. Take
government spending. On the one hand, Reagan did not rid us of many government
programs and did not restrain the growth of entitlement spending. The absolute size of
the federal government grew tremendously in the Reagan years. On the other hand, the
relative size of the federal government shrank in the Reagan years, from 22.2% of GDP
to 20.3% of GDP. Since shrinking government seems to be beyond his power, Reagan
prudently trimmed, hoping to have government grow at a slower rate than it otherwise
would. Even that ambition proved difficult to achieve. Take taxes. No one would
imagine a return to the 70% marginal rates in taxes or even a 50% marginal rate. We see
the influence of Reagan in Barack Obama, who fears raising taxes to fund his spending.
These aspects of Regan’s legacy are still relevant to today’s debates, and any intelligent
opposition to future extensions of the state will take place within the context that Reagan
helped define. In that way, the Republican Party cannot help but still being the party of
Reagan. No statesman of the last forty years made such profound and sustained,
principled and practical arguments against the extension of government’s reach than
Reagan. That he was not fully successful in achieving these goals is true, but not really
humanly possible for any statesman in our separation of power system or in modern
democracy generally.
In another way, it seems that we cannot help but seeing Reagan as yesterday’s news, or,
rather, the ambitions of Reagan’s enemies have not disappeared. American democracy
has lost its immune system for the temptations of the administrative state, and Reagan,
who nearly alone among presidents in the 20th Century appreciated the Constitution as a
document for limited government, could provide only a temporary anti-biotic for this
problem. The concerns of Reagan are modernity’s concerns and it takes a mighty
educational effort to appreciate and sustain limited government. Where will that
education come from? Where is it sustained? How are defenders of limited government
to approach the modern administrative state? Which programs are tolerable? Which
good? What are the electoral and practical costs of altering them? Of abolishing them?
Reagan recommends “a program of action based on political principle” and
constitutionalism to deal with these questions and these questions were his questions.
They require a new look from new blood to meet today’s circumstances.
Hayward’s book is a great guide to seeing the sloppiness of politics trying to meet these
questions. Such sloppiness is an indispensable part of modern government—it should be
welcomed as the best way to keep our house in order.