Ronald Reagan... the original Neocon?

[Rainsford]

Originally posted by: cwjerome

Originally posted by: senseamp
Reagan also funded the terrorists in Afghanistan and funneled money from Iran arms sales to Nicaragua to defeat the Soviets, and saddled this country with trillions in debt. So if you credit him with defeating the Soviets, you need to acknowledge all the damage he did to the US to get there. And yes, he is the original neocon, everything for the ideology, consequences be damned.

Yeah, you people keep repeating this stuff about Afghanistan and Nicaragua, but I thought I addressed it. So let this be the last time.

Nobody here is saying Reagan was flawless. What I have said is Reagan (properly)prioritized the Soviet/communist problem as the greatest threat to worldwide peace and freedom. Unfortunately he did pragmatically deal with the devil on occasion and was involved in questionable actions to serve his highest priority. I'm not making excuses, I'm simply saying he was idealistic about America and our principles, and he did what he thought was feasible to "battle" with what he thought was the biggest issue: Soviet communism.

As I stated, just as Jefferson forwarded revolutionary pronouncements on liberty and government while owning human beings, Reagan also had his contradictions and shortfalls. They are similar in that respect, but we look at the overall good they accomplished, even though elements around that good are tainted. The Jeffersonian notions have been successful. Reagan was successful in his principled goal of facing down the Soviets.

The bottom line is, there has been a large change in attitudes in American politics. At one time, liberal-ish Democrats were generally the custodians of the Jefferson idealism that democracy and freedom should be exported to the world. Reagan was the man who reversed this politically.

If anything, I think Reagan's actions in regards to fighting the Soviets reveals just how un-American his worldview was. You used the concept of pragmatism to defend our support of some truly awful people, and while I think you are certainly right in his thought process, I don't think such actions can be expressed as Jeffersonian idealism in regards to democracy and freedom. Reagan's foreign policy was remarkably single minded, defeat the Soviet Union. His ends-justify-the-means style of fighting the cold war may have been pragmatic and smart, but it also had a coldly calculating, blinded self-interest that does NOT make Reagan a Jeffersonian leader at all. It does, however, perfectly symbolize the neo-con movement, and how their worldview is almost 180 degrees away from our historic ideals.

You are right in that Jefferson, like most great men, had his personal shortfalls and contradictions, but I think you're wrong in grouping Reagan's policy failings into the same catagory. Jefferson preached democracy, and while he didn't always live what he preached, at least his ideals seemed solid...and his personal shortcomings weren't explained away by suggesting that the ends justify the means. Reagan, on the other hand, seemed perfectly at ease with dictators, terrorists and a total lack of democracy or freedom, as long as it was in the countries that were on OUR side. That is not a personal shortcoming or policy pitfall, that is a total lack of consistant morals. Supporting evil simply because you are fighting another evil is NOT an excuse that shouldn't impress anyone who truly believes in the American concept of freedom and democracy.

 

[Future Shock]

In all of the comparisons of Bush Jr. and Reagan, I (a former volunteer campaign worker for Reagan in BOTH 80 and 84) see people ignore a key fact - Reagan selected fewer cronies, and stocked a lot more bright people around him. He KNEW he was an actor, knew he didn't have all the answers - and so surrounded himself with bright people, people with impressive intellectual weight. Of the current administration, only Condie Rice has that level of intellectual credentials - but she is such a crony of the Bush family and friends that she is a former Director of Exxon, and even has an oil tanker named after her (no lie).

Not to say that Reagan didn't appoint some friends to positions also - it just didn't seem as rampant. As a whole, government seemed to work better.

Lastly, those that say the USSR was headed downward anyway ignored the accellerating effects of Reagan's military buildup - the 600 ship Navy, the boondoggle that was Star Wars - all of these convinced the USSR's leaders that they simply couldn't keep pace with the US militarily if we committed to spending the money. It is NOT clear if the long-term deficits were worth the accelleration of the USSR's demise (it probably would have happened anyway), but Reagan certainly did give the rotting tree a stern kick.

Future Shock

 

[cwjerome]

FutureShock, I generally agree, although I do believe the deficits were worth it.

Rainsford -and anyone else- should read a very interesting article that came out today in the NYT Sunday magazine. It's called "The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal," by liberal editor of The New Republic, Peter Beinart. Here's a short clip of the beginning (about 1/10 of the article).


"This fall, for the third time since 9/11, American voters will choose between Democrats and Republicans while knowing what only one party believes about national security. In 2002, Democratic candidates tried to change the subject, focusing on Social Security and health care instead. In 2004, John Kerry substituted biography for ideology, largely ignoring his own extensive foreign-policy record and stressing his service in Vietnam. In this year's Senate and House races, the party looks set to reprise Michael Dukakis's old theme: competence. Rather than tell Americans what their vision is, Democrats will assure them that they can execute it better than George W. Bush.

Democrats have no shortage of talented foreign-policy practitioners. Indeed, they have no shortage of worthwhile foreign-policy proposals. Even so, they cannot tell a coherent story about the post-9/11 world. And they cannot do so, in large part, because they have not found their usable past. Such stories, after all, are not born in focus groups; they are less invented than inherited. Before Democrats can conquer their ideological weakness, they must first conquer their ideological amnesia.

Consider George W. Bush's story: America represents good in an epic struggle against evil. Liberals, this story goes, try to undermine that moral clarity, reining in American power and sapping our faith in ourselves. But a visionary president will not be constrained, and he wields American might with relentless force, until the walls of oppression crumble and the darkest region on earth is set free.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It was Ronald Reagan's story as well. To a remarkable degree, the right's post-9/11 vision relies on a grand analogy: Bush is Reagan, Tony Blair is Margaret Thatcher, the "axis of evil" is the "evil empire," the truculent French are the truculent French. The most influential conservative foreign-policy essay of the 1990's, written by the Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment, was titled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." And since 9/11, most conservatives have seen Bush as Reaganesque. His adherence to a script conservatives know by heart helps explain their devotion, which held fast through the 2004 election, and has only recently begun to flag, as that script veers more and more disastrously from the real world.

Liberals don't have a script because they don't have a Reagan. Since Vietnam, they've produced two presidents: Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Carter's foreign policy is widely considered a failure. Clinton's foreign policy is not widely considered at all, because he governed at a time when foreign policy was for the most part peripheral to American politics. Ask liberals to describe a Carteresque foreign policy, and they tend to wince. Ask them to describe a Clintonesque one, and you'll most likely get a blank stare."


There's a plenty in the entire article I don't agree with much, but it's good food for thought and he does make some good observations. Read it!

 

[DealMonkey]

Yes, yes, America is a great country. But hey, here's a novel thought: Let's let the world come to realize how great it is on their own and emulate it under their own free will. Once you start "liberating" the rest of the world at the barrel of a gun, you've started your slide down that slippery slope of evil. How about this for a mantra: Don't be evil.

 

[CallMeJoe]

cwjerome:
I realise there is more than one variety of conservative. I was using Barry Goldwater, the most consistent prominent conservative of the late 20th century, as a touchstone. I could just as easily have used Robert A. Taft as an example of the classic conservative. Further, while Reagan may have admired and been inspired by Senator Goldwater, he got only the anti-Communism portion of Goldwater's stance. Classic conservatism includes a belief in personal freedom tempered by responsibility, fiscal restraint, limited government, and respect for the rule of law. The neo-conservatives have lost view of these values.

I do recall the "City on a Hill" image. President Reagan read speeches beautifully. That's what actors do. That's why his devotees called him "the Great Communicator". I judge his beliefs more by his actions than by his words. By that standard, the depths of his real devotion to freedom and justice were questionable. The dichotomy between his actions and words were what lead some to call him, rather, "the Great Prevaricator".

I agree the Bush administration has been woefully incompetant in its execution of the "War on Terror". I disagree in the validity of Bush's themes and rhetoric. The Taliban in Afghanistan seemed, and still seems, a legitimate target. Hussein's Iraq was a war of choice; furthermore, it was the wrong war at the wrong time. Besides removing the focus of the WoT from Afghanistan and BinLaden, Bush made a beautiful training ground for the terrorists of the future. To paraphrase one of W's favorite lines on Iraq, alQaeda is fighting us "over there" so that they can better learn how to fight us later "over here".

 

[cwjerome]

For me, the problem with Bush (in this issue) is the enormous gap between his words and his administration's performance. And yet...

Jefferson's vision also had a gap between dream and reality. Jefferson's explosive ideas had to grow and mature. Only white men could vote. Slavery persisted. But without Jefferson, there's no Emancipation Proclamation or Martin Luther King Jr. This is the crux of my discussion here. With Bush, he has what I believe is the Jeffersonian spirit, an international idealism that claims to want to combine stability and liberty... as Bush said, "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." His words indicate he wants to shrug off the pragmatic excusing and accomodating America has done in the past regarding sketchy groups and nations. He knows such short-terms actions did little to make us safe. Once again, his words: "In the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.

This is a refreshingly PRINCIPLED stand... a Jeffersonian stand, and stand I've advocated since before Bush became president. Of course the problem is -for me at least- has Bush made good on those types of rhetoric? If things end up a short term failure, will his overriding idealistic themes live on, grow, and find much success, like Jefferson's?

 

[Future Shock]

Originally posted by: cwjerome
For me, the problem with Bush (in this issue) is the enormous gap between his words and his administration's performance. And yet...

Jefferson's vision also had a gap between dream and reality. Jefferson's explosive ideas had to grow and mature. Only white men could vote. Slavery persisted. But without Jefferson, there's no Emancipation Proclamation or Martin Luther King Jr. This is the crux of my discussion here. With Bush, he has what I believe is the Jeffersonian spirit, an international idealism that claims to want to combine stability and liberty... as Bush said, "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." His words indicate he wants to shrug off the pragmatic excusing and accomodating America has done in the past regarding sketchy groups and nations. He knows such short-terms actions did little to make us safe. Once again, his words: "In the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.

This is a refreshingly PRINCIPLED stand... a Jeffersonian stand, and stand I've advocated since before Bush became president. Of course the problem is -for me at least- has Bush made good on those types of rhetoric? If things end up a short term failure, will his overriding idealistic themes live on, grow, and find much success, like Jefferson's?

Jerome,
Your ideals ring nicely, but the sad fact is that the lack of expertise and intellectualism in the Bush administration is like an F1 racecar with a 1 litre diesel engine. All looks and promise, no go. The sad fact is, he consistently denies what almost any expert on forgien policy admits - that it takes preconditions for democractic free-market country to be formed - a literate populace, the rule of law, a working judicial system, enforceable civil contracts, security and police protection...the list goes on and on. Unfortunately, this isn't something that can be imposed from outside - it has to EVOLVE.

Secondly, there are few working examples of stable democracies in place where the chief form of GDP is from the sale of a single natural resource - because that sort of economy nearly always leads to social stratification, and social stratification will ALWAYS negate the economic freedoms and opportunities that a democracy demands. There are two working democracies in the Middle East : Israel and Lebanon. Neither has any oil...and those Arab countries that are the most liberal (Jordan and UEA for example) are those expected to run out of oil the soonest and have begun transitioning...

It's good to ensure that the US has a world-class defense, and can even project power overseas when we need to (a la Afghanistan). But to get entangled in a long-term nation-building excersize in a country that could not be less ready for democracy internally speaks of a hubris and frankly insanity that has, unfortunately, come to overshadow any good intentions and ideals that Bush Jr. might have had.

P.S. - on a final note - when your ideals work for the benefit of the country as a whole, we can call that brave and possibly worthy of shared sacrifice. When your ideals just happen[/] to enrich all of your friends and family and administration officials, then the US population needs to really examine just how "shared" that sacrifice happens to be...

Future Shock

 

[Rainsford]

Originally posted by: cwjerome
For me, the problem with Bush (in this issue) is the enormous gap between his words and his administration's performance. And yet...

Jefferson's vision also had a gap between dream and reality. Jefferson's explosive ideas had to grow and mature. Only white men could vote. Slavery persisted. But without Jefferson, there's no Emancipation Proclamation or Martin Luther King Jr. This is the crux of my discussion here. With Bush, he has what I believe is the Jeffersonian spirit, an international idealism that claims to want to combine stability and liberty... as Bush said, "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." His words indicate he wants to shrug off the pragmatic excusing and accomodating America has done in the past regarding sketchy groups and nations. He knows such short-terms actions did little to make us safe. Once again, his words: "In the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.

This is a refreshingly PRINCIPLED stand... a Jeffersonian stand, and stand I've advocated since before Bush became president. Of course the problem is -for me at least- has Bush made good on those types of rhetoric? If things end up a short term failure, will his overriding idealistic themes live on, grow, and find much success, like Jefferson's?

The question, of course, is who deserves credit...the guy with the rhetoric or the guy who actually gets things done? Jefferson's "stand" might have been equality for all, but it wasn't until folks like Lincoln and then MLK came around that the idea became more than a bunch of high-minded noise little related to reality. So when history classes study civil rights, who's name should they be reading...that of the guy who said the words, but failed to live up to them, or the men and women who actually put their ideas into practice and made the world a truly better place?

Personally, I think that the world is full of truly useless "idea men". The people do nothing but spout off about things they don't really understand, and aren't prepared to back up with anything besides their mouths. Jefferson deserves credit for a lot, but I think his contribution to the civil rights movement is hardly worth mentioning. It's easy to SAY something, anybody can do that, but it's a lot harder to actually address the issue. Bush can spend hours every day telling us how much he wants to spread democracy, but put that together with a quarter and it will be worth about 26 cents. Almost everybody thinks spreading democracy is a good idea, the fact that Bush talks about it more than most doesn't exactly make him George Washington. If he was actually halfway effective at doing it, that would be something else, but at best, he's a guy who's skills don't exactly support his ideas.

Maybe I'm biased because of my profession, but in my line of work, simply sounding off with some ephemeral idea is going to earn you a lot of blank stares and "so what?" type comments. The pioneers are the people who take a good idea and really DO something with it. Granted, some of the credit has to go to the people who came up with the seed of the idea in the first place, but to suggest that the civil rights movement owes more to Jefferson than MLK is just silly. Jefferson's idea was nothing more than an intellectual musing until something with actual principles came along and made it reality. I'm not sure I'd credit old Thomas with a great deal of principles...strongly believing something, yet failing to even live up to those ideas yourself, much less trying to get others to do so, isn't exactly admirable to me. It's sort of like being a drug dealing Buddhist...

 

[ElFenix]

JFK was the first neocon

 

[cwjerome]

Originally posted by: Rainsford

The question, of course, is who deserves credit...the guy with the rhetoric or the guy who actually gets things done? Jefferson's "stand" might have been equality for all, but it wasn't until folks like Lincoln and then MLK came around that the idea became more than a bunch of high-minded noise little related to reality. So when history classes study civil rights, who's name should they be reading...that of the guy who said the words, but failed to live up to them, or the men and women who actually put their ideas into practice and made the world a truly better place?

Personally, I think that the world is full of truly useless "idea men". The people do nothing but spout off about things they don't really understand, and aren't prepared to back up with anything besides their mouths. Jefferson deserves credit for a lot, but I think his contribution to the civil rights movement is hardly worth mentioning. It's easy to SAY something, anybody can do that, but it's a lot harder to actually address the issue. Bush can spend hours every day telling us how much he wants to spread democracy, but put that together with a quarter and it will be worth about 26 cents. Almost everybody thinks spreading democracy is a good idea, the fact that Bush talks about it more than most doesn't exactly make him George Washington. If he was actually halfway effective at doing it, that would be something else, but at best, he's a guy who's skills don't exactly support his ideas.

Maybe I'm biased because of my profession, but in my line of work, simply sounding off with some ephemeral idea is going to earn you a lot of blank stares and "so what?" type comments. The pioneers are the people who take a good idea and really DO something with it. Granted, some of the credit has to go to the people who came up with the seed of the idea in the first place, but to suggest that the civil rights movement owes more to Jefferson than MLK is just silly. Jefferson's idea was nothing more than an intellectual musing until something with actual principles came along and made it reality. I'm not sure I'd credit old Thomas with a great deal of principles...strongly believing something, yet failing to even live up to those ideas yourself, much less trying to get others to do so, isn't exactly admirable to me. It's sort of like being a drug dealing Buddhist...

Wow, I'm astonished at your attitudes towards Jefferson. I guess maybe because you're not a polyphi major with a history minor you lack the appreciation of what he has done for America, and the world. Jefferson's actions -and yes, dreams- have been a guiding light for Americans since the beginning. His impact is immeasurable. Like I said, without Jefferson there could be NO Emancipation Proclamation or MLK. You need a starting point... revolutionary concepts and principles. Your low impression of "ideas" is incredibly narrow-minded. Above all, it's ideas that drive civilization.

He was a pioneer and a genius. I am pleased that many on the Left still understand his importance, like Christopher Hitchens, who wrote a book on Jefferson. I am also confused as to why someone like you can't understand how Jefferson essentially designed America and established the idea that individual (human, civil) rights, for the first time in history, shall be the basis for a nation.

His enlightenment ideas shaped American policy and promoted advancement. There's a three-word phrase you should think about: Beliefs Become Reality. That was graffiti on the Berlin Wall, and a guy named Reagan took it to heart. He understood the power of ideas. He seized those words and announced the wall "cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom." You can dilly-dally on the micro level with concretes, but don't dismiss the overriding power of ideas.

 

[cwjerome]

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