Why has the country gone so crazy over Ronald Reagan?
Back in 1982, President Reagan boldly told the world in a speech that Communism would end up on “the ash heap of history.” At the time most considered this wildly optimistic; seven years later it was fact.
Aside from whipping Soviet Communism–as Margaret Thatcher put it, without ever firing a shot–and aside from injecting some badly needed doses of capitalism into a mixed, increasingly socialist economy of the late 1970’s, Ronald Reagan’s contribution to the nation was profoundly psychological in nature.
For the first time in the modern era, he was a politician who brought idealism and optimism to the cause of individual rights and capitalism–rather than socialism or welfare state liberalism. For decades, the attitude of idealism and optimism had belonged to the socialists, the statists, the New Deal and the New Frontier Democrats.
Reagan changed all that.
He forced the liberals into a ferocious, angry and defensive (sometimes even hateful) pessimism–a conservatism in the true, ugly sense of clinging to their failed, dysfunctional and unjust social programs–and challenged those on the right to strive to identify and defend their own ideas as alternatives. The right has yet to live up to that challenge, but if it ever does Ronald Reagan will have played a key political, psychological and to some extent ideological role in helping to make it happen. We haven’t yet had as important a President since he left office.
Cartoon by Cox and Forkum
Today, as we fight the new and in some ways more dangerous enemy of Islamic terrorists, people yearn for a solution like the one Reagan found to the threat of Communism. Notice that President Reagan did not refer to Communism as “an ideology of peace.” He said they were evil because their ideas were evil. He was prepared to shoot, if necessary, and demonstrated this through a military build-up.
Our current leader seeks to defeat our enemy by doing just the opposite. He calls our enemies peaceful but then moves in with military force. He blends the military force with humanitarian aid and he apologizes for the discomfort of enemy combatants. Although the military force is justified, he never attacks the terrorists at their core. In fact, he refuses to bomb their mosques even when those mosques are used as shooting galleries for our soldiers.
People know we’re not getting the leadership we need to defeat terrorism the way we defeated Communism. We’re not likely to ever get it from the current President and we will absolutely never get it from his pacifistic, appeasing opponent. People sense, but cannot articulate, that something is missing. Brute force alone will not do it, but neither will pacifism. What’s missing is moral conviction. President Reagan reminds us that such a thing is possible, though not visible in our current leaders.
The yearning for Reagan is more than mere nostalgia. It’s the craving for a justice not yet realized in our current struggle. We need a leader who will attack our enemy first and foremost on moral and ideological grounds. The rest will surely follow.
***
Not long after the events of 9/11, I spoke with someone (a Democrat, in fact) who told me, “We need Ronald Reagan.” Despite being a Democrat who would never have voted for Reagan, his emotions told him something true at a time of crisis. I knew it wasn’t the man so much as the spirit that we needed (and still need). The “spirit” includes an understanding that evil is, at the core, weak and in some cases can indeed be defeated without firing a shot–though the determination and willingness to fire a shot must always be part of the equation. The challenges we face now are very different from those posed by Soviet Communism. Yet the quest to defend freedom, and to do so with optimism and courage, is something we will always need at our side.
