Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan – vilified when they were alive, now shown respect once they are 6 feet under. The funny thing is that Goldwater was always more socially libertarian then hard core social conservative, however he was a staunch anti communist and that is why they hated him. Buckley was always a gentleman and Reagan was far more pragmatic then they realized. Reagan put a happy face on conservatism, sought to broaden the party (not narrow it), and reached out to disaffected Democrats and Independents. He concentrated on winning the Cold War, halting America’s decline which had set in under LBJ, Nixon and Carter, and strengthening America’s economic base. His left-wing son (Ron Reagan, Jr.) in an attempt to win approval from the Left, is also trying to reinvent his father into making him something that he never was. As Jonah points out “As we saw in the wake of the Tucson shootings, so much of the effort to build up conservatives of the past is little more than a feint to tear down the conservatives of the present.”
by Jonah Goldberg
The only good conservative is a dead conservative.
That, in a nutshell, describes the age-old tradition of liberals suddenly discovering that once-reviled conservatives were OK after all. It’s just we-the-living who are hateful ogres, troglodytes, and mopers.
Over the last decade or so, as the giants of the founding generation of modern American conservatism have died, each has been rehabilitated into a gentleman-statesman of a bygone era of conservative decency and open-mindedness.
Barry Goldwater was the first. A few years ago his liberal granddaughter produced a documentary in which nearly all of the testimonials were from prominent liberals like Hillary Clinton and James Carville. Almost overnight, the man whom LBJ cast as a hate-filled demagogue who would condemn the world to nuclear war became an avuncular and sage grandfather type. Down the memory hole went one of the most despicable campaigns of political demonization in American history. Even Sarah Palin hasn’t been subjected to an ad in the New York Times signed by more than 1,000 psychiatrists claiming she’s too crazy to be president (though I don’t want to give anybody any ideas).
Then there was William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, the magazine I call home. For more than four decades, Buckley was subjected to condemnation for his alleged extremism. Jack Paar (the Johnny Carson/Jay Leno of his day for you youngsters) was among the first of many to try to paint Buckley as a Nazi. Now, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times book review section, who is writing a biography of Buckley, insists that Bill’s life mission was to make liberalism better.
But it’s Ronald Reagan who really stands out. As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Gipper is enjoying yet another status upgrade among liberals. Barack Obama took a Reagan biography with him on his vacation. A slew of liberals and mainstream journalists (but I repeat myself) complimented Obama’s State of the Union address as “Reaganesque.” Time magazine recently featured the cover story “Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan.” Meanwhile, the usual suspects are rewriting the same columns about how Reagan was a pragmatist who couldn’t run for president today because he was too nice, too reasonable, too (shudder) liberal for today’s Republican party.
Now, on the one hand, there’s something wonderful about the overflowing of love for Reagan. When presidents leave office or die, their partisan affiliation fades and, for the great ones, eventually withers away. Reagan was a truly great president, one of the greatest according to even liberal historians like the late John Patrick Diggins. As you can tell from the gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth from the far Left, the lionization of Reagan is a great triumph for the Right, and conservatives should welcome more of it.
On the other hand, what is not welcome is an almost Soviet airbrushing of the past to serve liberalism’s current agenda. For starters, if liberals are going to celebrate Reagan, they might try to account for the fact that they fought his every move, alternating between derision and slander in the process. As Steven Hayward, author of the two-volume history The Age of Reagan, asks in the current National Review, “Who can forget the relentless scorn heaped on Reagan for the ‘evil empire’ speech and the Strategic Defense Initiative?” Hayward notes that historian Henry Steele Commager said the “evil empire” speech “was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.”
The point isn’t that liberals were wrong to oppose every Reagan policy. But what they seem to ignore is that those policies were the products of a political philosophy. Sure, he made pragmatic compromises, but he started from a philosophical position that the self-anointed smart set considered not just wrong, but evil or stupid or both. The Media Research Center has issued a lengthy report chronicling countless journalistic examples, but my favorite comes from Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London, which in 1982 held a vote for the most hated people of all time. The winners: Hitler, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Dracula.
Read the rest: Liberal Bouquets for Dead Conservatives
Steven F. Hayward chimes in on the same topic
The news that President Obama decided to read a biography of Ronald Reagan during his Christmas holiday in Hawaii might be taken as a sign that Reagan’s triumph over liberals is complete. Can anyone imagine John F. Kennedy admitting he was reading a biography of Calvin Coolidge, or Jimmy Carter taking in lessons from Dwight Eisenhower? This represents the culmination of a remarkable turnabout in Reagan’s reputation, most notably among liberals, who might have been expected to do to Reagan what an earlier generation of partisan historians did to Coolidge. Instead, we have seen a raft of books from liberal grandees such as Richard Reeves and Sean Wilentz giving Reagan his due.
But while conservatives should pocket these unexpected concessions, they should also note that the admiration of Reagan in the media-academic complex is highly qualified and mostly limited to his role in the Cold War. (And even this story they get wrong.) About the domestic-policy Reagan, liberals are currently engaging in a clever two-step — either excoriating Reagan with recycled 1980s clichés (favors the rich, hates the poor and minorities, reckless deregulation, and so forth), or making him out to be a crypto-liberal who tacitly set out to shore up the welfare state while cloaking himself in anti-big-government rhetoric. Ever so slowly, liberals are attempting a subtle revisionism. This revisionism is alarming not simply as an offense against historical accuracy, but also because the Liberal Revised Standard Version of Reagan will be used against the Tea Party and congressional Republicans in the months and years to come. We can expect to hear (and have already heard once or twice) that even Reagan didn’t attack entitlements the way Paul Ryan and today’s radical House Republicans propose to do.
It wouldn’t be the first time the Left has pulled off a historical Brinks job on a Republican whose achievements and popularity could not be destroyed with a direct attack. A hundred years ago, the leading Progressives appropriated Abraham Lincoln for their cause, even as they explicitly attacked Lincoln’s (and the Founders’) central political philosophy of natural rights. It culminated in the chutzpah of Franklin Roosevelt’s declaration in 1929 that “it is time for us Democrats to claim Lincoln as one of our own,” and in the early 1990s with New York’s ultra-liberal governor, Mario Cuomo, ostentatiously embracing Lincoln because “he’s reassuring to politicians like me.”
The liberal revision of Reagan has been unfolding for a while now, and at the center of it is the effort to separate him from his conservative beliefs. Joshua Green wrote in The Washington Monthly in January 2003 that “many of [Reagan’s] actions as president wound up facilitating liberal objectives. What this clamor of adulation is seeking to deny is that beyond his conservative legacy, Ronald Reagan has bequeathed a liberal one.” He raised taxes! He talked to the Soviets and reached arms agreements! Green’s article was provocatively adorned with a cartoon rendering of Reagan as FDR, complete with upturned cigarette holder. The late John Patrick Diggins, an unorthodox liberal who was a close friend of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s, argued in his 2007 book Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History that Reagan deserves to be considered one of the four greatest American presidents, alongside Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. His Upper West Side neighbors are still picking up their jaws off the floor. However, Diggins makes Reagan into a crypto-liberal: “Far from being a conservative, Reagan was the great liberating spirit of modern American history, a political romantic impatient with the status quo. . . . Reagan’s relation to liberalism may illuminate modern America more than his relation to conservatism.”
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It should never be forgotten that the Left hated Reagan just as lustily as they hated George W. Bush, and with some of the same venomous affectations, such as the reductio ad Hitlerum. The key difference is that in Reagan’s years there was no Internet with which to magnify these derangements, and the 24-hour cable-news cycle was in its infancy. But the signs were certainly abundant.
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Read the rest Reagan Reclaimed
Tags: Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan
