Talking with Eric. 2

Was Reagan wrong?

Welcome back to conversations with “Eric.” (See “What are we fighting for?” for an introduction to what I’m trying to do in these dialogues.) Last time, we discussed the situation in Europe and mentioned immigration, but found there was a lot more to talk about. And at the end of that post I promised to talk more about Ronald Reagan. Since we last spoke, Donald Trump has given his speech to a joint session of Congress, which was the longest speech of its kind since they started recording this, 60 years ago. Then, the Democratic response was given by Elissa Slotkin, Senator from Michigan. Her response was much briefer (thank goodness) but she also cited Reagan—which is significant since it was a Democrat invoking Reagan against a Republican administration.

E. And she’s getting some stick for it, on her own side, in terms of the online left.

J. Okay, we’re getting right to it. Basically, Elissa Slotkin said a few things in her speech, but the point here was that she grew up during the Cold War period (as we did), and she’s glad Reagan was in charge then—the implicit contrast is with Trump. Because Reagan knew what Russia was, and stood firm against Russia, and that’s why we won the Cold War.

So, Eric. Why is the Democratic response to Trump’s speech an invocation of Reagan? Is this just another example of trying to co-opt the Cheneys and Bush voters, and people who voted for a version of the Republican party that no longer exists?

E. Look. If a non-Trump party wants to win in the future, they could do worse than evoking Reagan. He won landslides back to back that nobody can dream of nowadays.
At least Slotkin is trying something. You can almost tell she’s doing something right, because of the contrast to either side of her. Among other Democrats in the Congress, there haven’t been very sensible responses to Trump so far—holding up church fans with “False” on them isn’t going to sway many people. And to the left, the people online who are unhappy with a Democrat invoking Reagan are the types who have Palestinian flags on their profile. Seriously, people aren’t buying this.

J. But if we step back from what’s going on right now, in Ukraine, and start in the period when Slotkin and you and I were young. The 1980s, when Reagan was president. The U.S. was locked in an adversarial relationship with the U.S.S.R. as it had been since the end of World War II. In the ’80s (and ’70s, ’60s, ’50s) the Soviet Union, and America’s rivalry with it, seemed immutable. It had been there all our lives; there was no indication that it wouldn’t continue for decades to come. Indeed, very few experts at the time foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union,¹ because each was focused on his or her own area of expertise (the arms race, the economy, etc.)

I remember being a child and knowing that the adults closest to me had voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980, but by 1984 almost everybody was for Reagan (as far as I could tell). As you said, he was popular to a degree that’s hard to imagine now. And two events stand out to me. In real time, I remember when the Challenger space shuttle exploded in January 1986. Schoolchildren were watching, and although I didn’t see it live, what I do remember seeing live is Reagan’s speech to the nation. It was a short speech, and it managed to address specific audiences in that very short time, including us kids, and the Soviet Union. Reagan (the speech was written by Peggy Noonan) wanted to hit all these notes. And of course the part that everyone remembers is the poetic quote at the end:

We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”²

E. In a mere few minutes, Reagan acknowledged the unimaginable grief of the families, the children—some of whom, like me, had actually been watching the first teacher blast into space—and he asserted that the U.S. would remain united and committed to the space program, which was a message to the Soviet Union. It was a remarkable speech that people remember, just as we all remember where we were when it happened. Or when we heard about other catastrophic news—September 11, or John Kennedy’s assassination. Many Americans today, on both sides of the political spectrum, remember Reagan as this Great Communicator, and are nostalgic for a leader who seemed capable of at once uniting and consoling the country.

J. But the other event that stands out to me, and this is something I didn’t really know was going on at that time, but only after I was older. By 1986, more than 16,000 Americans had died of AIDS, which the president had only mentioned for the first time the previous September. For a gay community that was literally burying friends every day, Reagan, and George Bush after him, had blood on their hands. All this was going on before I knew enough to understand it; I knew about AIDS, but only that it was deadly and horrifying. As far as I knew in America, there was no tolerance whatsoever for homosexuality or bisexuality. Gay and lesbian Americans in those days felt that their lives were at stake, and they were standing almost alone against what should have been “their” government.

Now I use this example, because Reagan was both of these things. There are people today who will never forgive Reagan for American deaths from AIDS, or, for that matter, the torture and murder by regimes he supported in other parts of the world: El Salvador, Nicaragua, apartheid South Africa. And there are Americans who remember Reagan with great fondness, most of all Republicans who, at least until the Trump era, regarded him as the best modern president, perhaps the best since George Washington.

E. You brought me on here to talk about where conservative voters are coming from, and one of the issues is, is the current version of the Republican party conservative at all? Many of us would say it is not. I mean, I was in the Edmund Burke Society. Conservatism is about keeping things if they don’t need to be changed, not upending institutions. One of the reasons many conservatives like me feel a little lost with the two parties in America today is that neither seems to be interested in conserving. The Trump-Elon Musk alliance is coming into government saying “move fast, break things,” and pushing all these limits of the rule of law—certainly not with the objective of uniting the country or making Americans in general feel better about the place where we live. And as for the Democrats, they’ve moved way, way left, even just in the years since Barack Obama was president.

J. And yet, I want to push back a little on the idea that the current Republican party isn’t conservative. I think we can draw a line from Reagan’s approach to government and the destruction being wrought by Trump and Musk today. Reagan liked to say that “government is the problem,” that the worst news someone could hear was that the government was coming to help them. Instead of help being something people should, or have the right to, expect from their government.

Republicans spent more than a generation, five decades, preaching and imbibing that government is the problem, that government is an inefficient way to do things, compared with business. “Good enough for government work” is the cliché, a slur against the civil service, implying that government employees are [more likely than private sector workers to be] lazy and a waste of money. Taxpayers’ money. The current slash-and-burn Musk approach is certainly new, in that Congress designated that money and created those agencies by law, so it’s quite a contrast with Reagan’s two terms in which the budget deficit grew enormously. But in another way, it’s the logical extreme of denigrating government for fifty years.

E. I think the more pertinent thing is, and maybe this is the vast middle ground that you’re hoping to reach in these conversations: People can’t agree on a common set of facts. You know, we used to read or watch or hear the news, and we would argue about what Reagan should have done or what he shouldn’t have done. Libya, Grenada, Beirut. But we didn’t doubt that the events had happened. The lack of a common narrative, which is what we have now, makes it very hard to have the discussion.

J. I was just talking to a woman from England, where I live, about this same issue. Ironically enough, she pointed back to the Reagan era. It was in 1987 that the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) stopped the “Fairness Doctrine,” which required broadcasters both to report on controversial issues, and to include different viewpoints on those issues. This is different from “equal time” which is a requirement that applies only to political candidates.

The end of the Fairness Doctrine obviously opened the door to talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, the Murdoch empire which included Fox News, and of course on the other extreme MSNBC and left-leaning media. Now, most people don’t get their news from some common source but from highly partisan channels, or, increasingly, fragments here and there on the Internet or via social media.

E. Yeah, but you’re not really blaming Reagan for that, right? Earlier I mentioned September 11 and the JFK assassination. These events, and the moon landing (since we were talking about space), are the subject of many conspiracy theories—there’s a Gallup poll suggesting only a minority of Americans believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, for instance. The failure of Americans, and for that matter people in other societies of the Anglosphere, to perceive the same reality is a huge problem, but it’s been going on a lot longer than the media you are talking about.

J. We could argue about the Reagan era all day. I think what’s important though, and what Senator Slotkin was getting at, is that Reagan knew who America’s adversary was in terms of the global situation. He would be rolling over in his grave if he saw Trump reaching out to Vladimir Putin and Putin not making any concessions to the U.S. at all.

E. Another saying associated with Reagan was “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” What he meant by that was, you have to be able to communicate to the broader public in short cuts. “The evil empire” was a memorable way to describe the Soviet Union. Sure, it wasn’t nuanced, but we weren’t wondering, day by day, whether or not it was in America’s interest to cooperate with the Russians.
I think it’s interesting that after that blow-up between Trump and the Ukrainian president, Zelenskyy, in the Oval Office, the people trying to explain it as some kind of high-level strategy by Trump were Republicans—that is, partisans on Trump’s behalf. For most of the Trump era, especially the past five years, all the explaining, justifying, defending, seems to have been coming from left-leaning people. The fact that that’s changed now says to me that turning on Ukraine and cozying up to Russia, is a position of defensiveness. And it’s hard to defend.

J. One of the (many!) problems with Trump is that he doesn’t regard other countries as places where people live. He just thinks of Russia as Putin, for example. He figures he can talk to the guy in charge over there and make a deal. I don’t want to make the same mistake of conflating a country with its government, because it’s not that simple, even in the case of an authoritarian leader.

An American I know shared a video recently in which she talked about how hard it was to keep the lines of dialogue open, including with her friends and relations who voted for Trump. She pointed out perhaps the most basic fact about them though, which is that they are human beings. Just as transgender people who are being bullied or terrorized are human beings, and government employees who fear losing their jobs are human beings. Somehow, we have gotten into a state where if we don’t understand someone (their vote for Trump, or their transgender identity) we can’t sympathize. But we don’t need to understand them. We just need to treat them the way human beings should treat one another.

E. I mean, yes. I read about this young transgender person who was kidnapped, raped, tortured for a month, then killed. I don’t know anything about him or her—not even sure how to talk about this. But what’s wrong with “It’s inhumane to beat and rape and kill people?” Barbaric behavior is barbaric, and it shouldn’t matter whom it’s directed against. We don’t need to know or understand the victim; we just need to know that treating another human being badly is wrong.

J. I’m not sure we can end on a better note than that.

1. There’s an excellent discussion of this in Nate Silver’s book about forecasting, The Signal and the Noise.

2. From “High Flight” by John Magee