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Ronald Reagan – American Mao?
You have to give Ronald Reagan credit for one thing – his legacy defies indifference. Love him or hate him, if you are an American born before 1980 you probably have an opinion about him. Conservatives go glassy-eyed with reverence and bust out the superlatives when his name comes up. They call him a visionary, a philosopher king, a superhero – and they actually MEAN that shit when they say it. Not that his liberal detractors are much more in the realm of reality – they call him an antichrist, say he hated poor people, and insist that he ruined the country. For every booster who waxes nostalgic on Reykjavik, there’s a detractor fuming about voodoo economics. The truth, as they say, is out there, but you have to reach past the rhetoric to get to the heart of Reagan’s true greatest accomplishment.
Reagan’s eight years were nothing if not eventful and our 40th President, having been an actor, seemed to have a different face for each event. He was the treacherous but efficient conductor of the Iranian hostage release. When he cut taxes and promised economic stimulation, he was the indulgent daddy. He became the brass-balled negotiator whose blood-simple plan for winning the Cold War – spend your opponents broke – helped alter the course of history and bring an entire sociopolitical structure crashing down. When things worked for him, they really worked, and when they didn’t, there always seemed to be some fanatically loyal lackey waiting in the wings to take the blame - or a bullet - for Daddy.
But Reagan’s most lasting legacy has taken quite a while to be fully realized and felt. Over the last generation, most of us have barely noticed it creeping into our lives in small increments. Many of us who have noticed it haven’t really equated it fully with Reagan, but with a vaguely-defined umbrella term, “the eighties”. But its primary architect was Reagan, or at the very least the Reagan cabinet. His wife played a large part in it as well.
I refer, of course, to the American cultural revolution of the 1980s.
Remember? The emergence of “political correctness” and “safe sex”, of “family values” and “just say no”. While for the most part liberals – or specifically, liberal Democrats – have taken the rap for PC, people tend to forget that PC really blossomed hand-in-hand with the return of the 1950’s-style values systems that Reagan so successfully championed with his domestic policies. He had a great deal of help in bringing it to fruition with the coincidental advent of AIDS – there’s nothing like a good old-fashioned plague to send a ripple of panic through the masses and keep them afraid. The fact that Reagan wanted to see an end to the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies and that this particular plague turned out to be inexorably tied to sex was just gravy, a lucky break for champions of conservative values. But things got even better for Reagan’s agenda: it turned out that even more than sex, an even quicker and more common way AIDS could be spread through the American public was via intravenous drug use, which paved the way for a two-pronged “War on Drugs” in the US. This “war” basically had two fronts: the hard option, which consisted of huge amounts of Federal money and manpower poured into shutting down pot and heroin dealers (but working hand-in-hand with South American cocaine cartels – hey, no plan’s perfect, right?) and the soft one, which was a relentless PR campaign to educate – and in many cases, miseducate – American schoolchildren on the evils of drugs. Daddy handled the hard part, Mommy the soft part. Nancy Reagan became synonymous with anti-drug rhetoric and her three-word slogan “Just Say No” was perfect for the short American attention span. So was the Federal anti-drug program forced onto schools, the “DARE” (drug awareness resistance education) program. Most baby-boomers, who’d partied hearty all through the previous two decades, scoffed at the tactics, all the while quietly buying into them when they began having children of their own. When it came time for the crunch, the postwar generation was almost too easy for Reagan to seduce. He deregulated banks and made it easier for everybody to have a credit card while he dazzled them with the promise of an easy and painless economic recovery. The unspoken Reagan message: clean up your act and behave more like your parents and I’ll actually make you rich by cutting back on your taxes.
It worked like a charm. We’ve spent the past twenty years going back in time, demonizing pot like in the “Reefer Madness” days, growing ever more afraid of sex and all the ways it can kill you, and telling our kids not to do all the fun stuff. Hell, it’s worse than it ever was in some ways – most of us won’t let our kids out the door without a helmet, elbow and knee pads, shin guards and a fucking mouthpiece. Heaven forbid they fall off their bikes and eat a little pavement, get a shiner or a bit of road rash. Somewhere along the line we took this revolution of conservatism a little – no, a lot – too far, and ended up a culture of fear.
In that regard, Reagan’s great social reforms have been every bit as repressive as Mao’s Communist Revolution – held up to a funhouse mirror. He freed the market, deregulated financing, and allowed college kids to run loose with credit cards. But in giving us all of this freedom, he took away the greatest freedom of all – the freedom to forget to look over our shoulders.
