Is the pope Catholic? Well, some think not. According to the erudite Richard Gamble, ol’ Ronald was too Puritanical in the wrong way to be conservative. He gave us irresponsible tax cuts and a “Wilson” or evangelical, transformational foreign policy. His speeches were full of an “expansive liberal temperament” that flowed from Reagan spending his wonder years in “the pietistic, revivalist world of the Disciples of Christ.” His activist faith morphed into a Christianity without Christ that became our optimistic civil religion. He had nothing but contempt for any talk about limits to our power and wealth. Real Puritans talk about original sin, personal and national guilt and all, but not the selective Puritanical civil theologian Reagan. Gamble thinks we should return, instead, to the malaisian wisdom of the 1979 Jimmy Carter, a far more authentic Christian conservative who knew that patriotism wasn’t really about getting and spending.
This article was recommended to me by the porcher page and was published in THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE. It goes without saying that I don’t agree with most of it, but why don’t all of you divide up into small groups and discuss. (Hint: One possible criticism is that there’s no talk about the defeat of COMMUNISM and all.)
August 29th, 2009 | 4:34 pm
As one who can be found upon soapbox bleating higher hopes like a rascally Paine but then sobering up by morning and thinking in a moment of Burkean clarity that the party milling about the speakers corner got a little out of hand…well, maybe Reagan was just a Three Martini Conservative.
August 29th, 2009 | 5:24 pm
I’ll bite. Richard Gamble is essentially right (as is Andrew Bacevich, and John Patrick Diggins for that matter) – Reagan was not a “conservative,” but blended an idiosyncratic Emersonian religiosity with a rosy, optimistic libertarian worldview. Note that among his favorite quotes was the following: “”We have it within our power to begin the world over again,” from the pen of Thomas Paine. Hardly a mainstay of conservatism, I’d think even Peter can acknowledge.
Peter knows as well as anyone that the libertarians were as fierce opponents of Communism as anyone, but that doesn’t make them “conservative.” I don’t consider Reagan’s opposition to Communism to be despositively proof of his conservativism. Quite the opposite. It derives from his fundamental liberalism.
I think the history books will show that America’s triumph over Communism will be one of the most astounding Pyhrric victories of all time – unless we make some fundamental changes very soon. The inability of the United States to steer a conservative course in the latter part of the 20th century – along the lines that Gamble discusses, especially in regard to our energy policy, a cognizance of limits and the demands of self-government, which might have led us to avoid the subsequent fire-sale on America’s assets and jobs – will be dissected as an astonishing example of national self-destruction. We are today decidedly reaping what we have sown, though the Republicans are content to blame Obama for all the ills of the Republic, apparently which have accumulated solely over the past six months.
August 29th, 2009 | 8:05 pm
If Reagan’s liberalism was the cause of his resolute opposition to communism, then God bless his liberalism, the liberalism of Solzhenitsyn, Havel, John Paul II etc. If “rosy libertarian view” means the confidence the human nature can triumph over ideological lies, then I’m a rosy libertarian. That Reagan was an incoherent mixture of liberalism verging on libertarianism and social conservatism is hardly news. But I thought that incoherence is what resonates in our heartland of farms, families, and such–the incoherence of LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE etc. And, you know, even Pyhrric victories and better than Pyhrric defeats. Obviously, I don’t think we should look to Reagan to cure what ails us now–but infinitely less so to that moralistic whiner incompetent Carter.
August 29th, 2009 | 8:15 pm
Some disorganized thoughts,
1. The article could have been a useful corrective to both a facile optimism (which GW Bush often showed towards the establishment of constitutional democracies) and a too-close identification of the US with God or the City of God, but it was spoiled by Old Right special pleading.
2.Gamble manages to brand Reagan a “Wilsononian” but does not discuss Reagan’s Cold War policies. Thats not just odd, it is a way of having to avoid talking about a prudential foreign policy that involves at least some collective security arrangements. I would have been interested in a discussion of Reagan’s Normandy speech.
3. The stuff about Carter and conservatism and limits is nuts. The economy was stagnant and worse because of disastrous monetary, energy and tax policies. Carter was not realistic (in the context in which he spoke), he was making excuses for lousy statist policies that were blighting people’s lives.
4. Reagan’s “boundless optimism” was alot more contingent than Gamble lets on. His 1976 Republican Convention speech shows that. The optimism of his 1980s speeches was a corrective to the absurd pessimism that asserted the economic, political, and foreign policy problems of the day could not be overcome.
5. Gamble is way too harsh about the city on a hill stuff. He uses biblical language to create a picture of a constitutional commercial republic as a decent society. His first inaugeral contains a picture of how the citizens of such a society could live decent lives.
6. The stuff about “credit has no limits and the bills will never come due” depends too much on 1980s liberal talking points. Reagan accepted high deficits as a lesser evil given the political constraints of his time and place. Given the choices he had, I think he made the right choice. If deficits and debt do swamp us in the coming decades, it won’t be because of the Reagan tax cuts or the Reagan defense build up (or the Obama stimulus for that matter), but because of OUR inability to reform entitlements in our own time.
7. Gamble is right that many conservatives use Reagan’s words and record in a simplistic and self-serving way. So you think he would be more careful.
August 29th, 2009 | 8:56 pm
Pete, Yours are, in fact, very well organized, cogent, and accurate thoughts. I will plagiarize from them at every opportunity. You know your facts,son, and it would be presumptuous of me to babble on by just repeating them.
August 29th, 2009 | 9:15 pm
[...] semi-tangent apropos of the thread developing below on Reagan’s is-it-or-isn’t-it conservatism: it’s true that Reagan’s public [...]
August 29th, 2009 | 9:25 pm
Obviously I take off on this thread in a separate post but one thing to add as a footnote is that Reagan’s willingness, per Pete, to accept the ‘lesser evil’ did set an unfortunate rhetorical precedent for the mindblowing spending of the 00s. Say what you will about the Dawn of the Age of Terror or whatever, but it’s no Cold War, no matter what or how awful or threatening it is indeed. The Cold War was truly an unnatural and cursed predicament for the US — and the human race — to be in, in a lot of ways the nadir of human history at least in terms of the stakes and how close we came to really Orwellian life. Reagan’s gambit should have been used to slingshot us out of the double-down habits that I heard the head of the conservative caucus in the House proudly insist on back in 2007 or so. “Reagan gave the Dems what they wanted on domestic spending in order to win the Cold War,” he said in response to a question about how many years needed to go by before we considered a head-check on spending, “and we welcome having that debate again.” I only slightly paraphrase. It was a real bummer hearing that answer — full stop, no elaboration, no apology. And that was before The (Latest) Crisis…
August 29th, 2009 | 9:40 pm
The conversation between Drs. Deneen and Lawler is excellent and I’ll lean toward Lawler on this one.
For me Reagan’s election signaled the death knell of a pernicious liberalism that left the nation morally bankrupt and exhausted. Any carping about Reagan’s tax cuts is so much BS simply because the man’s tax policies led directly to a near doubling of monies flowing into the federal coffers. The problem was Reagan’s belief that Tip O’Neil and the Democrats would live up to their agreements, and his decision to welcome the neocons into the central gummint.
With Reagan we had some should-have-beens but, my goodness, he sure beat the phalanx of wacky leftists that ran against him….kind of like George W. in that respect.
August 29th, 2009 | 10:26 pm
James, in one sense you are right in that Reagan’s political success tended to convince conservative to worry less about spending restraint, but I wonder if the problem lies much less in Reagan than in ourselves.
Reagan prioritized around reviving economic growth, rebuilding the military and winning the Cold War (the last a troublesome formulation but with some real truth). Restraining domestic spending was a lower priority, but then so were many other things like abortion and curbing illegitimacy. When looking at his accomplishments, Reagan’s particular deficits don’t look that bad.
In the years since Reagan, conservatives have failed to come up with either a set of policies or rhetorical appeals regarding spending restraint that could appeal to the majority. But that is Reagan’s fault only if, like spoiled children, we expect him to have provided every answer in his policies as President (he was in his prepresidential career quite eloquent on the issue of deficits). The strategy of ever more tax cuts combined with a George W. Bush type spending spree was destined to run aground, but we were destined to follow that path only if we assume that a political strategy designed for one economic and political situation should continue ever on without diminishing returns.
Which brings us to a real problem of statemanship. How do we prioritize our own problems? How do we craft the right set of policies and find ways to sell them to a majority? In doing so, what problems will (for even in the very unlikley event that we are right about everything, we will still not get everything we would want) we leave unaddressed and thereby passed on to other generations?
August 29th, 2009 | 11:36 pm
Peter,
Must you insist on missing the point? I have no problem in your celebration of Reagan’s policies. You and I would share much in this respect. A self-proclaimed conservative can both admire Reagan and, at the same time, not consider Reagan a conservative. But only when we can get some clarity with regard to definitions and only when we decide to take empirical evidence seriously can we make any progress in serious discussions about political philosophy and public policy. The glee with which people can toss out broad labels, so mushy as to be useless as anything except emotional appeals, disturbs me. Richard Gamble, I think, introduced something a bit more careful and judicious–crafting with care his definitions and allowing the empirical evidence to be sorted by reference to those definitions.
But then Richard is a historian and he finds that being careful and precise is not only an academic courtesy but something of a requirement. The fact that Reagan was dramatically better than Carter tells us nothing about the conservatism of either man.
August 30th, 2009 | 9:52 am
Pete, I agree with everything you just said and even imagined that I intimated it in my comment!
August 30th, 2009 | 10:10 am
James, so I’m a bit slow.
August 30th, 2009 | 11:39 am
Ted, It’s impossible not to admire your defense of your own, even when they screw up. But Pete–a mere high school teacher and without the benefit of the special credentials of a professional historian–gave us above a very empirical post that shows that Richard’s article is kind of caricature of Reagan that’s more like special pleading than objective history. Reagan was pretty darn prudent and had a genuine sense of limits, and even his rhetorical exaggerations–which aren’t nearly as exaggerated as a few isolated quotes might suggest–were meant to restore confidence in our people that we’re right and the “evil empire” was wrong. I think even the most rigorous empirical studies back up that “value judgment.”
We can continue to talk, though, if Professor Gamble and Professor Deneen confirm your view that Reagan was a much better but much less conservative president than Carter. I’m not sure about Richard, but Patrick’s post left little doubt that he’s not on your page here. Of course, your view makes conservatives look pretty bad–surely we don’t have to choose between being competent and successful and being conservative. That’s carrying the Confederate and “beautiful loser” thing way too far.
But Reagan, of course, was in the decisive sense MUCH more conservative than Carter. Pete already laid out the strong case for his prudence. More important still, though, is the fact that the best statement of late 70s malaise (or McGovernism/Carterism) is found in the Harvard Address of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn–probably the greatest conservative ever. Solzhenitsyn feared that a decline in courage would lead to the defeat of the West. Reagan proved him wrong–in large measure by reinvigorating the conservative virtue of courage in our country.
August 30th, 2009 | 12:46 pm
Of course Reagan was a conservative. But he was a classic liberal kind of conservative, an American conservative. Not the kind of traditional European conservative admired so much on this blog.
BTW, we didn’t become full-fledged Americans until we dumped the Christian tendency to despise wealth.
Check out the link to my essay on Why I Am an American Conservative.
August 30th, 2009 | 12:58 pm
Oh, and before I forget, Americans dumped Christian pacifism while they were getting off the boat from Europe.
“Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay—and claims a halo for his dishonesty.” –Robert A. Heinlein, from “Double Star.”
August 30th, 2009 | 2:01 pm
A few questions:
Was Herbert Hoover a conservative? Studying Hoover, I am often struck by how similar are the principles expressed by Reagan and Hoover. They both have a progressive view of mankind in that they think man improvable with effort. Is that conservative or is it liberal? The conservative progressive seems to think that men and the nation can improve with a little help from government, a little guidance, while the more liberal (in today’s terms) progressive seems to think that government’s job is to mold the man and the nation.
What constitutes a conservative vision of government given 100 years of statist intervention in just about everything? Whatever Reagan’s principles, he could clearly express them, politically and in policy, only to a limited extent. The term “conservative” changes as history and our government changes. Standing athwart history yelling Stop seems to be a shifting position.
August 30th, 2009 | 5:00 pm
If I understand properly, it is impolite to leave a comment that amounts to an essay. Unfortunately, the subjects that form the parts of this conversation lend themselves to either declarations or to extended analysis. Because I have had my say on the history and development of conservatism as well as Reagan’s place in the movement (in particular an essay entitled “Reagan and the Transformation of American Conservatism,”
in the book, “The Reagan Presidency”) I’ll refer people to that literature if they have any interest.
But I think that Kate’s questions are useful for getting to the complex definitional problems that plague almost all political conversations. What I liked about Richard’s essay is that he defined his terms well. I don’t have to agree with someone’s careful definition in order to understand their argument. Moreover, I might agree with someone and never know it because she uses language that is too elliptical.
Perhaps one way of thinking about the division here is that it is between lumpers and splitters. Some people like to put experience and ideas into very few categories and they take similarities to be sufficient to lump things together. Splitters concentrate on distinctions and are looking to divide experience and ideas into smaller units and thereby to gain a greater understanding of their relationships. It is my experience that political theorists tend to be lumpers and historians tend to be splitters–each with their strengths and weaknesses. But in the conversation about something as complex and inconsistent as American conservatism, clarity requires more definitions, not fewer.
So, when Richard noted that Carter was, in at least one respect, more “conservative” than Reagan, it makes possible a different examination of the subject, breaking out of hardened categories. A progressive conservative, as Kate invokes, might turn out to be a useful category if we can sketch it out in light of other categories.
But what if we even thought outside of those boxes entirely? What if we examined Carter as a person whose ideas and ontological orientation works out of the American Puritan tradition and Reagan worked out of the American cowboy worldview? Would this clarify anything? Carter was given to lamentation about a falling away, a sense that we have not maintained our spiritual stamina. There are elements in that tradition that we might call conservative, even though it leads toward progressivism ultimately.
Rather than tracing this dualism out, I simply want to ask whether we can think about historical connections and continuities that might illuminate better our own time and the range of choices or alternatives open to us.
August 30th, 2009 | 7:34 pm
[...] Peter Lawler at PomoCon (read the comments for the meat of the discussion): [...]
August 30th, 2009 | 11:43 pm
Obama is more of a conservative then Raegan because Obama isn’t a puppet rather he’s Hunan and as we all know conservates must be human to qualify!
August 31st, 2009 | 10:46 am
Peter is right to mention Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech, since it’s the salient rhetorical convergence of the virtue-based conservatism of the ordered liberty crowd and the messianic Americanism of the neoconservatives.
Like the Front Porchers, Solzhenitsyn scolds Americans for squandering their freedoms. But remember that his Harvard speech calls for moral renewal in order that the US might become a better Commie-fighting colossus.
But did winning the Cold War really require Solzhenitsyn-style moral renewal? I think the combination of Morning In America and a bottomless defense budget let us spend the Soviets into financial and ideological exhaustion, without our ever having to clean up our act the way Solzhenitsyn would have liked.
The Cold War, as James puts it well, “was truly an unnatural and cursed predicament for the US,” and part of its hangover is this question over whether American conservatism needs a national greatness component, and if so, how that should manifest in our politics and foreign policy.
But set the Cold War and Communism aside for a moment. Let’s imagine a speculative history of the Global War on Terror, with Reagan in the White House. Shortly after 9/11, he arranges a sit-down with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Christopher Hitchens (bear with me here) to craft what we’ll too-cynically call a propaganda strategy. Solzhenitsyn thunders against American decadence, arguing that only a spiritually renewed America can defeat al Qaeda. Hitchens gives his usual spiel about defending liberal values against theocracy. I’m convinced that Reagan could have walked out of the get-together convinced that both men were right. I’m not convinced, though, that his internally incoherent national vision says anything about his conservatism or lack thereof.
August 31st, 2009 | 10:47 am
I’m glad Jon has added the “Hunan, China” theory to the birther case.
August 31st, 2009 | 12:56 pm
Matt, Good post. Solzhenitsyn did and does overdo the American decadence thing, and Reagan certainly didn’t require that the average guy clean up much. Your point on Reagan believing both guys at once says a lot about what’s required to be an effective president and the ambiguity at the heart of the phrase “American conservative.”
August 31st, 2009 | 2:20 pm
I have real reservations about the “national greatness” thing regardless of the Iraq War or whatever. The idea that we need some kind of state-led project (bringing democracy to the Middle East, going to Mars, a civillian version of the draft, whatever) to make us feel like real citizens creeps me out. It really scants the localist and private as avenues for real citizenship. It also overemphasizes the role that the state should play not only in our lives but in our imaginations.
August 31st, 2009 | 2:59 pm
Because everything moves faster in this country and its era, I wonder if the contretemps over whether or not Ronald Reagan was a “conservative” is akin to arguing over which Roman Emperor might have been more chaste: Nero or Elagabalus.
We have not had an authentic “conservative”…in the American sense….. in Washington since Senator Robert Taft anyway.
August 31st, 2009 | 3:25 pm
I agree with Pete, not to mention to Pat Deneen, on the national greatness thing–at least if it has to be manufactured just for greatness’s sake. Part of that somewhat silly movement was in response to the perceived spiritual vacuum after the Cold War, but our purposes shouldn’t ordinarily be national. DW starts out well in wondering why anyone would wonder whether Reagan was a conservative; he was better than Taft because he was less authentically conservative from a Taftian point of view.
August 16th, 2012 | 6:52 am
I almost never leave a response, but i did some searching and wound up here Was Reagan a Conservative? » Postmodern Conservative | A First Things Blog. And I actually do have some questions for you if it’s allright. Could it be simply me or does it give the impression like a few of the remarks look like written by brain dead visitors? :-P And, if you are writing at other online sites, I’d like to keep up with everything fresh you have to post. Would you list of every one of all your community sites like your linkedin profile, Facebook page or twitter feed?
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