The Official End of the Reagan Era

Here’s a shout-out to Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. You won’t find them on Mount Rushmore, yet each of these Presidents can lay claim to a status that transcends stone portraiture or academic canonization. For each has stamped his name and, more important, his ideas, personality and values on a defining chapter of the American story. How do you get an age named after you? Simply put, by shattering the existing political consensus and replacing it with one of your own making, one whose influence is felt long after your time in office.

The Age of Jackson spanned four tumultuous decades, from the 1820s to the Civil War (during which Lincoln, though of the opposing party, did not hesitate to cite his predecessor’s robust nationalism in order to justify his own Constitution-stretching). The man adversaries dubbed King Andrew I converted the early republic, governed by the well bred and well read, into an embryonic democracy. In making war on the Second Bank of the United States, the entrenched money power of his day, the choleric old soldier joyously invented the politics of Us–factory workers, white farmers, land-hungry frontiersmen–vs. Them–the commercial and intellectual élite, blacks, both free and enslaved, and Native Americans, whose road out of Jacksonian America turned into the Trail of Tears.

In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt promised Depression-weary Americans a New Deal. In practical terms, this meant rescuing democratic capitalism from its own unregulated excesses. Along the way, Roosevelt transformed the relationship between the average citizen and his government. The welfare state he fashioned in place of classic laissez-faire was largely improvised. Yet much of it–Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority, federally subsidized agriculture, stock-market oversight, for starters–has long since been woven into the fabric of American life. Politically, too, F.D.R. shuffled the deck, luring black voters out of the party of Lincoln, even while placating lily-white Southern Democrats. A self-proclaimed “preacher President,” Roosevelt raised a stricken nation’s spirits through his unquenchable optimism and masterly use of the bully pulpit invented by his distant relation and role model Theodore Roosevelt.

In Dixon, Ill., Jack Reagan’s son Ron listened spellbound to F.D.R.’s honey-on-toast baritone as it came out of the radio. Four times the future Great Communicator cast a vote for Roosevelt, whose consolidation of power in Washington the adult Reagan would set out to reverse. The Age of Reagan didn’t begin on Jan. 20, 1981, when he famously declared, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Its roots run much deeper–to 1966 at least. Two years after Barry Goldwater pronounced an end to Eisenhower-style moderation, two years before Richard Nixon appropriated Roosevelt’s forgotten man as precursor to his Silent Majority, Reagan the citizen-politician found himself leading a federation of the fed-up.

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His election that year as governor of California mirrored a broader repudiation of urban riots and campus turmoil; of perceived moral decay, the long reach of the tax collector and a liberal consensus stretched to the breaking point by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. In 1980 an electorate similarly radicalized by double-digit inflation, crippling interest rates and the humiliating spectacle of 52 Americans held hostage by Iranian kidnappers would award the old Hollywood player what Reagan biographer Lou Cannon calls the role of a lifetime.

Thirty years before Barack Obama, Reagan offered hope and change to a nation sick of the status quo. As with F.D.R. in 1933, the new President’s most pressing task was to dispel gathering fears that the U.S. might be entering a period of irreversible decline. Ironically, nothing so impressed voters as the grit and humor he displayed after being shot by a would-be assassin. Reagan practiced coalition government, though in his case it meant melding the cultural conservatism that had made him governor with the economic conservatism that had propelled him into the Oval Office. Populists and pinstripes–Reagan spoke to, and for, both. His governing majority included Wall Street titans and nascar fans, right-to-lifers and leave-me-alone libertarians, Jeane Kirkpatrick neocons and xenophobes channeling Father Coughlin through his lineal descendants on toxic talk radio.

Reagan preferred laughing at his adversaries to demonizing them. He disarmed critics of his relaxed administrative style by acknowledging that the right hand of his Administration didn’t always know what its far-right hand was up to. As the laughter crested, so did the tax-cutting, the regulatory rollback and the military buildup that foreshadowed, paradoxically, the most sweeping arms reductions of the nuclear era. The ensuing political realignment was measured less in voter-registration rolls than in a pervasive skepticism about the state. Because there were many things government did badly, it came to be assumed, there was virtually nothing it did well. Long after his return to California in 1989, Reagan’s anti-Washington consensus continued to exercise a powerful restraint on his successors. Even the notably activist Bill Clinton was driven to acknowledge an end to the era of Big Government.

Nothing so visibly riled the last Democratic President as Obama’s description of Reagan earlier this year as a transformative leader. More recently the same phrase has been applied to Obama by General Colin Powell, himself a prominent alumnus of the Reagan White House. Inevitably the prospect of an Obama presidency has led observers to ask, Is the Age of Reagan over? In the wake of Wall Street’s collapse, Reagan’s vaunted “magic of the marketplace” has come in for heavy criticism. Did the deregulatory pendulum swing too far? Have Americans glorified individual success at the expense of shared purpose? And what of the visionary who could imagine a Strategic Defense Initiative to trump the existing arms race but who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, conceive of an alternative to cheap fossil fuels?

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The very debate is a tribute of sorts. (Stop and think: When was the last time you heard anyone arguing Franklin Pierce’s legacy?) Moreover, if you doubt Reagan’s continuing influence, look no further than the dueling tax cuts offered by Obama and John McCain to a populace awash in red ink. That said, no President is immune to the law of unintended consequences. By decoupling conservatism in the 1980s from fiscal responsibility, he unwittingly sanctioned future deficits and helped usher in a consumerist society gaudily living beyond its means. The result: credit-card conservatism. Deprived of their green eyeshades, the Cold War and the Soviet Union, Reagan’s ideological children have little to unify their fractious family except love of country and loyalty to the past.

Certainly the campaign they ran this fall was anything but Reaganesque. One wonders what Reagan the onetime movie star would make of a campaign that made an epithet out of celebrity. More than tactics, ideas mattered to Reagan. He was the proverbial conviction politician, and his midlife conversion from New Deal liberal to Goldwater conservative owed more to Friedrich von Hayek than Joe the Plumber–the latter a perfect symbol of a party running on intellectual fumes. While Reagan thought in decades, if not centuries, his political heirs define success as owning the news cycle. Thus Halloween came early this year, as GOP operatives lurched from Ayers to acorn to questioning their opponents’ patriotism and flinging allegations of socialism. The last claim in particular rang hollow coming from one who voted to recapitalize Wall Street and partly nationalize the banking system with $700 billion in taxpayer funds.

A base campaign indeed. McCain is a better man than his robocalls. Yet he became enmeshed in the red-state-vs.-blue-state, hot-button, wedge-issue, 50%-plus-one formula that has dominated and degraded our politics in these locust years of racial, regional and cultural polarization. Reagan at his best was a happy warrior, who put a smile on the sometimes dour face of conservatism and recast his political faith as both optimistic and futuristic. He was no hater, and cultural scapegoating wasn’t his style. Indeed, in 1978 Reagan courageously opposed a California referendum that would have made it easier to fire gay schoolteachers simply on account of their sexual orientation.

Conservatives wishing to honor their modern founding father might begin by practicing what Reagan preached in his valedictory address to the 1992 GOP Convention in Houston. “Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone,” he told us, “I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts.” Some things are ageless.

The populist Jackson, a war hero, snatched power from the élite and spread it to farmers, laborers and the common man

THE ERA OF JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 1820s to the Civil War: a voice for frontiersmen

Defeating Depression F.D.R. created federal jobs and retirement security, changing our relationship with government

F.D.R. AND THE NEW DEAL 1930s to mid-’60s: Washington as interventionist

Supply sider Reagan rejected Big Government and cut taxes. And he pursued economic deregulation–to a fault

THE REAGAN REVOLUTION 1966 to 2006: a conservative revival

A historian and biographer who has headed five presidential libraries, Smith is now scholar-in-residence at George Mason University

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