Reagan Belongs on Kings Row
Why envious professors won't give the Gipper his due.
By Steven G. Calabresi
Monday, December 4, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST
Ronald Reagan has always been underrated. When he ran for Governor of California and for President of the United States, his opponents all dismissed him as an actor and an extremist. After Mr. Reagan won both of those offices, his opponents in the press and in the legislature dismissed him again as someone who could fool the public with his personal popularity but whose policies would not prevail. After Mr. Reagan won the Cold War and launched an unprecedented economic recovery, his opponents in the intelligentsia dismissed him as a lucky and amiable man who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. And, as the evidence accumulates that Mr. Reagan was along with Franklin Roosevelt one of the two most influential presidents of the Twentieth Century, the experts in presidential survey rankings decline to rank him as a "Great" President along with FDR, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln giving him an eighth place "Near Great" ranking instead.
The fact is that Ronald Reagan has always been our most consistently underrated president--as he was found to be by the Federalist Society's and The Wall Street Journal's recent survey of presidential rankings. Ronald Reagan was simultaneously a man of ideas and a man of action. Like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, he had a moral vision of how to improve the United States and the world, and like both of them he worked resolutely to make that moral vision a reality. We have had many presidents who were doers, and some who were thinkers as well. But, we have had very few presidents who through their vision and deeds did as much to make the world a better place as did Ronald Reagan. It is for this reason that Mr. Reagan deserves recognition as a "Great" president.
Ronald Reagan's cause was the advance of liberty both at home and abroad. He was simultaneously a great visionary, a foreign policy genius, and the rejuvenator of the American economy. His role in all three of these respects was all the more remarkable because Mr. Reagan came from nowhere. He was the son of an alcoholic, who attended uncompetitive schools, and he was, like Lincoln, largely self taught.
Notwithstanding all these limitations, Mr. Reagan became along with Margaret Thatcher one of the prime visionaries and defenders of liberal capitalism ever to grace the world stage. Mr. Reagan's presidency began at a dark moment in American history when defeats in Vietnam and Iran and the Watergate Scandal had all combined to sap the morale of America's elites and her people. Mr. Reagan knew that the U.S. was on the right side of history in the century-long global struggle between socialism and capitalism, and he stubbornly and single mindedly staked out a vision of the future in which entrepreneurial capitalism would be everywhere triumphant. Today, twenty years after Mr. Reagan's inauguration, his vision is the predominant one throughout the world. Reaganite free market policies are on the ascendancy in the U.S., in Western and Eastern Europe, in Latin America, and even in Communist China. While much work is left to be done, it is fair to say that the Marxist ideas that were in vogue twenty years ago have now been left as Mr. Reagan said "on the ash heap of history." There can be no question that Mr. Reagan was one of the greatest visionaries since Lincoln to occupy the presidency of the United States.
Second, Mr. Reagan was also one of the greatest foreign policy geniuses to occupy the presidency. Indeed, he is on a par with Winston Churchill in this regard. Like Churchill, Mr. Reagan realized that his adversary could be defeated but never appeased. And, like Churchill, Reagan set about organizing that defeat long before public opinion ever realized that the rolling back of communism was attainable. Mr. Reagan bled the former Soviet Union to death by forcing it to keep pace with U.S. arms developments, by placing nuclear missiles in Western Europe, by developing the Strategic Defense Initiative, and by waging proxy wars against the communists in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua. He did all of these things over the intense opposition of America's intellectual elites and with minimal help from the Congress or the editorial pages of our leading newspapers. At a critical moment in the struggle, when former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev launched a peace initiative, Mr. Reagan had the presence of mind to dare Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, if he really wanted peaceful relations. The ensuing collapse of the Wall in November 1989 led to the peaceful collapse of the entire Soviet Empire without a single shot being fired and with no loss of life! So spectacular a military victory was beyond anyone's imagination nine years earlier when Mr. Reagan became president, and it is surely one of the most spectacular foreign policy victories ever recorded in human history.
Aside from being a visionary and a foreign policy genius, Mr. Reagan excelled in a third respect as the rejuvenator of America's economy. He came to office after Jimmy Carter at a time of high inflation, high interest rates, and high unemployment. He vanquished all three of these demons and, by ending energy price controls, he brought a swift end to the energy crisis as well. Mr. Reagan's marginal tax rate cuts in his 1981 tax bill launched a spectacular period of economic growth--the benefits of which we continue to reap today. Mr. Reagan simplified the tax structure further with his 1986 tax reform legislation, and he gave great impetus to the deregulation movement which had begun in the late 1970's. He also popularized privatization of government resources, and he helped lay the groundwork for the critical campaign going on today to create education vouchers in place of the current government monopoly over education.
Ronald Reagan's momentous domestic policy legacy became clear in 1994 when voters responded to Bill Clinton's proposal to socialize American medicine by electing Republican majorities to both Houses of Congress for the first time since 1952. The rise of the GOP Congress was a direct response to Clinton's effort to challenge the Reagan legacy of limited government. Since 1994, Clinton has abandoned direct frontal assaults on the Reagan legacy, and the GOP Congress has delivered with Reaganite policies on capital gains reduction and welfare reform which have produced widespread benefits. In many ways, Clinton has been forced against his wishes into presiding over the consolidation of Mr. Reagan's legacy much as Dwight Eisenhower played a similar role in consolidating New Deal policies during the 1950's. Looking back on Ronald Reagan's impact on American domestic policy twenty years after his election makes it clear that his was a watershed presidency.
Ronald Reagan was a visionary, a foreign policy genius, and the most important figure in the domestic policy of the United States of the last quarter century. He was a man of ideas, like Jefferson, and a man of action, like FDR. He belongs in the pantheon of our greatest presidents because he helped define what this country was about for all of us and because he did so very much to rise above his times to make the world a better place.
Mr. Calabresi is a professor of law at Northwestern University and National Co-Chairman of the Federalist Society.
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