Reagan by Eugene Jarecki

It's available through Comcast On Demand, as an HBO Documentary.

campaign ads

Via Ezra Klein, you can see a Mitt Romney ad.

And then watch Ronald Reagan's 30-minute ad for his successful 1966 run for Governor of California.

Mythologizing Reagan

I find it very interesting to watch modern figures get mythologized and ossified by my own contemporaries. That has happened for two people--Martin Luther King and Ronald Reagan. I've complained plenty about King and the master narrative of the civil rights movement, a narrative that simplifies and depoliticizes King so that everyone can feel happy about themselves. Oddly, I haven't written a full condemnation of this on the blog it seems, though I have touched on it here and here. Maybe I'll get to that soon.

The creation of a Reagan to fit the modern conservative movement is expected. His mythology will be complete when Democrats create their own Reagan too. Obama has done some of this, but it's incomplete. Right now though, literally as I write, conservatives are completing their Reagan mythology. Though not without reality intruding, as David Silbey usefully points out:

Ronald Reagan, by contrast, is becoming somewhat re-radicalized. "Ronaldus Magnus" has come to be an avatar to the American right.

This has led to the eliding of some of Reagan's actions, actions which do not fit well with current conservative orthodoxy. Thus, for example, Rush Limbaugh, confronted by a caller pointing out that Reagan raised taxes, could essentially refuse to believe him. The Reagan of today could not be seen to raise taxes, give amnesty to illegal immigrants, compromise with the Democrats, or negotiate with the Soviets. Thus, those aspects of his Presidency get written out. What is left is a saint for the right wing, updated for current positions. One who got a fair number of streets, also.

A Rare Admirable Quality in Ronald Reagan?

I'm going to write words I never thought I'd write or say: it may not be such a terrible to look to Ronald Reagan on a key issue in the United States for the last several years:

Reagan was far to the left of the 2010 Republican Party on issues such as torture. The convention that he signed in 1988 holds that there is no circumstance of any kind that permits torture, which certainly would include the 9/11 aftermath and related anti-terror efforts today.

But it goes even deeper than that. As I noted in an early 2010 blog post: “Reagan would not have approved of drone-fired missile attacks aimed at killing terrorists; as president, he several times rejected anti-terrorism operations for the sole reason that civilians would have been killed by collateral damage. In 1985, he surprised aides such as Pat Buchanan by ruling out a military response to a Beirut hijacking for fear of civilian casualties; Lou Cannon reported then in the Washington Post that Reagan called retaliation in which innocent civilians are killed “itself a terrorist act.” And the idea of trying terrorists in military tribunals as opposed to a civilian court of law? The Reagan administration was completely against that. Paul Bremer (yes, that Paul Bremer) said in 1987, “a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law, against them.”

To be clear, I absolutely do not think Reagan was a saint, nor does Will Bunch, who also points out that the "'Reagan Doctrine' in Central America, leaving the fight to anti-Communist thugs and death squads that the then-president called “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers,” is arguably the gravest moral failing of his tenure." I couldn't agree more.

But that doesn't take away from the rather stark stance Reagan took against torture, nor does it detract from the obviously-opposite stance of current torture-apologists who claim to look to Reagan as their guiding light. Again, this is in no way an apology for Reagan, and I think his policies were overwhelmingly terrible and negative on both the U.S. and the world. That said, the fact that he was so strongly anti-torture does matter, and just serves as another reminder of how far the right has gone in the last 30 years, as well as how the vision of Reagan that today's right props up as its paragon does not always reflect the Reagan who was actually president.

Michael Jackson-related thought of the day

Since Trend and Erik have done them already, I'm submitting my Michael Jackson-related thought.

Well, really I've had lots of them. But a few of them I spun into an essay on pop and populism for Global Comment, because I'm just a nerd like that. So here: my Michael Jackson related thought.

Which came first, really? Nixon’s “Silent Majority” and the retreat of a real solid progressive movement leading to the Reagan Revolution and faux-populism used to convince people to vote to give their money to the rich, or a fragmenting media culture that killed off the chance for a true mass bond?

It is no accident that the last real pop superstar, Michael Jackson, hit the apex of his popularity in the Reagan years. There was at least an idea of a mass consensus in this country, even though no one really could’ve defined what that consensus was, and yet while we had a white man in office slowly hacking away at the rights of people of color, women, gays and lesbians, and anyone who didn’t fit into a nuclear-family, gender-binary, reactionary ideal of an America that never really existed, our number one superstar was a man celebrated and loved not in spite of his fluid sexuality, racial ambiguity, and androgyny, but because of it.

Michael Jackson: pop superstar, appealing to men and women, old and young, and subversive as hell.

If you want to read the rest, in which I bring in LBJ, leftist elitism, Barack Obama as celebrity, and quote Ellen Willis, it's all here.

Luis Arce Gomez, the "Minister of Cocaine," Sent to Bolivia to Serve Jail Time for Human Rights Violations

Bolivian Colonel Luis Arce Gomez, a military officer who helped bring about right-wing dictator Luis García Meza Tejada's 13-month repressive regime, has been deported to Bolivia, where he will face jail for human rights abuses after serving a jail-term for drug crimes in the U.S. Although barely lasting more than a year, the military killed more than 1000 Bolivians during García Meza's brief reign. Arce Gomez, now 71, can look forward to spending the rest of his life in jail as he begins a 30-year sentence for "human rights violations including genocide, armed uprising, constitutional violations, and murder." Gomez was so in favor of repressive measures and state-sponsored killings as the Secretary of the Interior during García Meza's regime that he notoriously claimed that Bolivians should "walk around with their written will under their arms." In addition to his human rights abuses, Arce Gomez was closely tied to drug cartels, ties that earned him the nickname "Minister of Cocaine," as well as the 17-year jail sentence he served in the United States. To understand just how repugnant the García Meza government was, one simply needs to know that even Ronald Reagan distanced himself from the Bolivian dictator, even while he cozied up to repressive regimes in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

Lillie has more.

Shame on You, John McCain, or," You of All People Should Remember 1968"

I can't make up my mind whether John McCain's gaffe on Reagan and the Prague Spring is laughable or depressing. I'd comment more, but former Alterdestinian Duss gives the "Reagan speaks and Communism falls" meme the proper treatment:

It’s the one where conservatives deploy a potted history of the Cold War — in which Reagan spoke and the walls came tumbling down — to cast international politics as a zero-sum contest between good and evil, and to cow progressives into a more aggressive rhetorical posture toward America’s adversary of the moment. It is usually hidden under the guise of “solidarity with captive peoples” and absent any genuine consideration of the practical effects on the peoples concerned.

Reagan and Latin America

In his response to my discussion of Herring's chapter on Reagan's foreign policy, Rob states:

Reagan's approach to Latin America was a touch more brutal than his immediate predecessors, but the disregard for human rights is only really notable for its contradiction with administration rhetoric towards the Soviet Union. The other difference was Congress; for the first time in a very long while, there was serious objection within Congress to administration Latin American policy. This resulted in a number of unsavory projects to limit the amount of information Congress possessed on US foreign policy, the most notable of which was the Iran-Contra affair. As the Cold War eased, so did US policy, opening some space for opposition movements in Latin America. When these movements no longer threatened to "tip the balance" towards the Soviet Union, they could tolerated and even supported to some extent.

This is a really good point. For as much as progressives rightfully excoriate Reagan for his foreign policy toward Latin America, he really wasn't that much worse than his predecessors going all the way back to William McKinley. The difference as Rob points out was Congress. By the 1980s, severe opposition to U.S. foreign policy in Latin America developed for the first time. Reagan was completely unwilling to heed this opposition, even if it meant engaging in illegal and impeachable actions to pursue his policies in Central America.

Of course, we should keep reminding the world how horrible Reagan was; this is especially true because of how conservatives lionize him. But it's also important to note that William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon were all terrible and the other 20th century presidents not all that great.

In fact, one might make a legitimate argument that the best president for Latin America since 1898 was George W. Bush (!) because he was too mired in his inept Middle Eastern foreign policy to pay Latin America much mind. Even when he did notice Latin America, the attention was too minimal to make a difference, most notably in the failed coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002. That's pretty damned faint praise right there, but it shows how singularly terrible the United States treated Latin America in the 20th century.

From Colony to Superpower, Part XIX

This is the nineteenth installment in the 20 part series Rob Farley and I have commenced to review George Herring's From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. See the Herring Review tag below for previous entries.

This week we will discuss Herring's chapter on the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. This is one of the book's better chapters. I like Herring's analysis of both presidents. He puts Reagan in the proper context without mythologizing him. In fact, Reagan comes across looking pretty bad. As Grandpa Caligula should. Reagan certainly was an important person. He represented what Americans of the 1980s wanted to see in themselves and in doing so, he restored national pride after Vietnam and the Iran hostage situation. The Reagan administration did incredible damage to this country and the world--in foreign policy, in the War on Drugs, in attacking welfare, in cutting domestic programs, in destroying labor unions, and in ignoring the AIDS epidemic because it was considered a gay disease. But ultimately, does Reagan deserve the blame or does the American people? It's not as if these policies were unpopular. At least until Iran-Contra, Reagan had a pretty consistently high approval rating. Why did Americans have so much hate in the 1980s toward people of the world and toward minorities, gays, and the poor in this country? I'm not prepared to offer a useful answer, but it's a sad period of American history.

However, the idea that Reagan won the Cold War has no basis in reality. In fact, most of Reagan's policies were terrible. He unnecessarily ratcheted up Cold War tensions in the early 80s, accusing the Soviets of knowing the Korean Air plane they shot down in 1983 was a civilian plane (not true), pushing Star Wars, and using dangerous rhetoric. His obsession with Central America led to disastrous results for the people of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. None of these places threatened the United States, but Reagan promoted horrible policies in each of these places. That he did so illegally, at least in the case of Nicaragua and El Salvador, is even more reprehensible. Where I can let earlier presidents off the hook a bit for their Latin American policies because both parties basically treated these places the same, by the 1980s, there was clear opposition to hardcore Cold War policies in the area. Congress refused to fund aid to the Contras. And Reagan's minions went around Congress. This was a crime and Reagan should have been impeached. The invasion of Grenada was even more absurd. The idea that Grenada, an island approximately the size of my office, could become the next Cuba was completely ludicrous. Nonetheless, invading the island was really popular with Americans looking for an unequivocal victory.

Reagan's policy toward the Middle East was even worse. Sending U.S. troops into Lebanon without a clear mission was a bad idea, pulling them out after the bombing of the Marine barracks made us look as weak as we had in 1973. Demonizing Iran and then dealing with them to fund the Contras was arguably the most hypocritical move in the long sordid history of American foreign policy. Reagan did a poor job of dealing with the rising tide of Middle Eastern terrorism; bombing Quaddafi's Libya was not an effective response. Virtually nothing the Reagan administration tried here went right.

One thing I thought interesting was that in the 1980s it was still possible to have a foreign policy toward Israel that was different than yes. Reagan was pro-Israel, but Begin caused him endless headaches. I guess latent anti-Semitism, especially in the State Department, was what led to a lot of hostility in the U.S. toward Israel, but at least in the 80s you could formulate an opinion about American relations with them. Today, everyone has to fall over themselves vocalizing fealty to Israel; even pointing this out, as Walt and Mearsheimer did, is cause to be accused of anti-Semitism (or self-hatred if the person involved is Jewish). I don't see how this reflexive relationship to one nation is good for the country.

What positive characteristics we can ascribe to Reagan come from the fact that he wasn't as crazy as he sounded when dealing with the Soviet Union. Although I'd like Herring to go into a bit more detail on what caused the Soviet Union to collapse, it's clear from his narrative that Gorbachev deserved most of the credit for leadership. It was his enterprise that thawed the Cold War and liberalized eastern Europe. Reagan just happened to be there. But to the chagrin of the hard-liners in his foreign policy team like the loathsome Richard Perle, Reagan softened considerably toward the Soviets once he realized what Gorbachev was doing. He stayed out of the way for the most part, and agreed to significant deals with Gorbachev over arms control during their frequent summits. Given his harsh anti-communistic rhetoric of his first term, not only was this change in heart unexpected, but also the best thing he could have done.

As for Bush, it seems that China and Iraq are the most important areas to discuss. Yes, he was president for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, but little he did mattered to this process. He wasn't particularly prepared to deal with this sudden change, but I'm not sure that most presidents would have done better. I do think Bush faced a pretty tough situation after Tiananmen Square. It was horrible, but what was Bush supposed to do? China was too powerful to act strongly against in any meaningful way. We could have completely ended all relations with them, but I remain unconvinced that this would have accomplished much for the Chinese people. As for Iraq, it's hard to argue that we should have let Saddam Hussein take over Kuwait. You really can't sanction nations swallowing their neighbors. The question of whether to leave Saddam in place is pretty tough. Obviously, Bush Jr. taking Saddam out didn't exactly work well. On the other hand, the HW Bush foreign policy team was far more competent than W's, there were active uprisings against Saddam that we might have piggybacked upon, and, for what it's worth, the times were different and the same result might not have happened. On the other hand, this is all speculation. Regardless, promoting internal rebellions and then letting Saddam brutally crush them was pretty terrible and it fits into a long history of Americans promoting democracy and freedom through their rhetoric and then hanging the freedom fighters out to dry when they take it seriously.

Sometimes the long term effects of foreign policy decisions can't be known for years. In 1989, Congress rejected Bush's first choice for Secretary of Defense, John Tower. His second choice: Dick Cheney. Tower might have sucked and maybe Cheney would have been just as powerful in the W administration. But maybe without his term as Secretary of Defense he would have remained a more peripheral player in the latter administration. Certainly the world would be a much better place now had that happened.

The Shock Doctrine 7: Saved By A War

(Previous posts here, Matt's posts here, Trend's "How to Overthrow a Government" here.)

Ohhh, Maggie Thatcher. For feminists like me, Thatcher is a conundrum. On the one hand, she's a success story--a leader of a country, a pioneer for women in power, and one that no one ever doubted was tough enough for the job. And yet everything she did makes me cringe and want to deny her any sort of association with women.

This weekend at WAM we started talking about Palin and the new conservative feminism, and I wonder why none of us thought to bring up Thatcher. The question we were asking was whether one has to be prochoice to be feminist, because that's the question the Palin-types have been asking. But Thatcher? Well...

Klein notes that Thatcher and Pinochet became close friends, but that Thatcher knew she couldn't enact Shock Doctrine-style reforms in England without immediately being tossed out on her ass.

Apparently, Friedman and his acolytes had already been disappointed once before, by none other than Richard Nixon. (Interestingly, our buddy Donald "War Crimes" Rumsfeld was named adviser to Nixon through his connections to Friedman). Nixon's "We are all Keynesians now" proclamation stabbed Friedman in his little shriveled heart.

Friedman paid it back with a crack about Nixon being "socialist," which would make me laugh if it wasn't such a common one in this country. I joked yesterday, after being aggravated by people on NPR calling Obama a socialist, that anyone who calls someone else a socialist should have to explain why that's a bad thing. But honestly, I'm tired of the misuse of the word, though I do wonder if overusing it constantly will actually take the scare power out of it--I wrote about this months ago.

Klein notes:

"The University of Chicago professor had built a movement on the equation of capitalism and freedom, yet free people just didn't seem to vote for politicians who followed his advice."

But the turning point for Thatcher was one we should be able to guess: war. War with Argentina (yes, the dictatorship) over the Falklands/Malvinas. Militarized conflict without allowed Thatcher to militarize conflict within Britain, unleashing riot police on striking coal miners--and plenty of domestic surveillance as well. Sound familiar? Like riot police and "protest pens" and warrantless wiretapping? Good. It should.

Thatcher's strike-busting, along with Reagan's, paved the way for radical capitalist reforms. Thatcher's code-name for the Falklands war was even Operation Corporate, whether out of humor or simple honesty.

Allan Meltzer, a colleague of Friedman's, noted "Ideas are alternatives waiting on a crisis to serve as the catalyst of change."

Klein notes that Friedman and his pals weren't looking for military crisis, but economic crisis.

"However, if an economic crisis hits and is severe enough--a currency meltdown, a market crash, a major recession--it blows everything else out of the water, and leaders are liberated to do whatever is necessary (or said to be necessary) in the name of responding to a national emergency.

If this is true, then right now what we have is an excellent opportunity for change. The Republicans are clearly out of ideas--this WSJ article was summed up on Twitter as:

FakeHowardDeanRT @kaiserbrown GOP Plan for Budget. CUT RICH PEPLZ TAXEZ, DIGZ US FOR OIL, ???, PROFIT!$!$!$

Americans aren't about to fall for that right now. Instead, we're seeing anger at the rich along with steady approval ratings for President Obama (I still kind of love typing that) and Paul Krugman's rock star status as he attempts to pull Obama's economic team further left only growing. It's time for ideas again, and this time it's us on the left who have them. Bernie Sanders has introduced a real single-payer health care plan in the Senate, and Sherrod Brown is having hearings discussing the New Deal. We can be the ones with the ideas this time around.

A little bit of perspective

It seems, for the most part, people are giving Obama the benefit of the doubt on the economy-- as well they should, since this crisis was years in the making, and fixing something is often more complicated than breaking it in the first place. Unemployment keeps ticking upwards, and is often the last part of the economy to recover. For a little bit of perspective, we can look at the data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and see how the horrible, miserable Carter years compared to the glorious Renaissance that comprised Reagan's reign.

Reagan won the 1980 election, when the unemployment rate was a salty 7.1% (a full pecent lower than the February 2009 rate of 8.1%). Unemployment rose in 1981 and 1982 (topping out at 9.7%), then slowly started to fall (9.6% in 1983, 7.5% in 1984, 7.2% in 1985). It wasn't until 1986-- six years into Reagan's term-- that unemployment was lower than it was at the end of the Carter administration, and then only by one-tenth of a percent (7.1% in 1986).

Clinton inherited a high unemployment rate as well-- in fact, higher than Reagan inherited from the Carter administration (7.5%). The Clinton administration enjoyed a quick and steep drop in unemployment to some of the lowest levels since the early 1950's-- 6.9% in 1993, 6.1% in 1994, 5.6% in 1995, 5.4% in 1996, continuing to drop until 2000, which had an unemployment rate of 4.0%. Every single year of the George W. Bush administration had higher unemployment than the last three years of Clinton.

So this may take some time to fix. This recession is more like the one in the early 1980's than the early 1990's, but I'm confident that Obama will get the ship turned around faster than Reagan did. And if Reagan can attain nearly canonized status by overseeing six years of unemployment higher than the Jimmy Carter years, Obama should be on the $20 bill if he can fix this mess in two or three years.

Historical Image of the Day

Ronald Reagan presenting his famous "A Time For Choosing" speech, supporting Barry Goldwater and making his own name as a conservative hero, 1964.

Does Darren White Shave His Legs?

Not that it really matters I guess. But I certainly wouldn't expect it from the Bernalillo County sheriff who is running as a Republican to replace Heather Wilson in my old New Mexico district. White is the definition of Republican jerk and is about to have his hat handed to him by Martin Heinrich.

Over at Daily Kos, they put this picture up to highlight his ankle tattoo of Reagan's signature. Which is really creepy. And then I looked closer and saw a very smooth looking leg there.

Reevaluating Carter, Reagan, and Clinton on the Environment

Historians' views of presidents change over time, depending on the circumstances of the present. In my view (which I think is becoming increasingly obvious) the key question of the 21st century is the environment, broadly defined. This includes pollution, climate change, energy supplies, urban issues, etc. Rising oil prices may not feel like an environmental issue, but of course it is given the larger importance of oil production, what could replace it, and how cheap oil has allowed us to so drastically alter nature.

How will a new environmental interpretation affect how we view presidents? The one president such a view clearly helps is Jimmy Carter. So often, Carter is seen as a bad president. McCain called him "lousy" recently. I wonder how McCain would compare Bush to Carter? Anyway, while Carter had his weak points, particularly in his handling of the Iran hostage crisis, he was a real visionary on environmental issues. I believe that future historians will see Carter as a man far ahead of his time, telling Americans things they needed to hear. Carter had the vision to change America before it was too late, too get us off a strictly petroleum based energy economy before the problem became unmangable. But this was not the lesson the nation wanted to hear.

And that leads us to presidents whose reputations will be sullied as a result of their environmental policies. No one will suffer as bad as Ronald Reagan. His destruction of the solar energy industry was disgusting. Across the board, Reagan's environmental policies were terrible, but his rejection of everything Carter tried to do will be seen as one of his most important legacies. The perception of Reagan will decline for many reasons I believe, but none more important than his horrible energy policy.

I also believe that Bill Clinton will suffer on this account. Clinton was great at the big environmental acts that garnered him tons of headlines. He was great on national parks for instance. And obviously, he was better than Reagan in all aspects of environmental policy. But Clinton also happily supported American automakers' investment in trucks and SUV's in the 1990s. He took no steps to reduce the nation's dependence on oil, to solve untrammeled growth, or to prepare the nation for living in the 21st century environment.

Historical Image of the Day

Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan.

There should be a special "When Bastards Meet" edition for pictures like this.

Could Al Haig Be Next?

I don't know what to do. All of my favorite icons from the 80s are dying. Not long ago, we lost Tammy Faye. Then, Michael Deaver passes away. No one did more to shape the Reagan image, not that ol' Ron probably remembered who the man was by 1985. Then today I hear about the passage of Leona Helmsley. The grand dame of evil was one of the true legends of the worst decade in the history of humanity. I'm sure there are some celebratory parties going on right now hosted by the many people who worked for her.

It's a good thing we have such an evil administration right now. If a Democrat was in the White House, we would be entering a dangerous and perhaps unprecedented period of unevilness. What would we do?

Also, the answer to the question in the post title is that I hope so.