A quick break while I re-politicize. A friend linked to this article on G Reader. I'll admit, I've been guilty of rose-tinting my view of Reagan on the basis of certain accomplishments of his. Part of this is because I was eight when he left office; it's nearly all hindsight evaluation, for me. What I knew about our President while he was in office was told to me by my teachers, my parents, and talking-head snippets from the TV*. Part of my rose-tinting is because I desperately want to find someone on the other side of the spectrum to relate to in a human way, someone whose policies I consider valid if debatable on other grounds. Someone who doesn't strike me as evil (by which I mean venal, selfish and grasping, not soulless). So I take this human president, forgive him his trespasses, and wish today's Republicans could be more like him.
It's exactly like wishing today's kids would listen to better music, conveniently forgetting NKOTB, Right Said Fred, Color Me Badd, and Vanilla Ice. Doesn't mean today's music doesn't largely suck, or that there wasn't also Jodeci, Boyz II Men, Public Enemy and NWA "in my day" (as one snot-nosed little Bieber-haired punk put it - Christ, I'm thirty, not sixty). It just means that my blanket judgment has some holes.
So yes, Tea Party, you can have Reagan back, if that's really a huge thing for you. Let's examine this article's whopping oversight, its careful omission which is either profoundly myopic or deliberately misleading. We'll start from this Thomas Paine quotation and move on.
"Government is a necessary evil. Let us have as little of it as possible."
(So far as I can tell, this is not actually a quotation, but a summary of part of the first essay of Common Sense, but let's treat it as gospel for the sake of argument.) I agree - but let us then agree what constitutes "as little as possible." We live in a society with a distribution of wealth so painfully disproportionate that "distribution" might be a misnomer. Power is allocated along similar if not identical lines. This disproportion was codified in post-Colonial America - women and slaves couldn't have money - and it still wasn't as bad as it is today. Today's second-class citizens ostensibly have full citizenship; however, their rights and their earning potential are being trodden upon by the nongovernmental oligarchs' refusal to take a damn pay cut instead of laying off a few thousand workers and closing down a plant (or, you know, Detroit).
For the majority of American citizens to have full access to their Constitutional rights and the natural rights upon which the founding documents were predicated - including the minimal quality of life required for "the pursuit of happiness" - the government must adapt to changing realities that reflect challenges to the enfranchisment and prosperity of its people. This article would have me look instead upon the 1780s, the 1980s, and the early 21st century as some sort of constant - across which only the political aims of those who self-identify as liberal have changed.
What if Thomas Paine's America was transported through time and existed in the world today right alongside the U.S.A. as we know it? This other country has no modern industry, no infrastructure, a population of about ten per square mile to our 73.5 - and we've got a hell of a lot more square mileage - and oh, yeah, slavery. What author, PAC, pundit or politician could look at these two nations and say convincingly that the political exigencies of each were the same? Who thinks these two countries require the same things of a just and efficient government?
I'm a liberal, and I agree - we should have as little government as necessary. I'm a liberal, and I believe that is entirely about individual and personal freedoms. I'm a liberal, and all of American History tells me that the government will have to take responsibility for extending and protecting those freedoms.
I'm a liberal, and I won't remain silent while my political raison d'etre is co-opted by so-called libertarians using imagery they don't understand to protest policies they don't understand. It was amusing and only mildly offensive, until I had to swallow the phrase "Senator Rand Paul."
So, conservatives, I brought your Ronald Reagan back. Any chance you have my Common Sense lying around? If you're not going to read it, I could use it back.
*So here's what I thought then, synthesizing a perspective from what I'd heard: President Reagan is helping us to win the Cold War (war is bad); President Reagan is a Republican from California (I'm from California); Mom and Dad voted for the other guy (Mom and Dad are Democrats). President Reagan might have had some part in a really convoluted but illegal thing involving arms (guns, not body parts), hostages, and something called a Contra (Contra is a video game where you shoot things. I used the Konami Code and beat the game - probably that's not what they're talking about). This is not the sort of perception from which you can form a definitive value judgment; by contrast, it was clear to me from the perceptions of the elders in my world that Nixon, Goldwater, and the Republican Party in general were "bad".
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