The Reagan Era Begins: Democracy Ends

from Special Correspondent T.S. deHaviland

The recent passing of Ronald Reagan has American conservatives gushing over the “greatness” of the 40th president’s legacy and his goodness as a man.

I won’t smear the dead by critiquing the latter, but the former is another matter. Reagan’s tenure in the White House turned me into a liberal–and the first President Bush sealed the deal.

We shouldn’t forget in our desire to praise that the 1980s saw the beginnings of global outsourcing, widescale Islamic terrorism, and the rapid growth of the gap between rich and poor. Reagan was the president who rode to power on the backs of supposed “welfare queens” and the glorious struggle against the “evil empire.” The great economic growth of the era of Reaganomics led to its own set of scandals, most notably in the Savings and Loan business, and utterly gutted the industries of America’s rust belt.

More disturbing than his administration’s imperfect policies (I’m leaving out the incredible deficit spending he oversaw) was what his election meant in terms of the American people. Even while Reagan was the last of the great American political orators, he was also the first of America’s figurehead presidents. Whether or not he was the best man for the job, like the current governor of California, he was elected for all the wrong reasons. His charm and grassroots rhetoric were totally opposed to the outcomes of his policy, but were also the reason he “resonated” with voters. And with Reagan, “resonating” became more important than actual politics. He was, to the end, an actor, and that’s exactly why we elected him: he played the part in a way that we liked. And every president we’ve elected since then has done the same: Bush senior was only elected because he was marginally more presidential-seeming than his opponent, and that Clinton was much more about feeling good than governing consistently should be pretty obvious by now (if it wasn’t when he was saxing it up on the Arsenio Hall Show).

This trend has become all too clear in the person of our current president, who proved that you don’t even need to be particularly coherent to be elected, just sort of down-homey enough and photographed in front of a bunch of flags.

It’s true that Reagan marked a change in American political history: he ushered out the era of the statesman and ushered in the era of the politician-as-celebrity. We proved, with Reagan, that we as a people may not be as worthy of our democracy as we would like to think.