Historian Gary Wills, in what was supposed to be at once a memorable bon mot and the journalistic equivalent of a Zen koan, once alleged that Reagan did not “mean the meanness” of his views. The remark had a limited shelf life, appealing only to a talking class that delights in thinking it is thinking, the class that took as axiom the notion that Reagan was fundamentally stupid. Wills’ comment has fallen on increasingly deaf ears for a simple reason: it was untrue. Ronald Reagan meant everything he said. Therein lay the key to his appeal.

At the end of the Ford interregnum, the Republican Party was in disarray. Nixon’s disgraceful exit had enervated the Republicans, and Ford had been saddled with stagflation and a serious public relations problem for having pardoned Nixon. The Democrats could have elected anyone they wished in 1976; in what can only be described as an act of astonishingly good sportsmanship, they turned loose on the nation the enfeebled Carter.

Reagan had already sensed the void at the head of the Republican Party, and the general leadership vacuum in the nation, when he opposed Ford in the 1976 primaries. But even in 1968 he had challenged Nixon for the presidency, because he recognized fundamental, qualitative differences between his own brand of Republican conservatism and Nixon’s.
Reagan’s conservatism had its roots in 19th century conservative thought; Nixon’s, if one may suppose, lay closer to the 18th century vision of Burke, which was really a regurgitation of Cicero’s largely insupportable vision of the Roman optimates: all members of society in their place, everyone doing their job (Cicero’s legendary Concordia ordinum bonorum, i.e., the consensus of all good men). Such conservatism is resistant and largely negative, relying on a near-worship of the status quo.

Nixon followed almost indistinguishably his Democratic predecessors; his protestations that he wished to end the Viet Nam war were belied by incursions into Laos and the bombing of Cambodia; his policy towards the Soviets differed little from that of Kennedy or Johnson; domestically, his wage-price freeze (economically useless) was the worst kind of government interventionism into the operation of the market, a frightening blend of Marxist planned economy and Diocletian’s Edict of 302, which attempted to freeze prices and wages across the Roman Empire. Ralph Nader claimed, when he ran for president in 2000, that he did so because there was no material difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush, or between Republicans and Democrats in general. Nader miscalculated by a mere three decades; he should have run in 1968.

Reagan’s conservatism, by contrast, relied on an absolute distrust of the ability of government to solve or, the military excepted, to run anything. For him, the fundamental unit of society was the individual. The state needed to justify incursion or interference into the affairs of the private individual; the individual owed no justification to the state. Reagan’s now published writings make it clear that he wanted as little government intervention in the day-to-day management of people’s lives as possible.

Reagan’s conservatism rested on three platforms of equal importance. First, he possessed an absolute faith in free market economics. This belief in the market, undoubtedly born in his days as an economics major at Eureka College, predominates his writings. His belief in the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith and the general dicta of Classical Economics was unshakeable. Government’s legitimate function in the market was limited to the prevention of catastrophe and enhancement of the individual’s opportunity to succeed on his or her own initiative.

Second, he believed in lower taxes. Reagan was probably the only president ever to pay taxes at the very highest rate of 91%, a rate that he quite rightly felt was confiscatory. (In ancient Rome, for example, when the government took that much property from a citizen, it at least had the decency to execute him first.) Reagan preferred the view of Andrew Mellon that confiscatory taxes on the rich, in the final analysis, hurt the poor by discouraging investment. Whatever the long-term impact of his tax policies (and economists are by no means agreed on them – the federal deficit has grown, but so has the GDP and GNP, exponentially, since Reagan’s tax cuts took effect), Reagan remained committed to his economic policy throughout his public life.

Third, Reagan believed in a strong military, one augmented by an active, vital intelligence community. He recognized that it was necessary for there to be an effective force to defend the peaceful way of life in our country. It is easy, at this remove, when we are the world’s last superpower, to forget the general disrepair and disrepute into which the military had fallen after Viet Nam; even when Carter admitted that U.S. military intervention abroad was warranted, he was hamstrung by the fact that we lacked the capability. Reagan’s commitment to his doctrine of peace through strength never wavered, and the current condition of all branches of the military (particularly the Navy) reflects his willingness to spend large amounts of money two decades ago. Reagan’s thinking on a military build-up was inspired by a basically dichotomous view of the world, but one neither simplistic nor crude, despite the simplicity with which it could be formulated: America was basically good, its adversaries basically evil. Reagan’s reputation as the “Great Communicator” rested largely on his ability to rally the majority of Americans to support this view. In this he enjoyed a bit of luck that all statesmen need: he had a visible, definable opponent in Communism. The Soviet Union provided Reagan with a tangible foe – unlike the People’s Republic of China, the U.S.S.R. was sufficiently transparent for the U.S. to know pretty much everything it was doing: where it was sending its own troops, where it was sending its proxies, how much money it was spending on arms, and how fast its arms stockpiles were increasing. The well-documented movements of the Soviets allowed Reagan to extrapolate and identify a purpose for their activities, one consonant with what most Americans knew of Leninist Marxism: that it was primarily ruthless, consequent, and eschatological, willing to employ coercion, intimidation, or force to bring about the Utopian thesis of the Marxist dialectic. Had reinforcement of Reagan’s beliefs been necessary, the Soviets obligingly provided it by invading Afghanistan.

China, by contrast, occupied surprisingly little of Reagan’s attention, outside of its human rights violations. Perhaps he knew the lessons of history about fighting on two fronts, even rhetorically; more likely, the bulk of Reagan’s thinking on world affairs was shaped in the time when China was largely unknown and unknowable. Similarly, he dismissed local insurrectionist movements that were springing up around the world as Soviet surrogates, and for evidence he could usually provide instances of Soviet financial backing or Cuban military assistance.

Reagan’s ability, even if myopic, to narrow the world from multiple states with competing interests down to a “good” country and a “bad” country, allowed him to focus not only his own, but our own, energies on a millenarian conflict for the world’s soul as well as its political and economic future. The logic of such a conflict befitted a man who came of age in WWII, when the first of the millenarian wars was waged against fascism.
The success of his myopia is demonstrable.

Reagan’s vision remained clear and consistent throughout his public life, but the accuracy of that vision was disputed by many. How, then, did he succeed so often in imposing his views on the electorate, on Congress, or on other statesmen?

The term “Great Communicator” has often been applied to Reagan, with some accuracy. But we might assign the epithet to Hitler or Mussolini with equal merit. Reagan’s acting career enabled him to master media, but that mastery would have betrayed itself over time had he lacked substance. Reagan communicated so well because he projected a fundamental decency, courage, humor, and humility that so many politicians lack. His adversaries, foreign or domestic, political or academic, black or white, often made the mistake of portraying Reagan as an enemy. He never returned the favor. Sneering insinuations about his intellectual defects were ignored, now given lie to forever as archivists comb through his personal writings. Allegations that he avoided active service during WWII out of cowardice were never met (in fact, he had poor eyesight); the 77 people that Reagan saved as a lifeguard on the Rock River could attest to the personal courage of the man. If he projected communism as an evil, he was willing to see evil born from errors in judgment rather than fundamental defect; this willingness to, in Christian terms, separate sin from sinner, may have saved humanity from a nuclear holocaust. It certainly did it no harm.

Reagan’s Christian faith informed all of his actions; fundamentally, Christianity is an optimistic religion, and Reagan was an optimistic man, believing fully in the glorious hereafter as much in his 1928 poem, “Life,” as in his 1994 farewell letter to the American people, in which he disclosed that he had Alzheimer’s. Yet, as his son Ronald observed at the Simi Valley graveside service, he never made the mistake of using that Christianity in the political arena. The current crop of self-proclaimed conservatives, from President Bush and the presumptive nominee McCain on down, would do well to follow his example.

The conservative message has changed little since Reagan, but the messengers have, to its detriment. Bush has been credited with restoring personal honor to the White House, and he may well have done so; Clinton did not leave him a tough act to follow in that respect. But conservatism now seems strident and angry. Some of that anger, paradoxically, has been generated defending the legacy of a president who seldom if ever lost his temper. The virulent assault on Reagan in liberal and academic circles engendered an equally fierce defense. Perhaps that is the great lesson of Reagan to his conservative and neocon heirs. Aside from the Iran-contra affair, Reagan never seemed on the defensive. The old lineman from Eureka College had learned his football lessons well: the best defense really is a good offense. Reagan’s thinking developed logically from a few deeply-held principles, principles which he affirmed, pursued,and promoted consistently for the rest of his life.