Republicans in Search of Reagan


Recently, a group of Republican big wigs (or Whigs, perhaps?) gathered in front of TV cameras to pick a new party chairman. The master of ceremonies asked the candidates to name their favorite Republican president, and each one gave the right answer. And how would you know these guys were Republicans? Because there was a right answer to a question about an opinion. They are, after all, the party of El Rushbo, who proudly calls his listeners ditto heads. Democrats and Independents would probably take offense at the implied lack of critical thinking, but Republicans seem to have no trouble getting in line and marching in lock step.

And what was the right answer? Not Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt, the two most progressive Republican presidents in American history. After all, neither of those two did much to help big business, and while many of our countrymen thought well enough of them back in the 1930s to have their faces carved in stone in South Dakota, right next to Washington and Jefferson, modern Republican party guys don't talk about them too much.

The right answer was, of course... (drum roll, slight hesitation) ...Ronald Reagan! Now there was a man who knew how to help big business! And if the purpose of the Republican party is to make the rich richer, Reagan pulled that one off so much better than Warren Harding! But what about W? He's gone far beyond Reagan, increasing the wealth of the top 400 richest Americans by almost $700B in eight short years. And big business never had a better friend! From big mining to big oil to big pharma to Wall Street, W called off or collared the watch dogs to the point where hundreds of Americans have died from a spectacular lack of regulations and millions have lost a large part of their retirement savings while the CEOs didn't even have to sacrifice their expensive massages and manicures.

Even though a Republican president named Bush has led the Republican party for twelve of the last twenty years, Republican party politicos don't seem to want to even mouth the "B" word. But why doesn't W get any respect? After all, didn't he just continue or try to finish the work that Reagan began?

Well, yes, quite possibly so, and that may be where W's real problem lies. While Reagan sold citizens the idea that "government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem," people on rooftops in New Orleans had to live the reality, and the words that Reagan called the nine scariest in the English language became the phrase those people really wanted to hear: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

If, as the first Republican president said, the American government is "of the people, by the people and for the people," then when Reagan said "government is the problem," what he really meant becomes "the people are the problem." And that would seem to be the modern Republican party position. By "the people," of course, they mean the rabble, the unwashed masses, anyone making less that $250K/year -- the non-rich, in other words. Keep that in mind the next time a Republican points out, as they love to do, that the U.S. is not a democracy, it's a republic. Well, to put the fine point on it, the U.S. is a constitutionally-limited representational democratic republic, but what Republicans want to make clear is that it's not a democracy -- they really don't like the sound of that word, do they?

So when Reagan told Americans that government (the people) is (are) the problem, his solution was less government (less concern for the people). And guess who benefits from less govenment (less concern for the people) -- why, that would be the rich, wouldn't it? Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote a few hundred years ago that the natural economic order is for the rich to get richer, and the best government is the one that most effectively seeks to redistribute wealth more evenly. In other words, long before the Declaration of Independence was an idea from a group of rebellious colonists, Mr. Rousseau could have told you that less govenment means the rich get richer and everyone else gets less. Surprised?

The big lie Reagan told, and that he got a majority of Americans to believe, is that less government would be better for everyone, when it's really only better for those at the top rung of the economic ladder -- everyone else gets screwed. The problem for Republicans now is that George W. Bush, while he talked a good Reagan game, showed the American people the reality of less government, in ways they're not likely to forget for maybe a decade or two, such as Katrina and the Wall Street meltdown. They're looking for another Ronald Reagan, but what they really need is a Super Reagan, because before the next Reagan tries to sell the "less government" line, he'll have to make everyone forget Bush's epic demonstrations of the meaning of less government. I could wish them luck, but honestly, I don't.

3/6/09