Peter Beinart: The Republicans' Reagan Amnesia
[Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be published by HarperCollins in June.]
Republicans love hallowing Ronald Reagan’s name. Too bad they know so little about the guy.
Last week in Hawaii, the Republican National Committee almost passed a resolution named after the Gipper. “Whereas President Ronald Reagan believed that the Republican Party should support and espouse conservative principles and public policies,” it declared, only candidates who complied with eight of 10 “Reaganite” principles would be eligible for party funds....
Why does this Republican amnesia about Reagan matter? Because it shows that the GOP isn’t as close to a political rebirth as its boosters believe. Reagan succeeded because he married a reputation for principle with an instinct for pragmatism. When Republicans lost big in the 1982 midterm elections because Democrats accused them of wanting to privatize Social Security, Reagan abandoned the idea and instead made a deal with Democrats that raised taxes and saved the program. In 1984, when his advisers told him that Americans considered him too warlike, he responded with a series of breathtakingly dovish speeches about his desire to eliminate nuclear weapons that helped ensure his landslide re-election. In 1981, he nominated the socially moderate Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court, even though Jerry Falwell and other evangelical leaders cried betrayal.
That was the real Reagan, the one Republicans need to embrace if they’re to genuinely threaten Barack Obama’s chances of re-election. Instead, they’ve reinvented the Gipper as a Sarah Palin-style zealot. Party activists always want to believe they can win elections without compromising their ideological purity, and the GOP’s recent string of off-year victories has convinced the conservative base that most Americans are tea-baggers at heart. But the tea-bag movement is dominated by graying white Anglos, at a time when the American electorate is growing less white, less Anglo and less gray. Demographically, American politics is being transformed by the dramatic growth of Hispanics, and by the emergence of a vast (and heavily non-white) “millennial” generation, larger in number than the baby boomers. Both groups went heavily for the Democrats in 2004 and 2008. And in their economic and cultural views, both are light years away from the tea-bag GOP....
That’s why many of the smartest conservative intellectuals—from David Brooks to David Frum to Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam—believe the GOP must become less ideologically doctrinaire. In this effort, the real Ronald Reagan could be a useful model. Of course, were he around today, he’d have a tough time getting funding from the RNC.
Read entire article at The Daily Beast
Republicans love hallowing Ronald Reagan’s name. Too bad they know so little about the guy.
Last week in Hawaii, the Republican National Committee almost passed a resolution named after the Gipper. “Whereas President Ronald Reagan believed that the Republican Party should support and espouse conservative principles and public policies,” it declared, only candidates who complied with eight of 10 “Reaganite” principles would be eligible for party funds....
Why does this Republican amnesia about Reagan matter? Because it shows that the GOP isn’t as close to a political rebirth as its boosters believe. Reagan succeeded because he married a reputation for principle with an instinct for pragmatism. When Republicans lost big in the 1982 midterm elections because Democrats accused them of wanting to privatize Social Security, Reagan abandoned the idea and instead made a deal with Democrats that raised taxes and saved the program. In 1984, when his advisers told him that Americans considered him too warlike, he responded with a series of breathtakingly dovish speeches about his desire to eliminate nuclear weapons that helped ensure his landslide re-election. In 1981, he nominated the socially moderate Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court, even though Jerry Falwell and other evangelical leaders cried betrayal.
That was the real Reagan, the one Republicans need to embrace if they’re to genuinely threaten Barack Obama’s chances of re-election. Instead, they’ve reinvented the Gipper as a Sarah Palin-style zealot. Party activists always want to believe they can win elections without compromising their ideological purity, and the GOP’s recent string of off-year victories has convinced the conservative base that most Americans are tea-baggers at heart. But the tea-bag movement is dominated by graying white Anglos, at a time when the American electorate is growing less white, less Anglo and less gray. Demographically, American politics is being transformed by the dramatic growth of Hispanics, and by the emergence of a vast (and heavily non-white) “millennial” generation, larger in number than the baby boomers. Both groups went heavily for the Democrats in 2004 and 2008. And in their economic and cultural views, both are light years away from the tea-bag GOP....
That’s why many of the smartest conservative intellectuals—from David Brooks to David Frum to Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam—believe the GOP must become less ideologically doctrinaire. In this effort, the real Ronald Reagan could be a useful model. Of course, were he around today, he’d have a tough time getting funding from the RNC.