Sasha Abramsky: Running after Reagan
[Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow at the New York-based think tank Demos.]
I've been having strange emotions recently. Somehow, I have become nostalgic for Ronald Reagan. It's a somewhat bizarre feeling to have, since I've always thought Reagan's election represented one of the great calamities in modern American history. So let me explain.
Reagan was a smiling, genial extremist. He promised a new dawn for a country that suddenly seemed no longer young; a new lease of life for an American Dream beset by uncertainty in the post-Vietnam war years. Sure, his prescriptions to cure America of its ills were either batty or dangerous, or both: the "voodoo economics" derided by George Herbert Walker Bush during the 1980 primary season; a bulked-up military engaged in continual nuclear Russian roulette with the Soviet Union; a turn toward religious fundamentalism that regarded Afghan mujahadeen forces (yes, the ones who ultimately made Osama bin Laden the powerful maniac that he is) as allies in a cosmic, Manichean battle, while regarding gays and abortion providers in the US as little better than stooges of Satan. But, let's be fair, he smiled as he prognosticated, and he genuinely believed he was ushering in the good times.
Moreover, however crazy Reagan's ideas were, at least in 1980 when he first got elected, he could plausibly claim, in his oh-so-soothing voice, to be running against a raft of failed policies and programmes enacted by the presidents before him. I don't like the changes Reagan pushed through, but give the man his dues: at least, to use current vernacular, he was a genuine change agent. He ran against the status quo not just with words but with specific policy differences.
The contrast with John McCain and Sarah Palin is stark.
The Republican party, dominated by the hard-right personnel who rose to power during the Reagan presidency, has controlled the White House for 20 of the last 28 years. They have gutted the social programmes handed down from the New Deal years. They have weakened organised labor and redistributed the country's tax burden away from corporations and wealthy individuals and toward the poor and middle class. They have remade the supreme court and corroded the supposedly iron-clad barriers between church and state. They have reshaped American military and foreign policy, moving it away from a reliance on international alliances and organisations and toward a more muscular, unilateralist posture. They have stood in the way of environmental protection and successfully blocked moves toward universal healthcare coverage. Quite a record.
And yet, at the end of all of this, with less than two months until the election, John McCain, who has served as a Republican senator since shortly after Reagan first got elected, is now running for the presidency as a man of change. Yes, the Republicans have failed miserably, he tells America, and that's why you need to elect him, a Republican, to fix things.
Not too long ago, McCain was running as the candidate of "experience", the only one capable of making the careful decisions needed to protect America and her allies in an age of mass terror. I didn't agree with his positions, but at least the old soldier was making an honourable, principled and intelligent case to voters – and, in talking about foreign policy and terrorism, at least he was addressing issues of genuine global import. He came off as smart, and even though he didn't have the Gipper's Hollywood smile, he also appeared to be rather likeable.
In the weeks leading up to last week's 9/11 anniversary, however, the 72-year-old McCain has stopped talking about experience, about the need for stability in troubled times, and instead begun touting his "change" credentials. And, in undergoing this metamorphosis, he has, to my mind, become infinitely less likeable.
His primary rationale for such an outlandish claim? His choice of the young and inexperienced Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin certainly is an outsider, but in terms of change, her social and economic views seem to be largely in lock-step with those of President Bush, perhaps just a tad to the right of him. As for abortion, the "wedge issue" Republicans have successfully used from Reagan onward to win a significant number of working-class votes away from the Democrats, Palin is fiercely against choice, but then so was Reagan, so was Bush senior, so is Bush junior. And none of them really made very much effort to criminalise abortion – because they all knew that, were they to do so, they'd be left with a rump party of fundamentalists and hardly anyone else.
McCain's playing the same cynical game here: shore up the conservative base by anointing Palin as VP, get into power and then, apart from periodically launching a few rhetorical jibes at pro-choice politicians, ignore the issue for the next four years. Talk change on abortion, then propose even more tax cuts for the wealthy. Pledge a new social compact, and then continue the same know-nothing policies which have given Bush the lowest popularity ratings of any president in American history.
That's a snow job of the first order. It's the prestige part of the magic trick, the successful imprinting of an illusion on the audience's mind.
For magic to work, the audience has to suspend disbelief and be willing to believe in what it thinks it sees. Reagan was a terrific magician, with his smile and grandfatherly persona, he made it easy for voters to believe in his message. It's possible that McCain's strategy will work, too. Certainly the polls suggest his campaign has finally achieved traction. He could very well get elected based on his tacking to the right while at the same time claiming to be a change agent out to rescue America from the failed policies that he continues to advocate.
But McCain isn't nearly so skillful a magician as Reagan. If the Palin choice and the change rhetoric propels him to a victory in November it will say more about the audience than the magician, more about the gullibility of crowds than the flawless execution of the trick itself.
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
I've been having strange emotions recently. Somehow, I have become nostalgic for Ronald Reagan. It's a somewhat bizarre feeling to have, since I've always thought Reagan's election represented one of the great calamities in modern American history. So let me explain.
Reagan was a smiling, genial extremist. He promised a new dawn for a country that suddenly seemed no longer young; a new lease of life for an American Dream beset by uncertainty in the post-Vietnam war years. Sure, his prescriptions to cure America of its ills were either batty or dangerous, or both: the "voodoo economics" derided by George Herbert Walker Bush during the 1980 primary season; a bulked-up military engaged in continual nuclear Russian roulette with the Soviet Union; a turn toward religious fundamentalism that regarded Afghan mujahadeen forces (yes, the ones who ultimately made Osama bin Laden the powerful maniac that he is) as allies in a cosmic, Manichean battle, while regarding gays and abortion providers in the US as little better than stooges of Satan. But, let's be fair, he smiled as he prognosticated, and he genuinely believed he was ushering in the good times.
Moreover, however crazy Reagan's ideas were, at least in 1980 when he first got elected, he could plausibly claim, in his oh-so-soothing voice, to be running against a raft of failed policies and programmes enacted by the presidents before him. I don't like the changes Reagan pushed through, but give the man his dues: at least, to use current vernacular, he was a genuine change agent. He ran against the status quo not just with words but with specific policy differences.
The contrast with John McCain and Sarah Palin is stark.
The Republican party, dominated by the hard-right personnel who rose to power during the Reagan presidency, has controlled the White House for 20 of the last 28 years. They have gutted the social programmes handed down from the New Deal years. They have weakened organised labor and redistributed the country's tax burden away from corporations and wealthy individuals and toward the poor and middle class. They have remade the supreme court and corroded the supposedly iron-clad barriers between church and state. They have reshaped American military and foreign policy, moving it away from a reliance on international alliances and organisations and toward a more muscular, unilateralist posture. They have stood in the way of environmental protection and successfully blocked moves toward universal healthcare coverage. Quite a record.
And yet, at the end of all of this, with less than two months until the election, John McCain, who has served as a Republican senator since shortly after Reagan first got elected, is now running for the presidency as a man of change. Yes, the Republicans have failed miserably, he tells America, and that's why you need to elect him, a Republican, to fix things.
Not too long ago, McCain was running as the candidate of "experience", the only one capable of making the careful decisions needed to protect America and her allies in an age of mass terror. I didn't agree with his positions, but at least the old soldier was making an honourable, principled and intelligent case to voters – and, in talking about foreign policy and terrorism, at least he was addressing issues of genuine global import. He came off as smart, and even though he didn't have the Gipper's Hollywood smile, he also appeared to be rather likeable.
In the weeks leading up to last week's 9/11 anniversary, however, the 72-year-old McCain has stopped talking about experience, about the need for stability in troubled times, and instead begun touting his "change" credentials. And, in undergoing this metamorphosis, he has, to my mind, become infinitely less likeable.
His primary rationale for such an outlandish claim? His choice of the young and inexperienced Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin certainly is an outsider, but in terms of change, her social and economic views seem to be largely in lock-step with those of President Bush, perhaps just a tad to the right of him. As for abortion, the "wedge issue" Republicans have successfully used from Reagan onward to win a significant number of working-class votes away from the Democrats, Palin is fiercely against choice, but then so was Reagan, so was Bush senior, so is Bush junior. And none of them really made very much effort to criminalise abortion – because they all knew that, were they to do so, they'd be left with a rump party of fundamentalists and hardly anyone else.
McCain's playing the same cynical game here: shore up the conservative base by anointing Palin as VP, get into power and then, apart from periodically launching a few rhetorical jibes at pro-choice politicians, ignore the issue for the next four years. Talk change on abortion, then propose even more tax cuts for the wealthy. Pledge a new social compact, and then continue the same know-nothing policies which have given Bush the lowest popularity ratings of any president in American history.
That's a snow job of the first order. It's the prestige part of the magic trick, the successful imprinting of an illusion on the audience's mind.
For magic to work, the audience has to suspend disbelief and be willing to believe in what it thinks it sees. Reagan was a terrific magician, with his smile and grandfatherly persona, he made it easy for voters to believe in his message. It's possible that McCain's strategy will work, too. Certainly the polls suggest his campaign has finally achieved traction. He could very well get elected based on his tacking to the right while at the same time claiming to be a change agent out to rescue America from the failed policies that he continues to advocate.
But McCain isn't nearly so skillful a magician as Reagan. If the Palin choice and the change rhetoric propels him to a victory in November it will say more about the audience than the magician, more about the gullibility of crowds than the flawless execution of the trick itself.