Party at Reagan's

I'm getting tired of these conservative pundits taking up a mantle as though Reagan was the greatest thing ever and then apparently ignoring everything he ever did or said while a public figure. Say what you want about Reagan's politics (there's a lot of ugly in there for people like me), the guy tended to be a lot more consistent on principles and a little less likely to use platitudes to glaze over them than these guys. His revelers intent on electing his reanimated corpse as the next President don't seem to pay attention to substance and get caught up in the whole "Great Communicator" part of the Reagan mythos.

You can argue against supply-side economics by looking at the Laffer curve, but it looks to me like Reagan more or less intuitively understood the Laffer curve and tried to set up the taxes in a way that was simpler and more productive in the same way that Kennedy had done, and Coolidge before that. It seems, after a fashion, to have worked (revenues went up and the economy grew). His successors take this message to mean that it is always appropriate to cut taxes and that doing this will always result in more revenues and economic growth as a matter of faith (and that raising taxes will result somehow in less revenue and hamper economic growth). This is incorrect, or charitably, an incomplete application of the system.

You can argue against terrorism and torture by saying we need to treat this as a war, because wars are serious business, and we need information/revenge NOW!. Reagan signed an anti-torture treaty ratified by the Senate and his official policy on terrorism, at a time when American Marines were being blown up in Lebanon and airplanes were actually being blasted successfully out of the sky, was to treat the terrorist as a criminal when captured and put him on trial and in prison. Without beating information out of him. His rhetoric on this and the Cold War always tried to appeal to a message of America as an ideal, and that this ideal was always worth trying to live up to. It may not be my ideal (the city on a hill speech), but it was compelling stuff for a lot of Americans (obviously still is). Yet they ignore that ideal and debase it by insisting on torturing our enemies (when Reagan specifically signed a treaty into law that said "under no circumstances") and giving them revered status as "warriors" rather than as heinous criminals.

You can argue against homosexuals being accorded equal rights and treatment under the laws. Its not a very convincing argument, and it relies on a lot of revealed wisdom rather than faith and compassion, but it's one that people have been making for decades. Guess who didn't make it? Reagan. In 1978, Reagan, then a former governor and soon to be Presidential candidate, was on Harvey Milk's side in casting down against a law discriminatory to homosexuals. I'm not sure what rationale he used to arrive at this wisdom, perhaps it was arrived at through his faith, perhaps because he came from California and Hollywood, or perhaps because he was schooled in civil rights by the 60s and the figure of Barry Goldwater who didn't share this abiding fear of homosexuals with other conservative pundits and politicians (Goldwater took a sort of hands off approach to civil rights in the federal and legal arena which wasn't all that popular or great in the view of history and this reputation is deserved since he was one of the votes against the Civil Rights Act. But he also wasn't out there supporting the opposite legal arena of bigotry and separatism, at least publicly, and any laws which sanctioned bigotry were unacceptable on principle). I don't know. But he did not whip up a frenzy of hatred and fear against otherwise law-abiding citizens who wanted nothing more than the ability to live as legal equals with their peers. Maybe he didn't have to, but in appealing in rhetoric against terrorism and the Soviets with America as an idealized world, it's pretty hard to turn around and say, but fuck you if you're gay! Kind of incongruous to have a message of hope and triumph that mixes in hate and intolerance.

Same deal with immigration. Reagan signed onto a package of immigration reforms that allowed millions of people a path to citizenship by sweeping aside the fact that they came here "illegally". When the same idea comes up again, no thanks, we hate Mexicans (or alternatively, we hate it when Indians "steal" "our" jobs). Maybe it wasn't popular. But easier and more immigration is, at its base, the right way to treat the "American way" or the "American dream" and to make it a more fruitful reality. We are not a gated community and never have been.

For a party of people that supposedly revers the guy, they don't seem to have a lot in common with him. Yes they're still big on defence and fear the Russians and the Red Chinese and call out socialism freely as an evil that must be cast down, without actually understanding the forms of socialism and tyranny that exist (and in many cases, which they demanded as powers for themselves). Those I guess are principles and platitudes that die hard from the Cold War mentality and the power it accorded a sense of American internationalism as an ideal state of affairs. But anywhere else I am not seeing a connection between their sacred idol and the reality of principles and politics that are laying around in the modern conservative playbook. If you cannot break people from their mindsets, it seems only appropriate at this point to try to shame them into realizing the error and folly of their ways by pointing out what their heroes did in similar circumstances. It is easy enough to make this argument with religious folk by pointing out the exemplars that they are supposedly following and the hypocrisy of their own lives by contrast. I don't think it any harder to raise a political analogy when it relates to the politics.