The night Ronald Reagan was elected I watched the whole sorry spectacle on the TV in the student lounge at my small college in the Pacific Northwest. It wasn't a surprise - it had been clear ever since the debate with Carter that Reagan was going to win. The media had already started the death watch even before the polls opened that morning.
I tried to convince myself it didn't matter - that one capitalist hack had simply been replaced by another. I was way out in left field in those days, and had voted for - and worked for - Barry Commoner, the candidate of the Citizens Party, an early forerunner of the Green Party). We carried our precinct (essentially, the college dorms) and I was proud of that.
But I was in a distinct minority. There were a lot of students from Californian at the school - people who'd grown up with Reagan in the governor's mansion. And some of the faculty had been at Berkeley when he sent the cops in (earning him the counterculture title of "fascist gun in the West." Some of them were walking around the campus that night with stunned looks on their faces. They couldn't believe the senile old huckster they'd known and hated had just been elected president of the United States.
I walked back to my dorm that night with an uneasy feeling that maybe I was wrong - that Reagan's election marked some kind of turning point. Which it did, of course - as we discovered over the next few years.
In hindsight, it's easy to see that Reagan's election was the end of many things - the end of the '70s, and the mood of experimentation that went with it (the '70s were when the '60s went mainstream); the end of the "Vietnam syndrome," and the temporary popular revulsion against imperial military adventures; the end of the political alignment that emerged from the New Deal, the end of the New Left and its hopeless ambitions - the end, really, of the post-World War II era.
I found it hard to hate Reagan - even though I detested most of what he stood for, believed and sought to do. Yes, he was as ignorant and stubborn and incapable of rational thought as our current president, but he wasn't arrogant - or at least, he didn't come across as arrogant. He lacked Bush's infuriating sense of entitlement, and his nasty temper. Reagan smiled, he didn't smirk.
With the benefit of distance and hindsight, I can also admit that not all of Reagan's economic policies were reckless and incoherent - although his fiscal policies certainly were, and eventually had to be undone at great cost. (See Stockman, David, The Triumph of Politics)
But the economic policies of the Nixon, Ford and Carter years weren't exactly models of prudence and effectiveness either. For all his flaws, Reagan inspired confidence in the business community - which, like it or not, controls the economy and creates the jobs. His deregulation policies were, by and large, a success - it that a Democratic House was there to curb his worst excesses. He allowed the Volcker Fed to do its job of breaking the inflationary spiral. Reagan's attacks on organized labor, on the other hand, were brutal, and helped set the stage for the cuthroat corporate downsizings of the '80s and early '90s, and the dramatic rise in income inequality that's seperating the haves from the have nots. He was, for all his cornball folksiness, the ultimate class warrior - or class front man, anyway.
But I'll leave the pluses and minuses of Reaganomics for the historians. At this late date, it's hardly worth arguing about. Reagan's foreign policies, on the other hand, still make my blood boil, even after all these years. His decision to challenge the Soviets on every front - which, given the senility and paranoia of the Breshnev-era Soviet leadership, could easily have led to war - is, of course, relentlessly promoted by the conservative propaganda machine as the masterstroke that ended the Cold War. In reality, it was the end of the Cold War (made possible by Mikhail Gorbachov's rise to power) that headed off the disaster that Reagan's recklessness might otherwise have triggered.
The legacy of Reagan's policies in the Middle East, meanwhile, are still being paid for - in blood. The cynical promotion of Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the alliance of convenience with Saddam Hussein against Iran, the forging of a new "strategic relationship" with Israel, the corrupt dealings with the House of Saud, and (perhaps most ironic, given Reagan's tough guy image) the weakeness and indecision of his disastrous intervention in Beruit - all of these helped set the stage for what the neocons now like to call World War IV, and badly weakened the geopolitical ability of the United States to wage that war.
But all this pales in comparison to Reagan's war crimes in Central America. We'll probably never know just how stained his hands were by the blood of the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of defenseless peasants who were slaughtered in the Guatemalan highlands, or the leftist politicians, union leaders and human rights activists kidnapped and killed by the Salvadoranian death squads, or the torturned in Honduran prisons, or terrorized by his beloved contras.
Did Reagan's men covertly support these murders? Or did they just look the other way? Did Reagan ever know just what kind of charnel house he helped create? Or did he live completely in his fantasy world of freedom fighters and "founding fathers"? Either way, it was in Central America that Reagan most clearly earned that nickname the hippies pinned on him back in Berkeley: "fascist gun in the West."
Looking back, it's also easy to see the propaganda connections between Reagan's war in Central America and the current Orwellian nightmare in Iraq. There were the same moral oversimplications - pure goodness versus absolute evil - the same flowerly rhetoric about freedom and democracy (to be administred to impoverished campesinos with machine guns and torture chambers.) There was the same lurid hype about the dire danger to the homeland - as when Reagan famously warned that Nicaragua was just a "two-day drive from Harlington, Texas."
And of course, we're even looking at some of the same actors - Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, Colin Powell. To a large degree, the Reagan administration's covert wars in both Central America and the Middle East formed the template for how the war in Iraq was packaged, sold and - unfortunately - fought.
So, while Reagan - like the entire decade of the '80s - has long since faded into historical irrelevence, I certainly won't mourn his passing. And I suppose I'll just have to grit my teeth and do my best to ignore the glowing tributes and bipartisan praise we'll be subjected to over the next few days - just as I did when Nixon died. The ritual deification of Ronald Reagan has become one of the essential bonds that holds the modern Republican Party together - not to mention a lucrative fundraising vehicle for some of its leading lights. The rest of us will just have to make the best of it.
To me, the tremendous conservative nostalgia for Ronald Reagan is a sign of a movement that is, if not in decline, then poised on the cusp of it. It's an implicit admission that the golden age, when a conservative ideologue like Reagan could win the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans (and not just the instinctual cultural loyalty of red state America) has passed away.
The contrast with Bush the younger - desperately scrambling to avoid defeat in a bitterly polarized electorate - is painfully clear. In it's obsessive desire to glorify Ronald Reagan, the conservative movement is retreating psychologically into its own past. It's a sign that the political era that opened the night Reagan was elected may also be nearing its end.
To which I can only say: Rest in peace.
