Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/111692/11169916.000

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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 73

ELECTION `92

The End of Reaganism


How the Feelgood Era that dawned in 1980 foundered on recession,
mean-spiritedness and missed opportunities

By GARRY WILLS


    It ended not with a bang but a whimper -- Dan Quayle
whimpering about Murphy Brown, Hollywood and family values. It
began with Hollywood values installed on the Potomac -- Frank
Sinatra, that champion of family virtue, staging an Inauguration
for his old friends Ronald, Jane Wyman's ex-husband, and Nancy,
the goddaughter of a famous lesbian (the silent-screen star Alla
Nazimova). We have all heard that revolutions devour their own,
but how could the Reagan Revolution, of all things, end in a war
against Hollywood?

    Why, for that matter, after Reagan's Feelgood Era, did the
Republicans feel so terrible? It was morning after in America.
George Bush was understandably puzzled, almost to the point of
paralysis. He thought he had done everything right -- won the
cold war, won a hot war, made a showy raid on Panama, brought
down the yellow ribbons, brought on the victory parades. Unlike
the Kennedys with Castro, Carter with Khomeini or Reagan with
Gaddafi, Bush had got his man, the first tyrant to bother him
-- he ran Noriega to ground in Panama's papal nunciature,
tortured him with rock music and hauled him back home for trial.
He did not finish off Saddam Hussein, but he kicked him out of
Kuwait and rained rockets on his army at will.

    If anything, Bush thought he was going to make up for the
deficiencies of the Reagan years. He pointedly said in his early
days as President that he would insist on ethical government,
that he would be kinder and gentler, that he would be a "hands
on" President. The contrast with laid-back Ronnie and his
scandals was never very subtle. The shallow Hollywood glitz,
which was useful for regaining the White House from Jimmy
Carter, would be replaced by solid Republican virtues now that
patrician George was in the Oval Office. The simpleminded
rhetoric about an evil empire would yield to more refined
management of foreign policy under the former director of the
CIA. Bush, a diplomat at the U.N. and in China, was not like
Reagan, who before he turned 50 had been abroad only once, to
make a movie in England.

    The real surprise, given that background, is that Reagan
was more flexible abroad and more attentive at home than Bush.
Hollywood, it turns out, had given Reagan more real civility,
even magnanimity, than Andover and Yale had bestowed on Bush.
Reagan's rhetoric was simplistic but not mean. His "welfare
queen" was a campaign exaggeration, but it did not rise out of
the sewers of the mind that gave us a distorted history of
Willie Horton. Even his opponents had to admit that Ronald
Reagan was basically a nice man -- a thing harder for Bush's
defenders to claim after the President thanked Congressman
Robert Dornan for casting Bill Clinton as a traitor.

    What can explain these striking reversals of all
reasonable expectations? The truth is that Bush, even as he
tried to flail free of Reagan's absentminded embrace, remained
the prisoner of his predecessor. Reaganism without Reagan is not
an easy thing to sustain, and Bush's improvements just made
things worse. This is evident in the three main areas of his
failure.


    FOREIGN POLICY. Reagan was supposed to be -- and was --
naive on foreign matters. He thought the evil empire could be
stymied with a magic weapon, the "defensive" Star Wars. He also
thought that weapon so purely defensive that its technology
could be shared with the Soviet Union. Reagan outdid both
extremes of his own party. He dismayed the hard-liners he had
himself assembled and taken to Reykjavik by calling for total
disarmament, but not before he had dismayed the moderates with
obstructive measures like the all-or-nothing "zero option" for
European missiles. Reagan started slowly in foreign affairs,
directing his whole first year to the tax cuts he wrestled
through Congress. But he moved quickly when he finally met
Soviet leaders and found, as usual, that he was charmed by his
ability to charm them. The party that had punished Kissinger for
measures of detente found its favorite cold warrior racing right
past peaceful coexistence to plunge into peaceful cooperation.

    When the Berlin Wall came down on Bush's watch, he seemed
the beneficiary of Reagan's massive defense buildup.
Conservatives said that buildup had brought down the mighty
U.S.S.R. -- though they had earlier claimed that totalitarian
regimes never undergo internal change. The strain of a
half-century of conflict could give way for Bush's new world
order.

    But it was hard to map where America was going when there
had been no real assessment of where the country had been. The
fall of the Soviet Union came so rapidly that surprise and
relief blotted out analysis. Could anything come to pieces so
fast if it had not been essentially hollow? Had we been scaring
ourselves with bogeys? The evidence is very strong that the
"window of vulnerability" that Reagan armed us against was as
false an alarm as the missile gap in Kennedy's day and the
bomber gap in Eisenhower's. Had we outspent not only our enemy
but also ourselves in battle with a phantom, becoming a debtor
nation to accomplish a victory without spoils?

    Cold war certitudes were too great to make such inquiries
easy, and George Bush, as it turned out, was the last to
encourage those or any other new reflections on world order. His
boasted expertise in world affairs was largely a matter of
knowing many foreign leaders. Deng Xiaoping he knew from the
days of President Ford, and Mikhail Gorbachev from President
Reagan's -- which just meant he was slow to respond to new
situations after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the rise of
Boris Yeltsin. Bush's is an inertial view of the world, meant
to retain old ties as long as possible, a kind of male-club
loyalty to things as they were.

    Even his one venture on a grand scale was essentially
retrospective in nature. Bush early on identified Saddam Hussein
as the new Hitler, and he waged World War II against him,
recapturing the exhilaration (and the values) of his heroic
bomber-pilot days. The Patriot missile was celebrated as if it
were the product of some modern Los Alamos. Bush visited the
factory for a rally that resembled his trips to flag factories
in the 1988 campaign. The Allies were invoked as they had been
against the Axis. When victory came in Kuwait, Bush presumed
that V-K day would rank with V-E day and V-J day, that America's
international eminence was restored as at the peak of the
nation's power -- in 1945.

    But in World War II the country's economy recovered from
the Depression. In the final stages of the cold war, the U.S.
became a debtor nation. A noncombatant like Japan seemed more
the beneficiary of America's struggle than was the nominal
victor. The hard question no one in the U.S. dared raise was
whether, in bringing down the shell of the U.S.S.R., this
country had been hollowing itself out economically. Many have
wondered why the cold war's end has brought so little
celebration. Was the U.S. victory like Muhammad Ali's over
George Frazier in Manila, where the fighters burnt out their
internal circuits in the general conflagration?

    Any attempt to reconsider America's world role, reform its
priorities, recruit its strength was dismissed by Bush as
isolationist -- which took the country further back than World
War II, back to the rhetoric of the 1930s. It was a comparative
advance toward modernity for Bush to re-enter the cold war of
the 1950s by raising McCarthyite doubts about Clinton's trip to
Moscow. At any rate it is hard to find anything new in Bush's
new world order. Even before communism's fall, Reagan was far
readier to imagine a different world arrangement, to adapt and
dream, than Bush has been. The opportunity offered by the rapid
changes in Europe continues to slip away.


    THE ECONOMY. Though Reagan had to reverse a lifetime's
preaching on balanced budgets to become a supply-sider, at least
he had a plan for the economy; and unlike most modern
Presidents, he concentrated on passing it. Domestic affairs are
less glamorous than foreign policy. Richard Nixon compared them
to sewer projects. Jimmy Carter gave the economy a couple of
pages in his memoirs. Bush was even less interested than those
men in conditions at home. He let others take care of that while
he kept up his tag-team phone calls to foreign leaders. He was
undoubtedly sincere when he kept saying, all through 1992, that
the economy was not so bad. If it had been, how would he have
known?

    Leaving the economy to others might not have mattered if
the others had agreed among themselves. But true believers in
Reaganomics and doubters of it were speckled through the
economic-management team. Supply-side dogma had not delivered
on its promises -- that savings would increase, capital
formation would occur, plant and infrastructure would be
renewed. What would not occur, according to the dogma, is what
did happen -- the huge and growing deficit. Some argued that
this must be faced. Others claimed that the economy, stimulated
by Reagan's tax cuts, defense contracts and febrile financial
trading, was basically sound, though government spending should
be checked. Where did Bush stand on these matters?

    Richard Darman said last October (using the Washington
Post's Bob Woodward as his courier) that the "read my lips"
pledge was a campaign maneuver, urged by Roger Ailes to counter
the picture of Bush as a wimp. Bush resisted making a dubious
pledge, but once it was made, once his manhood was vindicated
by it, he could abandon the pledge only at his peril. If he did
not break it, one tool was denied him in coping with mounting
interest payments on the deficit (which doubled in Bush's
years). If he did break it, his macho moment became an empty
charade.

    Darman said Bush was wrong to make the pledge;
supply-siders said he was wrong when he broke it; Darman said
it was idiotic for Bush to apologize for breaking it, thus
repeating the move that boxed him in at the outset. Bush had,
by then, managed to be on every side of this issue and give all
sides good reason to distrust him. Basically Bush was as inert
in the economic sphere as in the foreign spheres. He considered
nothing anew; he called for more of the same -- more tax
advantage for those with capital gains, higher deficit levels,
more railing at entitlements without daring to cut them. Reagan
had skimmed the surface advantages of supply-side enthusiasm and
left Bush holding the bill. Any departure from failed policy
would be a betrayal of Reagan's "revolution." The pledge
highlighted his dilemma. It might have been his undoing whether
he kept it or broke it -- but it was fatal when he did both.
This was not the only Ailes trick to backfire, but it was the
costliest.


    CULTURE. For some Republicans, even in earlier days of a
confident Reaganism, the possession of the White House seemed
an incomplete vindication of conservatism. Why, if modern
Republicans had a lock on the presidency, was the rest of the
culture still resistant? It seemed somehow illegitimate for
liberals to be so powerful in the nonelective part of society,
in the academy, in the arts, in the media. Neoconservatives
deplored the existence of a "counterculture" trying to tear down
what the people's representatives were up to. Older
conservatives saw a conspiracy of "elites" at war with the
government of the U.S., maintaining the liberal "intellectual
establishment" after their political establishment had been
defeated. The religious right saw "secular humanists"
everywhere.

    Political instruments were used to wage a cultural war.
Grants of the National Endowment for the Arts were policed. The
National Endowment for the Humanities subjected scholarship to
ideological tests. The Administration's legal efforts against
affirmative action were part of a larger campaign to defeat a
"politically correct" emphasis on minority viewpoints in the
classroom.

    Conservatives were frustrated when electoral returns were
not reflected in the society's broader cultural views. But it
is hard to make an intellectual contribution from an
anti-intellectual base. William Bennett claims he is maintaining
intellectual standards, but he accompanied President Bush on a
pandering appearance before Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition.
Robertson says Bush's new world order is Satan's instrument, and
his supporters removed the offending words from the Republican
platform. A party whose intellectual agenda is dictated in this
way has little standing for discussing the affairs of the mind.

    A cheerfully philistine business community used to dismiss
as peripheral the concerns of philosophers and artists. But
when the neoconservatives brought into the party some
academicians who were not economists, the scholars began to
wonder why they had to check their intellectual luggage at the
door. The answer is that the culture of the Republican Party is
hostile to independent scholarship. This shows best in the
religious arena, where Fundamentalists think all positions but
their own -- those, for instance, of a Mario Cuomo or a Jesse
Jackson, of a Bill Moyers or a Marian Wright Edelman -- are not
truly religious but masked forms of irreligion. It is hard, even
for many sincerely devoted to religion, to have a useful
discussion with Fundamentalists who consider them satanic.

    The family-values emphasis at the Republican Convention
was not an accidental intrusion (no matter how ineptly
handled). Conservatives are no longer content to run a
businessmen's Administration like that of Coolidge or Hoover,
letting other matters be debated by the pointy heads. Today,
after all, the basic values of society are changing or being
debated -- attitudes toward monogamy, women's roles, abortion,
gay rights, censorship. These topics are bound to be tested
largely in the freewheeling atmosphere of the academy and the
arts, and changes there are bound to disturb traditionalists.
But when traditionalists respond as they have on abortion, with
obstruction and assertion rather than argument, they should
expect to lose in the arena of debate, whatever the merits of
their cause.

    Thatcherism in England was called less a revolution than
a hiccup, in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement.
Will the same be said of Reaganism? Certainly Reagan's
reputation, like Thatcher's, is in eclipse at the moment. But
Reagan's decline may be an extreme reaction, prompted by this
year's mysteriously sour mood. Ending the cold war has left
Americans adrift. Anticommunism imposed an ordinating principle
on the government's many scattered activities. Without that
principle, the country seems disoriented. The nation's problems
are evident, but Reagan's denigration of government (for all
uses but opposing communists) reduced any hope of dealing with
the situation. If government, as Reagan liked to say, is the
problem, not the solution, you do not solve problems by applying
a bigger problem to them.

    The uneasinesses of the present moment are not finally
imprisoning. America is in trouble, not in decline. Bush was
unable to face up to the trouble -- it would enrage the
Reaganites even to recognize it. But once Americans face the
problems, they have great resources for dealing with them.
Things got as bad as they are only because Americans were not
allowed to admit that they were bad at all. If the new
Administration does not face up to that reality, only then does
real trouble begin.