Why Republicans Would Still Like Reagan

We hear a lot, especially from liberals and tonight from the Daily Show, that today's Republican Party is so crazy that even Ronald Reagan would be eaten alive for his deviations from conservative orthodoxy. Back when the RNC was pushing an ideological purity test (that had Reagan's name in the title!), people on the left liked to point out that the Reagan Administration failed on something like seven out of ten requirements. And it's true that Reagan did things like raising taxes and giving amnesty to illegal immigrants. But I think it's wrong to think that he wouldn't be able to fit into today's Republican Party. The same is true of Richard Nixon (aside from the whole crazy-paranoiac-crook thing), whose administration was even more "liberal" than Reagan's. Here's a little analogy that explains why I think this is so.


Imagine you're a citizen of Dextra, one of two great empires that, between the two of them, rule over the entirety of a certain continent. The other empire is named Sinistra, and fifty years ago Sinistra controlled two-thirds of the area of your continent. But then, forty years ago, a new leader rose to power in Dextra (in our scenario both empires choose their leaders democratically, and the leaders only stay in power for a reasonably short period of time). He was a clever leader and managed to win back, let's say, ten percent of the continent. After his rule Sinistra only controlled about 55% of the land. Then another decade later another man became the leader of Dextra, and during his reign he conquered another ten percent of the continent. Now Dextra controlled most of the island. In the two decades after he left office, his successors managed to conquer another five or so percent of the land.

Now suppose that one of those leaders who managed to win back a tenth of the land on this continent was magically resurrected, and mounted a campaign to be elected leader of Dextra again. Would he win? Yes. Not because things were better during his reign than they are now. No, even after all of his conquests Sinistra still ruled over 45% of the continent, whereas now they're down to just 40%. But would this ruler from the past campaign on the platform, "We controlled an optimal amount of land in my day, let's downsize back to just 55%"? No, of course not. He'd be saying, "We've made great progress since my day. Now let's make some more, and take another 10% of the continent like I did the last time around!" And he would win on that slogan.

I hope the metaphor is pretty obvious here. The two empires are the two political parties, or perhaps the two ideological movements. Dextra is the Right, the conservative movement, the Republican Party, while Sinistra is the Left, the liberal or progressive movement, the Democratic Party. The scenario starts in 1960, when liberalism was riding high, and the two leaders are Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. (Again, we're setting aside the part about how Nixon was a scandal-plagued nightmare who did immense damage to his party and its causes.) The point here is that, especially in our Madisonian political system, no politician can make the nation's policy line up with his ideal. You try to change the current policy landscape in the direction of your ideal. The assumption is that no President has ever left office in a position to say "American public policy is perfect now, there's no further need to improve it." If Ronald Reagan were alive and of a suitable age to run for President now, and inclined to do so, there's no reason to think he would run on the actual record of the Reagan Administration. The Reagan Administration, don't let's forget, had to deal with Speaker Tip O'Neill, who wasn't exactly on the bandwagon of Reaganism. Ronald Reagan was someone who believed in a fiery, nasty conservativism, and who had a tremendous knack for bringing that kind of conservativism to life, both within his own party and in the nation as a whole. That's the picture of someone who would be a full-throated firebreathing Tea Partier in 2011. Hell, in the case of Nixon we know that he didn't really believe in the environmental policies he championed. He only supported them because they were popular, and he desperately wanted to be President instead of not being President (how'd that work out for you, by the way, Nixon?).

Note that I'm not saying that Reagan or Nixon would act like today's Tea Partiers out of opportunism, or that politicians never really believe anything and just say what they need to to win elections. To the contrary, the point is that Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, and Rick Perry all probably have a notion of ideal public policy that is even further to the right than what anyone is pushing here in 2011. In 1968, current political constraints told Richard Nixon that he couldn't ask for all of what he wanted, that he needed to moderate his platform on issues like aid to the poor and environmental legislation. In 1980, current political constraints told Ronald Reagan that he couldn't ask for all of what he wanted, that he needed to moderate his platform on issues like balanced fiscal consolidation and immigration laws. In 2000, current political constraints told George W. Bush that he couldn't ask for all of what he wanted, that he needed to moderate his platform on some issues, most notably immigration though I'm also told by various pundits that NCLB was a fairly center-left-ish law (not sure I believe it, though).

But the point is, each of these conservative leaders did something very crucial that allowed the next one in line to face looser political constraints on how much of their conservative agenda they could achieve: winning. Nixon won (for a while). Reagan won. Bush won. And as a result of all of this winning, they "shifted the Overton window;" that is, they shifted both actual policy and the boundaries of policy discussions further and further to the right. So much so that today, the very most ambitious leaders in Sinistra are maybe proposing mounting a campaign to get back to 50% of the continent's territory. That's a proposal that gives Sinistra less land than it would receive under the first great leader of Dextra's proposal. But that doesn't mean that Barack Obama is more conservative than Richard Nixon. It means that, between 1968 and 2011, Nixon's side kept winning, and Obama's side kept losing. Presumably Nixon is glad that his side kept winning after his days, and presumably Obama wishes his side hadn't been losing prior to his turn in office.




As an aside, this is part of what we should like about the Affordable Care Act. It represented a win. Actually a pretty big win: we got the federal government to endorse the idea of universal health care for the first time ever, and promise a giant friggin' subsidy to help poor people get health care beyond what it had previously agreed to. It is not the ideal health insurance policy. One guy who thinks so is Barack Obama, who had stated in public that the ideal system here would probably be single-payer, but that we can't just jump there. The reason we can't jump there is that people in elected office don't want us to jump there. But we just won a battle. If we win the next battle, maybe we'll add a public option. Then, maybe, if we keep winning and winning and winning more than we're losing, we'll eventually get to our ultimate goal of single-payer. But losing doesn't help anyone except the conservatives.