It took several decades for our country to come around but we finally apologized to those Americans of Japanese descent for seizing their land and putting them in internment camps. I'm sure many of you would argue that it was war time, after all, and there wasn't really any choice. Who could know what spies lurked amongst these "yellow devils?" In all honesty, I would have probably been one of those people supporting FDR's decision to make all of these people instant prisoners of war.
One would think, however, that at the conclusion of the war, Truman might have apologized but he didn't. Nor did Eisenhower nor my favorite president, Jack Kennedy. In fact, it took four more presidents before we finally elected a man who had the balls to admit that we were wrong. That man was Ronald Reagan and, on August 10, 1988, he signed a bill that gave reparations to those Japanese Americans. Here is a photo of him signing the bill into law.
In reflecting upon this image, I have to admit that the last vestiges any thoughts I had that defined Reagan as a "bad" president have effectively been vanquished. Ideologically, there are many of his views and actions with which I will always disagree. And he's still not in my Top Five.
But you can't argue with someone who mans up and says that our country fucked up. Ironic, that Reagan is the hero to a party which is completely incapable of that now and heaps vitriol upon President Obama for doing just that.
I suppose it's not surprising that the same group of people that twist the message of Jesus Christ to suit their needs would create a "Fictional Ronnie" that they can worship with candles and ignorance. What would they say about President Reagan talking (gasp!) to our mortal enemies, the Soviets, and actually engaging in diplomacy? What would they say about a man who ran record deficits and debt to GDP spending? What would they say about a man who admitted that arms for hostages were traded and that is was HIS responsibility alone?
Well, they'd probably call him a Nazi. Or a Communist.
I'm man enough to admit that history has shown me that Reagan was a much better president than he is given credit. Why? Results. Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union. It's just that simple. We hear the Cult these days obsess about Obama's teleprompter and how speeches don't solve anything. Yet it was President Reagan's speech, in which he said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" that has since been shown by author Romesh Ratnesar in his book Tear Down this Wall to be a major turning point in the end of the Soviet Union. This is a fantastic book, btw, which I highly recommend.
And it was Reagan, as Manzi pointed out in his tour de force, that brought the US back to the forefront of the world economy.
Ronald Reagan's solution to the '70s crisis proceeded from two diagnoses. The first was that macroeconomic pump-priming was merely creating inflation, not growth. The second was that America's economy had large untapped potential for growth, but that this potential went unrealized because of the restrictions on markets intended to promote social harmony as part of the post-war economic consensus. These included everything from price controls to government encouragement of private-sector unionization to zealous anti-trust enforcement. Reagan's strategy, therefore, was to promote sound money plus deregulation. He succeeded, and America re-emerged as the acknowledged global economic leader. Economic output per person is now 20 to 25% higher in the U.S. than in Japan and the major European economies, and America's economy dominates the world in size and prestige.
Again, it comes down to the results. Of course, these results did not come without hardship and that is where the left comes in with their complaints about Reagan which I'm certain I will hear in comments. Manzi explains.
The percentage of the U.S. population born abroad — which had reached its historical minimum in 1970 — began to rise rapidly as mass immigration resumed after a multi-decade hiatus. This development increased inequality further by introducing a large low-income group to the population, and by intensifying wage competition among lower-skill workers.
The Reagan economic revolution exacerbated the problem. Its success resulted, in part, from forcing extremely painful restructuring on industry after industry. One critical consequence of this restructuring was a new compensation paradigm — one that relies on markets rather than on corporate diktats, regulation, or historical norms to set pay. This new regime also accepts a much higher degree of income disparity based on market-denominated performance, and it expects that most people will exploit the resulting demand for talent by moving from company to company many times during a career. Growing inequality was a price we paid for the economic growth needed to recover from the '70s slump and to retain our global position.
I think that Manzi explains this quite well. Growing inequality was the price we had to pay or it would have been worse. Reagan knew this, of course, and did what he to do.
That's not to say that all of his ideas would work in today's economy. I don't think many of them would. I'll be talking over the next few weeks about what Bruce Bartlett's take on the difference between the Reagan economy (in which he was a principle architect) and the Obama economy. In fact, as I have reflecting quite a bit on President Reagan since juris put up that comment, I see more and more similarities between him and our current president than I ever though possible. More, I'm certain, that the Cult would not like to admit.
So, isn't it interesting, as juris posed in the same comment regarding his trip to Manzanar, that Reagan was the one to apologize and FDR, the extremely left leaning statesman, got it all wrong in putting American citizens in camps simply because of their ethnicity? And doing this while fighting a war against an enemy that believed in a "Master Race?"
It is, indeed, very interesting and this would be just the kind of reflection upon the gray that all of us should be doing in our current age of hyper vitriolic "Us VS. Them." As one can plainly see, I have no problem doing this. Those who have created a fictional effigy of Ronald Reagan, at least at this point in time, do not have the word "reflection" in their vocabulary.
Until they do, we aren't going to get anywhere.
4 comments:
Yet Reagan is the same president who secretly sold weapons to the Iranians, after the Iranians held fifty some Americans hostage for months. The same president who at that very time was publicly supporting SADDAM HUSSEIN in the Iran-Iraq war. The same president who looked the other way when allies and American corporations sold components for weapons of mass destruction to the Iraqis, who used them to gas the Iranians in the war, and the Kurds for trying to assassinate a ruthless dictator.
The same president who took the money from selling those arms to the Iranians and gave it to right-wing death squads in Central America. Death squads who murdered priests and American nuns.
The same president whose CIA backed the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and radicalized Muslims in the Soviet Asian republics. Reagan's CIA gave seed money to Osama bin Laden and the Chechen separatist terrorists who have been bombing Moscow subways recently.
This was the same president who coined the term "welfare queen" as racist code for lazy blacks who are living high on the hog with food stamps. The same president who classified ketchup as a vegetable.
The same "economic innovations" you keep praising are what brought this country to its knees when the Reaganesque "greed is good" attitude trumped all else during the Bush administration and everyone from Bush to the CEOs of Wall Street banks and Alan Greenspan thought that housing prices would never go down.
You may not remember, but Reagan had his own economic meltdown with the savings and loan crisis, typified by the Silverado Savings and Loan failure. This outfit was run by Neil Bush, W's brother. Bush approved a $100 million loan (which they defaulted on) to his partners, a clear conflict of interest that he did not divulge. This was a smaller scale version of our current problem, though it hit banks and savings and loans instead of the Wall Street brokerage houses. It caused huge deficits for many years until the budget got under control with Clinton.
And this catastrophe was associated with the Keating Five: five senators (four Democrats who were gone in short order and John McCain) who intervened with regulator for Keating, in exchange for campaign contributions.
You can also argue that the Soviet Union collapsed of its own inertia and the yearning for freedom and the bravery of the Poles, Czechs, Germans, etc. The drubbing the Russians got in Afghanistan took a terrible toll on the economy and the morale of the country. Finally, one man's humanity had more to do with the Soviet Union's breakup than anything Reagan did: Gorbachov's policies of glasnost and his refusal to use the murderous tactics of his predecessors are what really freed the Soviet Union. Reagan's schizophrenic attitudes toward the USSR ("I've signed legislation to outlaw Russia... We begin bombing in five minutes" and his arms limitation initiatives) strengthened the hardline elements in the Soviet Union and made Gorbachov's attempts at liberalization that much harder.
The soft-on-Saddam policies Reagan instituted carried over into the first Bush administration, setting the stage for the wink-and-nod approval Saddam thought he had for the invasion of Kuwait. And the Gulf War, with the stationing of American troops on Saudi soil, was the proximate cause of bin Laden's jihad against the United States.
So, yes, while Reagan did do a few good things, his policies set the stage for decades of systemic economic problems, and inadvertently created decades of Islamic terrorism.
You can argue, as many do, that Reagan didn't know about the backroom deals with terrorists and dictators. Whether he knew about them and approved them, or was inattentive and suffering from Alzheimer's, it doesn't matter. They happened on his watch.
Oh irony is so sweet. M actually holds Reagan in higher esteem than do I, and the howling on the left is going to be defeaning (as blk leads the charge).
No one should be so surprised at the similarity between Reagan and Obama, as Obama has conciously modeled himself after him (in style of course, not in substance).
The tender story about juris aside, Reagan was an awful president, Mark. He single handedly destroyed the middle class and set up many of the problems that we have today with our economy.
I also don't get how you can write a column about someone (juris)that is complimentary with someone who is so personally insulting to you.
He single handedly destroyed the middle class and set up many of the problems that we have today with our economy.
Ahahahahahaha - that is so precious. Single-handedly. Wow. Do you have any idea how juvenile you have to be to believe such nonsense? Have you ever seen The Lion King - you should, but you'll probably need someone to explain it to you.
It always amazes me when people think that mythology is only an artifact of primitive society.
Any way, you apparently missed all the discussion of Manzi. I suggest you go and read it - that even changed M's mind about some of his most cherished notions.
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