Reagan and the other side of optimism

(Part 2 of my version of the Reagan Legacy Project, an all-week event)

In the contemporary conservative telling, Ronald Reagan was a figure of boundless optimism, whose sunny attitude and can-do spirit united a nation in common cause. This is an easy yarn to believe if you only watch the newsreels of joke-cracking news conferences and a smiling old codger in a cowboy hat. It’s a harder sell to anyone familiar with the whole of his political record and campaign rhetoric.

There’s no arguing that optimism and hope for the future played an enormous role in Reagan’s success as president, especially as a candidate. Part of his unique political genius was taking an aggressively regressive right-wing agenda and wrapping it in the forward-looking language of JFK and FDR. But it’s a mistake to think the man got as far as he did politically by being only sunshine and smiles. Reagan was an enormously divisive figure while he was president – a fact left out by the myth machine – and his rise to governor in California was built through the masterful use of cultural division and unrest.

Reading Rick Perlstein’s seminal Nixonland, it’s fascinating to see just how much Richard Nixon cribbed from Reagan’s rhetoric. Nixon had the opportunity to take it to a national level first, but there’s no doubt Reagan fired the first shots in this thing we now call the culture war. He spoke to the ‘silent majority’ before it was ever called that, and deftly exploited fears about the rise of minorities, changing roles for women, and the rebellious youth. He famously described hippies as those that “dress like Tarzan, have hair like Jane, and smell like Cheetah”, and shocked voters with tales from his favorite punching bag, UC Berkeley. According to then-governor Reagan, the school was full of “sexual orgies…so vile I cannot describe it to you”, and when police violently put down a protest there in 1970, he blithely remarked, “”If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.’  What a can-do optimist!

Let’s take a look at some other examples of the cuddly side of young Governor Ronnie.

Reagan advocating nuclear weapons to end the Vietnam war : “It’s silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.”

Reagan on the Fair Housing Act : “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so.”

Reagan on poverty: “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet”.

Reagan after the assassination of MLK, Jr : “a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”

Reagan opposing expansion of Redwood National Park : “A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at?”

So, obviously, Ronald Reagan didn’t get to the top of the political heap solely by playing sweet, old, forgetful Grandpa. He was the backlash bomb-thrower par excellence, and he didn’t stop exploiting fears when he got to be president. You don’t hire Karl Rove’s mentor, Lee Atwater, to run your reelection campaign because you want to highlight your accomplishments. Here is Atwater, being remarkably candid about how Reagan would have to speak in code to get his racial appeals across to his southern base:

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

But Reagan hardly needed Atwater to push him in racist directions. After all, this is the man who coined the term ‘welfare queen’ in a stump speech in 1976. He’d always had a sixth sense for White America’s soft spots on race, and he exploited them at every opportunity. This wasn’t limited to rhetoric. Reagan was a vocal supporter of the South African government, and he did everything in his power to limit the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Certainly, blacks in America didn’t feel like it was “Morning in America” during the Reagan years. Nor did gays as he spurned money for AIDS research, and refused to even say the word in public until 1987, either out of personal indifference or a fear of alienating the newly powerful Christian Right.

The Great Communicator didn’t only communicate in tones of optimism and national unity. He also spoke in the familiar cadences of our own modern conservatism: us and them, the deserving rich and the indolent poor, normal America and the encroaching ‘other’. Fear and division, the same old song we get these days. It’s quite a credit to the Reagan image industry that the happy tunes are the only ones we’re allowed to remember.