Thanks to a few comments by Obama, today has turned into Ronald Reagan day around the liberal/progressive blogosphere. I was really hoping to avoid commenting on this, but there are so many people saying silly things that I can no longer avoid it.
First, here's what Obama actually said:
I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what's different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.
This is so obviously and unarguably true that its hard to believe anyone would object, and yet all day that's precisely what many have been doing. As Ezra points out here, Chris Bowers - and I'm picking on him here both because he is often a blog opinion leader and because his post is largely representative of many of the others that have annoyed me today - is particularly guilty of this here:
There are many reason progressives should admire Ronald Reagan, politically speaking. He realigned the country around his vision, he brought into power a new movement that created conservative change, and he was an extremely skilled politician. But that is not why Obama admires Reagan. Obama admires Reagan because he agrees with Reagan's basic frame that the 1960s and 1970s were full of 'excesses' and that government had grown large and unaccountable.
Those excesses, of course, were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement. The libertarian anti-government ideology of an unaccountable large liberal government was designed by ideological conservatives to take advantage of the backlash against these 'excesses'.It is extremely disturbing to hear, not that Obama admires Reagan, but why he does so. Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship, but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power. Lots of people don't agree with this, of course, since it doesn't fit a coherent narrative of GOP ascendancy. Masking Reagan's true political underpinning principles is a central goal of the conservative movement, with someone as powerful as Grover Norquist seeking to put Reagan's name on as many monuments as possible and the Republican candidates themselves using Reagan's name instead of George Bush's in GOP debates as a mark of greatness.
A few thoughts are in order here.
First, and perhaps most fundamentally, I don't see how you can interpret Obama's comments as demonstrating his support for all things Reaganesque. Obama makes perfectly clear that he admires Reagan for the way he was able to reshape the political debate in this country. That's what he means when he says Reagan "changed the trajectory" to "put us on a fundamentally different path." You can respect Reagan for his ability to pull off such a transformation without necessarily agreeing with the nature of the transformation itself. I should know, because I myself do just that.
Second, Reagan was both a "sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship" and "a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power." It isn't, as Bowers and others often suggests, an either/or dynamic. Combing the two might seem almost impossible, but that's precisely why Reagan was rightly considered to have been a "master communicator."
Third, this idea that the conservative ideology was "designed...to take advantage of the backlash" isn't just wrong, its also circular. All of the movements Bowers' sarcastically lists as "excesses" were political movements. Each of them in their own way sought to mobilize the political process to change the political and social landscape in this country. And just as these movements were necessarily political, so too were the backlashes they produced. As a result there was no need for anyone to "design" an ideology to take advantage of the backlash. The backlash was an ideology in and of itself. What was necessary was for someone to provide a master narrative that brought the disparate elements of the backlash together into a coherent whole. And that, of course, is precisely what Nixon and Reagan did.
This is often an inconvenient fact for liberals and progressives to admit, but it is nevertheless true: By the late 1970s, a solid majority of Americans desperately needed a break from change. The previous decade had been one of enormous turmoil, and people wanted the turmoil to stop. And yes, if that meant slowing down the process of social change, so be it. At bottom, that is what all of the backlashers had in common. Reagan's genius was that he figured out a way to deliver that message through a frame of optimism and political rebirth.
But what of Paul Rosenberg's claim that Obama's claims notwithstanding, public opinion didn't actually shift in any significant ways during and after Reagan's terms. At first glance, this would seem to be determinant. But dig deeper and I think you'll see that rather than support Rosenberg's claim it undermines it.
What we have is a classic case of seeing the trees but not understanding how they fit together to make a forest. It isn't that Reagan necessarily shifted people's opinions on specific issues. In fact, it isn't that at all. What Reagan did was shift the master narrative of politics. He made conservatism ascendant. He built a new Republican majority. He made "liberal" impossible to say without first appending "tax and spend" to it. He put the Democratic party on the defensive (how else to explain Clinton's need to brand himself a "new democratic") for more than a quarter century. And he did all that, yes, often without changing people's underlying opinions. As Joseph Campbell once said, if you want to "change the world, change the metaphor." That's precisely what Reagan did. And once he had done that, he didn't need to change the public's underlying opinions, because in a new narrative the political implications of those opinions had changed. For example....
Rosenberg cites the unchanging nature of public attitudes on spending to protect the environment. If Reagan changed so much, why didn't this change? First off, it is important to note that Reagan's narrative focused far more on the evils of regulation than it did on government spending, a shift that was particularly powerful in blocking new environmental legislation. In Reagan's new narrative, spending wasn't the issue; economic dynamism and prosperity was. Focus on attitudes about spending and you are focusing on the wrong thing.
Second, when Reagan did talk about spending it was almost always in the context of taxes. That was the brilliance of the "tax and spend" slur used against the Democrats. In Reagan's frame, more spending necessarily meant more taxes, and because no one wanted higher taxes higher spending became a non-starter. Except, of course, when it came to military spending, which was framed as separate and apart from the need for "fiscal responsibility." Taken together, the individual desire Rosenberg charts for increased spending became meaningless. By changing the narrative, increased spending was taken off the table. In abstract people wanted more spending on specific programs, but in the political reality as defined and created by Reagan they didn't.
It might seem counterintuitive, but the unchanging nature of political opinion actually demonstrates the power of narrative change. In abstract people might want more spending, but nothing in politics is ever done in abstract. Context always matters, and narrative always shapes context.
All of which brings me to a point I've been meaning to make for quite some time. Within the world of political science, realignment theory has earned a fairly bad name for itself. Defining the elements of a realignment proved difficult, and that's nothing compared to the difficultly we had in identifying precisely if and when realignments have taken place. But the reason for this confusion, I would argue, comes from conceiving of realignments too narrowly. Most see changes in voter behavior as a cause, but I would argue that they are actually an effect of something much larger.
If you want to change the world, change the narrative. Realignments happen when presidents are able to change the national narrative. Reagan did it. Obama wants to do it. If your goal is a new progressive majority, you shouldn't have a problem with that.
UPDATE: I expect this kind of shallow, reactionary thinking from bloggers. But John Edwards?
“When you think about what Ronald Reagan did to the American people, to the middle class to the working people,” said Edwards.“He was openly – openly – intolerant of unions and the right to organize. He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country. He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment.”
“I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change.”
Yes, Reagan was a disaster for unions. Yes, he created a tax structure that favored the wealthy over the working class. Yes, he was a disaster for the environment. But he was all those things because he had the very solid support of a majority of Americans, including the working and middle classes. You can't just wish that away. To combat his legacy, you need to understand why he was able to do the things he did.
For god's sake, people. Obama's point wasn't that he wanted to protect Reagan's policy legacies. It was that he wanted to build a new majority to undo them.
UPDATE: Via Ezra, this excerpt of John Cohn's new TNR piece on Obama provides a perfect example of how this works:
In 1996, when he first ran for state Senate, he indicated his support for universal health insurance--and a single-payer system, in which the government insures everybody directly (although he acknowledged it might not be feasible at the state level right away). Three years later, he was the lead Senate sponsor for the so-called Bernardin Amendment. Named after the famous Chicago archbishop, the amendment would have enshrined a right to health care in the Illinois constitution. Although a symbolic measure--the amendment did not specify what a "right to health care" entailed--it would have pressured the legislature to come up with some kind of coverage plan.The amendment failed, but soon Obama was busy with a more concrete effort: expansion of public insurance programs to reach more of the uninsured. It was a tough political environment for trying such an initiative: Republicans, always skeptical of expanded government, controlled the state Senate. And they often did the bidding of the insurance industry, which didn't like public programs encroaching on its turf. So Obama sought common ground.
The result, according to John Bouman, director of the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, was two main compromises, including one allowing those newly eligible for Medicaid to opt for private insurance instead. It was a significant concession, since it gave the insurance industry a chance to compete for the new business. But it also undermined one of the best rhetorical arguments of critics, since it appropriated one of their favorite mantras: "choice." With that trope out of the way, Obama was able to fight for what he and the reformers thought mattered most: bringing insurance to a great many more people. And they won, prevailing over resistant conservatives. "He could not be accused of partisan aggression," says Bouman. "But he got his way."
Keep reading and you'll see how he used this small narrative shift to clear the way for much larger changes. If that's what a small shift can do, imagine the impact a large one might have. You don't win big battles simply by battering your opponents into submission. You win them by shifting the rhetorical terrain such that they have no choice but to give way. That's what Reagan did, and that's what Obama hopes to do.
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