Mark Gabrish Conlan/Zenger's Newsmagazine | 24.06.2004 11:15

Despite the near-deification in the official tributes to Ronald Reagan, his legacy on virtually every significant issue of his presidency — the economy, the environment, women's reproductive rights, Queer rights, labor rights, crony capitalism and U.S. financial and logistical support for international terrorism — was a disaster for the country. Reagan deserves to rot in hell for all eternity.

Reagan’s Dark Legacy

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor
Copyright © 2004 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • Used by permission

First you must learn to smile as you kill.
— John Lennon, “Working-Class Hero”

I actually met Ronald Reagan once. It was in early 1973, as the Watergate scandal was heating up. I was attending the College of Marin and serving on its student government, and we had become the first college in California — perhaps in the country — whose student government had gone on record as favoring the impeachment and removal from office of Richard Nixon. A delegation from our school was invited to go to Sacramento and tape an hour-long television show with Reagan. I have few memories of the details — I was nervous through the whole hour (I was itching like crazy under my arms and I was worried the TV cameras would catch me scratching there) — and about all I remember about Reagan was his implacability, his iron conviction that President Nixon had done nothing wrong and his utter imperviousness to any suggestion to the contrary.

As this memory came back to me in the wake of the extraordinary adulation, verging on sanctification, towards Reagan poured out by the mainstream media in the week after his recent death, what struck me most about it was what didn’t happen. The tributes to Reagan have trotted out the hype about him as the “Great Communicator” and also about his likability, which allegedly made even people with quite different politics feel warm and friendly towards him personally. Not me. I went into that TV studio in Sacramento loathing Ronald Reagan and everything he stood for politically, and I came out an hour later the same way. His surface charm and affability hadn’t moved me one iota.

The hagiography with which Reagan’s death was greeted by the so-called “liberal media” of the broadcast networks and the major newspapers — as well as the frankly and unashamedly Right-wing propaganda outlets like talk radio and cable news — provides yet another example of how history is written by the winners. Reagan’s death was turned into an occasion of national celebration like no Presidential death since that of John F. Kennedy 41 years earlier — and at least with Kennedy’s death there was the excuse that he’d been cut down while in office and had died while still in his 40’s. Reagan had, for all intents and purposes, died well before his body stopped functioning — indeed, given the scatterbrained way he ran the country in the final two years of his Presidency it seems likely he’d already succumbed to Alzheimer’s well before his keeper-of-the-flame wife Nancy publicly admitted it — and frankly I’d been able to forget that he still had a flesh-and-blood existence until it finally ended.

In ancient Rome, the Senate would honor their most distinguished — or at least their least rascally — emperors by voting literally to make gods of them after their deaths. In contemporary America, Reagan’s Right-wing political heirs have similarly sought to deify him in the ways open to them in today’s world. The actual history of Reagan’s presidency has been recast into an official myth that proclaims that he “ended the Cold War” (actually the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own inefficiencies and history of terror against its own population, and the world would be considerably better off today if Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to rehabilitate and reform the Soviet Union’s socialism had worked) and restored a sense of confidence to America after Jimmy Carter’s proclamation of “malaise.”

The attempted canonization of Reagan has produced phenomena like the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, whose stated goal is to name at least one major public building, facility or monument after Reagan in each of America’s 50 states. Already they’ve stripped the name of George Washington from the D.C. airport and replaced it with Reagan’s. A Republican Congressmember has called for the removal of Franklin Roosevelt’s picture from the dime and its replacement with Reagan’s, and his explanation — that it’s time to get rid of that out-of-date liberal icon and replace him with a conservative one — has left no doubt that his motive is more ideological than anything else. And then there was that weird play with Reagan’s body, which was shipped from California (where he died) to Washington, D.C. for one big public funeral and then sent back to California for another — as if the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project was determined not only to have a public building named for Reagan in all 50 states but to have a funeral for him in each state as well.

Not surprisingly, I and most of my political friends have looked on the deification of Ronald Reagan with a mix of disgust and horror. For we remember all too well the dark sides of his legacy:

• Thanks to Reagan, the U.S. blew its best chance of a smooth transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Reagan reversed Jimmy Carter’s halting steps in that direction and signaled the return of a slash-and-burn mentality towards energy by ripping out the solar panels Carter had had installed atop the White House.

• Beginning in his 1980 campaign (and even before that, as governor of California), Reagan systematically trashed the environmentalist legacy of the Republican Party (which had begun with Theodore Roosevelt and continued through the Nixon and Ford administrations), allying himself publicly with the anti-environment “Sagebrush Rebels,” blaming trees for 80 percent of all air pollution and famously proclaiming, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” As President he appointed James Watt as Secretary of the Interior to promote an agenda of destroying the environment for short-term private profit.

• Reagan’s ceaseless assaults on the very idea of government smashed the leftover New Deal impulse to use government power to equalize wealth and income and shield working-class and poor people from the most vicious, brutal aspects of untrammeled lassiez-faire capitalism. Though the impulse to deregulate the economy was bipartisan and actually began in the Carter administration, Reagan carried it forward with the fervor of a true believer and began the process that has led to sky-high energy prices and an end to any sense of corporate ethics. Enron didn’t happen on Reagan’s watch but his policies sowed the seeds for the exaltation of greed above all other human characteristics that made Enron and the other corporate scandals of today possible.

• Reagan’s jihad against the air traffic controllers’ union in 1981 sent a clear signal to all American employers that the government wouldn’t intervene to protect their workers’ right to organize unions. By allowing the so-called “permanent replacement” of striking workers Reagan stripped organized labor of its principal economic weapon and led to the near-total deunionization of the U.S. private sector. Indeed, if it weren’t for unions’ remarkable success in organizing government workers over the last quarter-century there would no longer be a labor movement in the U.S. worthy of the name, thanks to Reagan.

• Reagan pioneered the economic strategy, pursued even more fervently and single-mindedly by the current Bush administration, of systematically starving the public sector with whopping tax cuts for the rich. As Reagan’s first budget director, David Stockman, publicly admitted, the purpose was twofold: not only to reward Reagan’s wealthy friends and supporters but also to starve the public sector to make sure that there would never be the money to fund universal health care or any of the other social-welfare programs Europeans take for granted but which remain dreams in this country.

• Reagan also exalted the military and created ruinous deficits by vastly expanding defense spending, often on ridiculous, unnecessary and non-functional programs like the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) that amounted to nothing more than corporate welfare for defense contractors.

• Under Reagan, the U.S. became the world’s largest funder of terrorist organizations, ranging from the contras in Nicaragua to Manuel Noriega’s thuggish regime in Panama, Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship in Iraq (to whom Reagan’s special envoy, current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, arranged the sale of precursors to biological and chemical weapons in 1983-84) and the mujahedin in Afghanistan — including a fellow named Osama bin Laden who’s given us quite a lot of trouble since.

• Reagan and his supporters among Right-wing ministers like Jerry Falwell organized the “Moral Majority” to mobilize the evangelical Christian vote and move it solidly into the Republican Party. They persuaded evangelicals to reject or ignore the economically liberal parts of their ideology and dump a genuinely religious president, Carter, who took all of the Bible seriously. Thanks to Reagan, Right-wing evangelicals are a permanent fixture of the U.S. political landscape.

• Rejecting his own past — his signing of the most liberal abortion law in the U.S. to that time as governor of California in 1967 and his opposition to the anti-Queer Briggs initiative (which called for the firing of Gay and Lesbian teachers) in 1978 — Reagan as President systematically sucked up to the Christian Right. He imposed the international gag rule forbidding the U.S. from funding population-control programs in other countries, annually addressed the so-called “pro-life” rallies calling for the reversal of Roe v. Wade and an end to women’s right to reproductive choice, and appointed health officials whose response to the then-burgeoning AIDS crisis reflected their own homophobia.

• I’m less bothered than a lot of other Queer writers with the fact that Reagan didn’t say the word “AIDS” until 1987 — six years into the crisis — than by what he finally did say about it, calling for a massive program of testing with the unreliable, nonselective HIV antibody tests while refusing to support laws to ban discrimination against the so-called “HIV-positive.” (At least Bush, Sr. got that one right.) And, of course, it was under Reagan’s watch that then-Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler politically proclaimed as “truth” the absurd notion that the various phenomena referred to as “AIDS” could all be blamed on a single virus — a scientific fraud that has hamstrung efforts to deal with it ever since.

• One of the least talked-about parts of Reagan’s legacy, but perhaps the most far-reaching, was the vote by his appointees to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1987 to repeal the 38-year-old Fairness Doctrine. As a result, the airwaves — especially on AM radio — have gradually evolved into a sinkhole of relentless Right-wing propaganda, fueled by hate speech and outright lies, that has permanently skewed U.S. politics towards the Right. Indeed, the great irony of talk radio and the rest of the Right’s media propaganda machine is that the core of its audience are the very people — working-class white males — who have suffered most from the deindustrialization and deunionization of America Reagan did so much to foster. Polls show that this group is still the most likely in the country to vote for Bush, thus rewarding their class enemies.

The Right-wing political movement that currently rules America began with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Presidential campaign (for which Reagan did a paid TV speech that proved he was a more persuasive spokesperson for Goldwater’s ideas than Goldwater himself). It first took power in the 1968 election, when Richard Nixon and George Wallace between them got 57 percent of the vote to Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent and Nixon’s campaign manager and attorney general, John Mitchell, promised to “move America so far to the Right you won’t recognize it.” Thanks to the Watergate scandal this was delayed temporarily, but Reagan — a better salesman for the far Right than the flinty Goldwater or the demagogic Wallace — revived it in 1980. In the 24 years since there have been only two years where the Republican party did not hold at least one of the three levers of federal power — the Presidency and a majority in both houses of Congress — and only 10 years where they did not hold at least two.

Even though polls indicate an electorate still closely divided between the two big parties, the U.S. is slowly but surely going the way of Mexico in the second half of the 20th century: a system in which there are several political parties but only one that matters. Reagan’s legacy has been not only to revive the era of Republican dominance that initially lasted from the Civil War to Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 but to put into effect the brutal social and economic policies the Republicans pursued during those years: a legacy of lassiez-faire capitalism, corporate irresponsibility and greed, American imperialism and warmongering abroad, and racial discrimination and the suppression of dissent at home. If you’re a Republican, especially a far-Right one, you’ll see all this as a return to American first principles and a rejection of the perversions of the New Deal and the Great Society.

But if you’re a human being who believes that we’re all in this world together; that the rich have a social obligation to help the poor; that discrimination based on race, religion, gender or sexual orientation have no place in a society that calls itself democratic; and that we have an ultimate obligation to future generations not only to preserve the economy but to ensure the very survival of the planet; then you will hate Reagan’s legacy as much as I do and wish there is a hell so he can rot in it for all eternity.

e-mail:: mgconlan@earthlink.net