December Read: The Old Ideology's New Clothes

Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future
Will Bunch; 2009

The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America
William Kleinknecht; 2009

WPA/Federal Art Project: Newark, N.J., 1937 (Special Collections and Archives, George Mason University Libraries)

"Facts are stupid things," he famously mangled his line.

As the Reagan centennial approaches, two journalists bring up some stubborn facts—as did a few of their Reagan-era colleagues, back in the day.

One true thing about facts: they have a well-known liberal bias.

Something facts do not have: a lavishly-funded PR machine.

Reagan does.

Years before the man's death, efforts including Grover Norquist's "Reagan Legacy Project" set out to name every conceivable piece of public property after the man who encouraged Americans to hate government.

Will Bunch notes how, prior to Reagan's June 2004 funeral, former White House aides and advance men spent at least a dozen years pre-planning the televised week-long "'spontaneous' moment of national unity and shared grief."

When the day finally came, their prep work took the meticulously staged camera ops of the Reagan presidency to new levels of packaged spectacle, handed to a grateful corporate media.

Bunch quotes Richard Goldstein in the Village Voice—

Each gesture was minutely choreographed, every tear strategically placed.

It's all to be expected: the Right has the money to invest in perpetual image polishing of a "PR outfit that became President," in the words of a former Reagan press secretary quoted in both books.

Both authors run through Reagan's lies, distortions, and fantasies; the economic and social depredations his policies set in motion; the myths his PR machine has promoted.

And there was the Democrats' reaction to Reagan's "popularity"—actually, not so great, during most of his eight years in office. Yet the party leadership's acceptance of the notion was the beginning of the end for Democratic effectiveness at governing—or at even managing a coherent message.

Bunch credits Reagan' willingness, as California governor, to combine "red meat rhetoric with closed-door compromise." Bunch believes that Reagan as president was often a pragmatist, and praises him for starting to ease tensions with the Soviets. But this was after Reagan had recklessly tempted raising tensions, with his Evil Empire cracks and other shenanigans.

Reagan may have been a sentimentalist, willing to acknowledge the humanity of his putative enemies—if he got to know them personally. Or if he saw something in a movie, which seems to have been his mode of perceiving the world.

Bunch describes at length Reagan's reaction to the 1983 broadcast of The Day After, and how its scenes of nuclear holocaust in a Midwestern town motivated him to work for an arms treaty.

Too bad no one ever showed him a movie about a struggling single mother; one wonders if that might have made it harder for him to turn real Americans into imaginary freeloading welfare queens. But he wouldn't have wanted them to be flesh-and-blood: the vision of dark-skinned, overly fertile women conjured up by his tall tales was too politically useful.

Just as—before being re-branded a "sunny optimist"—he advanced his career this way:

In 1969, as he geared up for a second run at governor, the students of Berkeley provided Reagan with another opportunity. Students and community activists rioted over a patch of campus-owned land they called People's Park.

Reagan sent in the National Guard. The image of a Guard helicopter dropping tear gas on the campus sent the governor's popularity soaring.

The next year, anti-war demonstrations caused more protests and a riot at UC Santa Barbara.

"If it takes a bloodbath to silence the demonstrators," Reagan said, "let's get it over with."

And Reagan's campaign for the presidential nomination was launched here: a proud symbol of "state's rights," best known as the site of murders committed very nearly with impunity.

There was no regard for the public good in Reagan or his machine.

Days before the 1980 election, Reagan blew off his handlers' attempts to prep him for debating Jimmy Carter, so confident was he of winning over his TeeVee audience.

Carter droned on about dull subjects like Americans going without national health care, which Reagan had long opposed.

Reagan replied with his foolproof zinger: "There you go again."

Reagan became president not merely to ensure that "America still lacks the national health-care program that Carter spoke about." [Bunch] The real goal was to undo the New Deal. At the time, unthinkable; now, distressingly far along.

During the Depression, both books note, the WPA wages Reagan's father and brother earned were all that kept the family afloat. For a time, Reagan was grateful, and considered himself a loyal Democrat. Later, as his acting fortunes fluctuated, he made helpful connections with the rich and powerful—and learned where to find the best pay for his loyalties.

Both authors cover similar ground on the impact of Reaganism since the man left office. Bunch writes in detail about the operatives and media strategies behind the post-presidency myth-making accomplished in Reagan's name. Much of Kleinknecht's book is a condemnation of what nearly thirty years of Reaganism has done to the country. This includes a look at life in Reagan's home town of Dixon, Illinois, before and since those policies triumphed.

Kleinknecht notes the political role of new wealth by the 80s, in bringing Reagan to power and promoting attitudes that remade the country. Of new wealth as a class with a certain mentality, Kleinknecht writes—

... the breed of businessmen who had been closest to Reagan during his rise in politics... were the ranchers, oilmen, and developers of the West and the South whose fortunes had been made in the postwar period... Most had built their businesses from the ground up in the booming communities of the sun belt, which left them with a raw notion of free enterprise that would not have been out of place in the Gilded Age. The wealthy families that had made up the eastern Republican establishment may have cherished their tradition of noblesse oblige, but this class of capitalists had little time for such altruism.

The business figures behind Reagan's presidential run manipulated the soft money loophole in campaign finance law; their innovation was the funneling of corporate donations to local Republican parties as a way around federal limits.

The payoff: Reagan's administration would be filled by figures fresh from corporate boardrooms. Here too, was a pioneering practice, but soon to become SOP for the GOP: the naming of corporate foxes to guard the henhouses of those regulatory agencies they had fought throughout their careers.

The press secretary quoted above had spoken to Mark Hertsgaard, for his 1988 On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency. Bunch describes how—

The nonstop PR offensive spin got to be too much for one deputy White House press secretary, Leslie Janka, who quit in protest after reporters were barred from covering the 1983 invasion of Grenada. "The whole thing was PR... This was a PR outfit that became President and took over the country. And to the degree then to which the Constitution forced them to do things like make a budget, run foreign policy and all that, they sort of did. But their first, last, and overarching activity was public relations."

Bunch writes of the real-life consequences of the image machine—

The Grenada operations indeed proved to be the place where deadly force and PR spin first met. The Pentagon's decision not to embed any journalists with combat troops in the first couple of days of the asualt was unprecedented; with the public clamoring for any kind of information about the fight, the only initial video footage of the invasion was what the government fed to the TV networks... Grenada created a new war template—heavily sanitized, easily winnable, boosting the president's popularity... Top Reagan public relations aide Deaver later admitted to Hertsgaard that he had backed the Grenada assault because "it was a good story" and added that "I think this country was so hungry for a victory, I don't care what the size of it was, we were going to beat the shit out of it."

The jingoistic military moves, the glow of hyperpatriotism, and the pure plays for public emotion, held together by the glue of Reagan's personal popularity and skills as a performer in the public eye, were critical to cementing the president's popularity in the mid-1980s, because of a dirty little secret so rarely reported in the press. The majority of voters disagreed with Ronald Reagan on most of the major issues facing America, from the time he took the oath of office until the day he left.

Kleinknecht's final chapter, "The Second-Rate Society," aims to sum up where we are now, after so many years of living with

...the most destructive element of the Reagan legacy: America's utter loss of national purpose... By discrediting government as a legitimate and meaningful presence in the lives of Americans... By exhorting Americans to place self-interest above all, [Reagan] undermined the spirit of sacrifice and the possibility of a common effort to solve our most pressing national problems.

"Second-rate": too high a ranking? For a country that starves public education; turns children into a captive audience for marketers; then names schools for the person who did so much to get us to this state?

An unaccountable elite has had impunity in looting whatever is left to loot of a hollowed out economy. At the level of the lower classes, we see daily how the Reaganite CEO mentality has trickled down upon us.

Most of my work has been in public or private non-profit institutions, and ever since Reagan, bosses have been eager to imitate the corporate big boys. They may not have stock options, but post-'80s non-profit managers have been happy enough to give themselves raises by laying off staff. And long-time staffers who built an organization became targets for termination—just in time to head off their collecting pensions.

Then there are the more recent employee-screwing innovations, including foreign outsourcing of whatever institutional functions can be auctioned off.

As if to mimic corporate mass media's role in a dumbed-down culture, the institutions that should be guarding our heritage are instead trashing it—as in libraries being run by people who despise those old-fashioned, unsexy books, and can't get rid of them fast enough.

But this is all just the tip of the iceberg that is the true Reagan legacy.

That real legacy, joined to Republican control of public messaging, has been hard at work, ensuring that only correct thought will be heard publicly during next year's centennial.

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