July 27, 2007
Another Great Rightist VII Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:45 PM EST Just a few observations to add to this most interesting colloquy. 1) I think these sorts of polls are basically meaningless because they are asking an unanswerable question. It’s a bit like asking which is more inherently delicious, a cheese soufflé or a bowl of strawberries with heavy cream (“Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.”). Which is a greater work of art, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Picasso’s Guernica?The only possible answer, as far as I’m concerned, is all of them. 2) I don’t think that being a “rightist” (whatever that might be) is what Churchill, de Gaulle, and Reagan have in common. Churchill backed programs early in his career (and crossed the floor of Parliament in 1904 to further them) that were definitely of the left. Only when British politics drifted further leftward, did Churchill come to seem of the right. He was a liberal, not a socialist. Churchill felt that the aim of socialism was to tear down the rich, and the aim of liberalism to raise up the poor. Much the same can be said of Reagan, who always felt that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; it left him. 3) Varied as they were, Churchill, de Gaulle, Reagan, and the so-far-strangely-absent-from-this-discussion Franklin Roosevelt had a few things in common. First, they were all optimists. They had no trouble seeing the “broad, sunlit uplands” of the future whatever the terrible travails of the present. Second, they were all eloquent and able to connect with the people through words at a very fundamental level. Third, they were all nationalists, intensely proud of the history of their respective countries and entirely confident that their countries’ days of glory were not over. Fourth, all four were capable of thinking with their hearts, not just their minds. They could think—and speak—emotionally. Intellectuals seem never to understand that it takes two of the body’s organs to really find the truth in the human universe. The ordinary guy in the street has no problem with that concept at all. 4) Alexander Burns writes, “Many Americans remember Reagan as the winner of the Cold War. There’s plenty of evidence to complicate that perception of history, but it may be that popular memory hasn’t yet absorbed it.” Nor, I’m confident, will it. Nuance is for historians, not the people. Previous Presidents wanted to manage the Cold War; Reagan wanted to win it, and he did. He was captain of the ship when the enemy vessel became a flaming wreck. To be sure, a fire in the enemy’s boiler room helped mightily, but it was Reagan who helped force the enemy to overstress its dilapidated machinery. And it was Reagan who took over a country in deep economic distress and left it in the midst of an economic roll that the world has never seen the equal of. Was he entirely responsible? Of course not. But it wouldn’t have happened had Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale been running the country between 1981 and 1989. I have a very close friend who is a card-carrying liberal of the old school: boycotted grapes, backed the nuclear freeze, opposed every tax cut he ever heard of, you name it. For reasons I can’t remember now, someone gave him a list of the “great Presidents” including Reagan. My friend smiled and said, “Yeah, I guess he was pretty good after all.” That’s when I knew that Reagan had made it into the presidential seraphim. Historians will quibble about this and that, but the man’s greatness will never be seriously in question.
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