CHAPTER NINE

THE MYTHOLOGY
OF REAGANISM

In 1960, William F. Buckley, Jr., was a featured speaker at a Nixon-for-President rally held in a Beverly Hills school auditorium. The man who was to introduce Buckley to the throng was the California chairman of Democrats for Nixon and a subscriber to the National Review—Ronald Reagan. The microphone, however, was dead and there was no one in sight to turn it on. The only route to the locked control room was a foot-wide ledge running outside the building, two stories above the ground. Buckley recalled: “Hollywoodwise, [Reagan] climbed out on the ledge and sidestepped carefully, arms stretched out to help him balance, until he had gone the long way to the window, which he broke open with his elbow, lifting it open from the inside and jumping into the darkness. In a moment the lights were on, the amplifying knobs turned up, the speaker introduced.”¹ Here, at last, was the natural. Reagan was even his own stuntman.

In 1966, Buckley attended a debate between Ronald Reagan, just elected governor of California, and Senator Robert Kennedy on the Vietnam War. In private, Kennedy was going through a profound crisis over the issue, which would eventually lead him to challenge for the presidency. He was filled with doubts. Reagan, on the other hand, had no ambiguities; he was for the war. Almost all observers at the debate agreed that he was the victor. Among those who happened to be in the audience was Richard Nixon, then a Wall Street lawyer, already planning the miraculous resurrection that would result in his election to the presidency. He was impressed with Reagan’s performance. “Suppose he makes a very good record as governor of California?” Nixon told Buckley. Reagan must then be considered presidential timber. Buckley scoffed at the suggestion, refusing to believe Americans would ever accept a former actor in the Oval Office. Reagan was just too “implausible” to imagine as President.²

Buckley did not recognize that Reagan would make the key breakthrough for the movement, performing political tasks that no other conservative could manage. Conservatives had repeatedly attempted to fuse the various doctrinal creeds of the movement into a single force. But precisely because the movement was based in ideology it was rent apart; inconsistent logic could not be reconciled as consistent politics. What Reaganism represented was the effort to unify in politics the disparate strands of conservatism. He animated the intellectuals’ theories with a resonant symbolism—images of idyllic small-town life, enterprising entrepreneurs whose success derived from moral character, and failure induced only by federal bureaucrats. By translating a complex ideology into a soothing vernacular he made it accessible to Americans yearning for reassurance of their own special grace. Reagan’s popular rendition of conservatism was in one sense a simplification, but in another sense an improvement. For he turned the movement outward by transforming a sectarian interpretation of the world into a political mythology, a civil religion. The point, he demonstrated, was to get people to participate in the myth-making.

In the days of the Remnant, conservatism had been dismissed by almost all political analysts as an eccentric movement whose origins could be traced to deeply rooted pathologies. The ideology, it was believed, could never withstand exposure to empirical examination. But Reagan’s ability to present conservatism as a mythological system insulated it from much criticism. With him, facts don’t determine the case; they don’t make his beliefs true. Rather, his beliefs give life to the facts, which are tailored to have a moral. Reagan doesn’t use stories the way experts use statistics. They seek mathematical certainty, whereas he has moral certainty. He asks listeners to trust the tale, not necessarily the detail. If the facts belie his premises, then the facts are at fault, and he can shift ground without making any fundamental change in his beliefs. His policies might be contradictory and counterproductive, but his mythology remains appealing. Throughout his presidency, Reagan has maintained support by persuading many Americans to value the mythology even above their own economic interests. He stages a superb theatrical production, but it’s no act. Greed is not enough to explain this kind of presidency; an analysis that patronizes Reagan simply as a front man for special interests, a man who became president because he was the available pretty face, is too narrow. His life experience vindicates his nostalgic approach to the future; he feels what he says, and that gives it authenticity and force.

No previous conservative leader had been capable of his astonishing feats. Barry Goldwater was able to mobilize true believers but could not persuade others. His statements were those of a sectarian prophet, reflecting a minority claiming to speak for the majority. Goldwater projected a militant ideology, often as arid as the Arizona desert from which he came. He was born a Westerner, whereas Reagan had gone West as a young man. The difference is crucial. Reagan knew from his own life that there could be a new beginning; he knew the frontier was open to all. His vision had far horizons and his tone was always optimistic. He didn’t appeal to resentments, but to the American dream he had had the good fortune to live. Unlike Goldwater, he had originally been a liberal Democrat, but had converted— another new beginning. And unlike Goldwater, Reagan projects the message outward, drawing people in. Goldwater’s slogan was: “In your heart you know he’s right.” Reagan’s tack is different: In his heart he knows you’re right. And he wants to give you the opportunity to prove it in the free market. His ideological politics wasn’t constricting, but attracted support beyond the usual Republican constituencies.

Conservatism, as Reagan practices it, is partly a consequence of the old California Progressivism, which was an anti-party movement led by people for whom ideas were paramount. In 1910, Californian political parties, which had been pawns of the Southern Pacific Railroad, suffered de facto abolition when the Progressives won control of the state government. All state jobs became civil service appointments, rendering machine politics impossible. The Progressives also made it legal for politicians to cross-file as both Democratic and Republican candidates, undermining the meaning of partisanship. (California representative Richard Nixon ran in his second campaign for Congress with both parties’ designation.) Since then, movements rather than parties have dominated politics in the Golden State. It is hardly surprising that the first political consulting firm, Whitaker and Baxter, emerged in California. Politicians and special interests, lacking the party vehicle to sustain ambitions, required image-making machinery to mobilize public opinion.

Reagan himself has not depended on the party to promote his career, as have regular Republicans like Gerald Ford. Reagan, moreover, does not believe in the party as such. He has always been much more the movement figure than the stodgy partisan; he believes he represents values beyond party. During the long wilderness years after Goldwater’s defeat, Reagan’s career was sustained by the movement, just as he sustained it. And because of his indispensability he has been able to use the movement without becoming shackled to any of its factions. His unique position has confounded many political observers, who attempt to pigeonhole him as a “pragmatist” or an “ideologue” without reference to his relationship with the conservative movement.

Reagan’s purpose has never been the resurrection of the traditional Republican Party. His mission is Reaganism. His ideology naturally comes to him, partly because he has crafted a mythology from his own life, which he believes exemplifies the themes of Reaganism.

Time and again, he has used an autobiographical vignette to clinch a political point. For him, Reaganism begins at home, a deduction from the Ronald Reagan story, which illustrates broad forces at work in American society. He presents himself as the self-made man. He tells us that he’s just like us and that through the free market we can succeed as he did. For decades he has been surrounded by image-makers in Hollywood and in politics. But ultimately he has been his own myth-maker: the self-made man invents himself.*

Jack Reagan was an alcoholic traveling salesman who never succeeded. He was a staunch Democrat in the Republican heartland, a nonpracticing Catholic among devout Protestants and an outspoken opponent of the ascendant Ku Klux Klan. His wife, Nelle, an active member of the local Christian Church, a Protestant sect, was always performing good deeds, regularly inviting just-released convicts to board in her home.

Ronald Reagan remembers his early childhood as “one of those rare Huck Finn–Tom Sawyer idylls.”When he was nine, his family moved from Tampico, Illinois, to the larger Dixon, population 10,000. “All of us have to have a place to get back to; Dixon is that place for me,” he wrote in his autobiography, Where’s the Best of Me?³ His memories are of a golden age whose tempo was measured by the seasons, not by the clock. Small-town life was the natural world.

Growing up, Reagan says he was “an inveterate reader.”⁴ A book that “made a lasting impression on me at about the age of eleven or twelve, mainly because of the goodness of the principal character” was entitled That Printer of Udell’s, a Horatio Alger–style success story, written by a popular turn-of-the-century author, Harold Bell Wright.

The hero of the novel is a young Midwesterner named Dick Falkner, earnest and poor. His benevolent mother dies and his father is a drunk. He must leave town to find work. He moves to Boyd City, where he becomes a printer by day and a student at the night school. There he solves a murder and rescues a beautiful, wealthy young lady in distress. Dick and the other young members of the Jerusalem Church seek “to apply Christ’s teachings in our town.” They aim for “civic Christianity” and “municipal virtue”; social welfare, they believe, is a matter of individual initiative. So they set up their own charitable agency—the Institution for Helping the Unemployed— which makes sure that only the truly needy are aided. Traditional values are good business, and Boyd City becomes a paradise.

In place of the saloons that once lined the east side of Broadway and the principal street leading to it, there were substantial buildings and respectable business firms. The gambling dens and brothels had been forced to close their doors, and their occupants driven to seek other fields for their degrading profession. Cheap variety and vulgar burlesque troups had the city listed as “no good,” and passed it by, while the best of musicians and lecturers were always sure of crowded houses. The churches, of all denominations, had been forced to increase their seating capacity; and the attendance at high school and business college had enlarged four-fold; the city streets and public buildings, the lawns and fences even, by their clean and well-kept appearance, showed an honest pride, and a purpose above mere existence. But a stranger would notice, first of all, the absence of loafers on the street corners, and the bright, interested expressions and manners of the young men whom he chanced to meet.⁵

A traveling salesman, passing through Boyd City, remarks upon viewing this incredible transformation: “I’m sure of one thing, they were struck by good, common-sense business Christianity.” In the end, Dick Falkner marries the girl he saved, is elected to Congress, and leaves home to carry his message to Washington.

Reagan was encouraged at home to emulate heroes like Dick Falkner. Jack Reagan taught his son: “All men are created equal and man’s own ambition determines what happens to him the rest of his life.” By taking this maxim to heart, Ronald may have had ambivalent feelings about his father, whose alcoholism Nelle explained as a “sickness . . . beyond his control,” a character flaw that undermined ambition.⁶

Jack’s dreams never came true. He never owned his own home; the one he rented had a leaky roof. He never earned more than fifty-five dollars a week, and he was able to afford a new car only once. Ronald had to wear his older brother’s clothes until he at last outgrew him. One Christmas Eve, Jack received a dismissal notice in an envelope in which he expected a bonus (a story his son told countless times on the campaign trail). Then, Jack’s dream of owning his own store was shattered by the Depression. Fortunately, big government saved him. His campaign activity on behalf of the Democratic Party landed him a patronage job as Dixon’s top bureaucrat with the Work Projects Administration during the early days of the New Deal. The local relief agency, however, wouldn’t allow all of its charges to work for Jack’s WPA. His life, according to his son’s later interpretation, “became one of almost permanent anger and frustration. However, his rage was directed only at his local tormentors. Being a loyal Democrat, he never criticized the administration or the government.”⁷ But did Jack’s “rage” begin with the New Deal? He was, after all, a dyed-in-the-wool lifelong liberal Democrat who was rescued from ruin by his party’s program. Was there no connection between his economic failure, his alcoholism, and his “rage”? His son prefers an explanation that suits his political views.

Reagan’s family’s humble state fits a classic motif of success fairy tales. Jack’s alcoholism, the leaky roof, the do-good but ineffective mother, the layoffs, the bankrupt business, the hand-me-down clothes—these are Ronald Reagan’s log cabin. The most successful people are those who have risen the furthest; the humbler the father, the nobler the son.

After Reagan graduated from Eureka College, he worked as a radio announcer at WOC (World of Chiropractic) in Davenport, Iowa. He went on to broadcast Chicago Cubs games, and when he followed the baseball club to California for spring training he took a screen test at Warner Brothers. He left town before his test was reviewed. Reagan believed that returning home helped him get his Hollywood contract. He didn’t sacrifice his authenticity to “go Hollywood,” he needed only luck. “Actually I had done, through ignorance, the smartest thing it was possible to do.”⁸

Reagan’s dream as a young man was to become a leading man in what he later called the “house of illusion”—in Hollywood. Eventually this dream of stardom matured into a political vision that would be officially embraced by the Republican Party. The importance of Hollywood to Reaganism does not lie mainly in Reagan’s ability to peer professionally into a camera lens. He gives a sense of being at home with himself not because he’s an actor, but because he knows his place in the cosmos. Hollywood has at least as much to do with Reagan’s substance as his technique.

When Reagan signed his first contract with Warner Brothers, the movie colony was a dream to millions of young people aspiring to become silver-screen legends. During the Depression, Hollywood helped sustain the hope that anything was still possible in America, the opportunity society. Leo C. Rosten, in his classic 1941 study, Hollywood, wrote:

Our culture is saturated with the dynamic attributes of what Max Weber called “the Protestant ethic”: Work hard, be virtuous, and you will succeed. But our world, particularly in an era of crisis, does not fulfill these promises, and to the degree that our economy fails to reward those who try hard and train themselves and shun evil, the role of luck becomes increasingly important, and the individual becomes increasingly aware that luck is a crucial part of success. The very fact that opportunities have shrunk, that millions are caught in depressions as in an iron trap, that neither ability, intelligence, nor training seems to guarantee success any more—these make the role of luck more desperately cherished, more desperately invoked in fantasy or prayer. There is an unconscious point to the dream of Hollywood which millions keep alive in their minds.⁹

The star system was the basis of Hollywood box-office success. An actor became a charismatic celebrity because people could see in him their private dreams. A star was an archetype: There was only one Clark Gable, but producers searched for a “Gable type.” New contract players at the studios may have thought that they were hired because of their own radiant qualities, but more often than not, they were on the payroll because they reminded producers of someone else. Reagan learned “some time” after his film debut that “I was in Hollywood and at Warner Brothers because of a similarity in voice to that of a promising young actor, Ross Alexander, who—on the verge of stardom at Warner Brothers—was a tragic suicide.”¹⁰ Ross Alexander’s lingering image made Reagan’s film career possible. As an actor he never achieved the status of an archetype, a failure that liberated him for another kind of stardom.

Reagan’s most affecting role was in Knute Rockne, playing George Gipp, a young football player for Notre Dame, whose death was used by coach Rockne to inspire the team to victory: “Win one for the Gipper.” Reagan’s silliest role was in Bedtime for Bonzo, in which he was upstaged by a chimpanzee. And his best role was in Kings Row, which is particularly interesting because it can be interpreted as a dream picture about the New Deal. (When the film was made, in 1941, Reagan was an ardent liberal who idolized Franklin D. Roosevelt and regarded the Republican Party as “the party of big business.”)

Kings Row is set in a midwestern small town. Reagan is Drake McHugh, a carefree young man who lives off a trust fund (symbolically: the Roaring Twenties). He courts the town physician’s daughter, but his bid for love and respectability is rejected because he is too carefree. The wealthy doctor, played by Charles Coburn, is a sadistic surgeon (the “economic royalist”). When Drake’s trust fund is embezzled by the local banker, he is without work or cash (the Crash). He must move to the wrong side of the tracks to live with his new girlfriend, Randy Monaghan, played by Ann Sheridan. Her father, a railroad foreman, gets Drake a job. But one night Drake is hit by a train, and the cruel doctor is summoned. Drake’s legs are amputated. “Where’s the rest of me?” he cries upon awakening. He’s crushed (the Depression). But his best friend, Parris Mitchell, played by Robert Cummings, who has been studying psychoanalysis in Vienna, is informed about the accident by Randy. Parris writes a letter, describing the accident as a “ghastly tragedy,” especially because Drake “lived by his freedom and independence.” Above all, care must be taken to “avoid the helpless invalid complex.” Drake must “make a new beginning.” Soon Parris arrives on the scene. He tells Drake that he has nothing to fear but fear itself. He lends Drake money to get him on his feet again. Parris is a doctor who fixes bodies and souls (Dr. New Deal). By the time Parris tells Drake that losing his legs was unnecessary, Drake has regained his old confidence. “Let’s give a party. I feel swell,” he says in the last line of the movie. (Happy days are here again!)

Reagan’s movie career, poised to take off after the success of Kings Row, was grounded by World War II. He served in Hollywood, making films for the army. Although he didn’t leave California and never heard enemy fire, he contends that his wartime experience jolted him.* He wrote:

The story of my disillusionment with big government is linked fundamentally with the ideals that suddenly sprouted and put forth in the war years. Like most of the soldiers who came back, I expected a world suddenly reformed. I hoped and believed that the blood and death and confusion of World War II would result in a regeneration of mankind. . . . I was wrong. I discovered that the world was almost the same and perhaps a little worse. . . . [This] crystallized a determination in my mind. I would work with the tools I had: my thoughts, my speaking abilities, my reputation as an actor. I would try to bring about the regeneration of the world I believed should have automatically appeared. This introduced me to the world of reality as opposed to make-believe.¹¹

Shortly after the war, Reagan became president of the Screen Actors Guild. All political groups jockeyed for power inside the Guild, including the Communists. In the beginning of Reagan’s involvement in Hollywood politics, he characterized himself as having the “uncomfortable consciousness of being unusually naive.”¹² He regarded himself as a “near-hopeless hemophilic liberal.”¹³ Within a couple of years he became such a realist that, when he felt his life threatened, he packed a .32-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver on a shoulder strap. He discovered that instead of harmony, shared values, and trust in the liberal community, there was conflict, faction, and deceit. He came to believe that if Communists like those he encountered in Hollywood won, the world would fall apart.

Reagan was a premature neoconservative. Like the neoconservatives, he first became personally disillusioned with the left and then attributed the world’s fall to the left’s activities and programs. He believed that his mission was to restore the rightful order of things.

His conversion from left-winger to right-winger wasn’t the result of a single epiphany, but the outcome of a series of upheavals, including his tangle with the Communists in Hollywood, his encounter with the stiff British tax system, his bitter divorce from Jane Wyman, and his marriage to Nancy Davis, whose wealthy stepfather was a staunch conservative. Reagan continued moving rightward when his movie career stalled. In 1954 he became a traveling salesman for General Electric and the virtues of free enterprise. He also became a star in the new medium of television, hosting GE Theater and Death Valley Days. His standard GE speech, about “encroaching government control,” was a litany of engaging anecdotes and facts culled from magazines like Reader’s Digest. He was continually clipping pertinent articles and underlining brief stories to enliven and update “the speech.”

One day, in 1959, he added a paragraph to “the speech” in which he attacked the Tennessee Valley Authority. This alarmed GE’s executives because the company did $50 million worth of government business. Reagan was pressured to drop the offending remarks. In 1962, when GE officials demanded that he drop the ideological pitch from “the speech,” he refused. Twenty-four hours later, the corporation canceled GE Theater. In analyzing what happened in this confrontation of conservative principle and corporate interest, Reagan turned to the writing of another former left-winger, Whittaker Chambers. In a passage cited by Reagan in his memoirs, Chambers wrote: “When I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit at something else. What I hit was the force of that great Socialist revolution which in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its icecap over the nation for two decades. I had no adequate idea of its extent, the depth of its penetration, or the fierce vindictiveness of its revolutionary temper.” Reagan decided that the “attempted hatchet job” on his speech reflected the “vindictiveness of the liberal temper.”¹⁴

Reagan’s autobiography stops just as his political career began. The book’s final paragraph conveys optimism and restlessness. “The days stretch ahead with promise. The city closes in on the ranch—we prowl the countryside scouting a new location.” Had he concluded here, the story that began as a “Huck Finn–Tom Sawyer idyll” might have recalled the last lines of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck’s impulse is to escape the civilizing clutches of Aunt Polly and “light out for the territory ahead of the rest.” But Reagan did not stop here. He was not attempting any symmetry with Mark Twain. Instead, he mustered an appeal to the Zeus of Hollywood. “I should turn to the sages for some profound utterance to close out these words. Still, it is more fitting that a remark by The King of actors, Clark Gable, sticks in my mind. Gable said, ‘The most important thing a man can know is that, as he approaches his own door, someone on the other side is listening for the sound of his footsteps.’ I have found the rest of me.”¹⁵ You can go home again—it’s the happy ending that also sets the stage for another new beginning.

In Hollywood, Reagan never made the transition from person to persona. He was a second-rank actor, a player in other people’s dreams. He was known as the “Errol Flynn of the B’s”—there was no “Reagan type.” When Jack Warner was asked what he thought of Reagan for governor, he is reputed to have answered, “Jimmy Stewart for governor, Ronald Reagan for best friend.” Stewart, after all, was a superstar, an archetype. (Moreover, he had been a U.S. senator in two movies—Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.) Warner understood Reagan only in the context of moviemaking, where a “best friend” couldn’t be a brilliant leading man. A “best friend” in politics was altogether another matter. Reagan’s inability to rise high in the Hollywood firmament was critical to his political stardom. If he had been a superstar, his celebrity would have been blinding; we wouldn’t have been able to see his ideology. Reagan, however, was ordinary enough to make his message sound trustworthy. He failed to become a Hollywood archetype, but cast an ideology into a mythology. He achieved his real stardom by bringing Reaganism to us, by asking us to go back with him to where dreams began.

Reaganism was the star vehicle Reagan had been waiting for all his life, the ultimate treatment of conservatism. Reaganism integrated his dreams and deeds, his inner and outer selves. But he had to live his life before he could master the mythology. Great acting that electrifies audiences is born of conviction. And while Reagan exalted the individual, he stood at the head of a mass movement.

The scene: The 1980 Republican Party Convention in Detroit. The issue: passage of the party platform. The vote: unanimously in favor. The platform’s preamble closed with these ringing words: “By reversing our economic decline, by reversing our international decline, we can and will resurrect our dreams.” Thus, economic and foreign policies were acclaimed as means to a larger goal—making dreams come true—or, more precisely, bringing dreams back from the dead.

Dreams are the raw material of myth. They are condensed, fragmented, symbolic, super-real; they have a vividness and intensity beyond waking reality. They are an inverted world of wish-fulfillment. They present the answers but not the questions, and so they can seem at once enigmatic and crystal-clear. They’re a lot like movies. The substance of Hollywood, of course, is the production of dream pictures. The movies are dreams of what never happened, but what should or could have happened. Movies can create nostalgia and even homesickness for places that are only dreams, like Andy Hardy’s small town or John Ford’s and John Wayne’s Old West. (Movies are fictions, not lies.) Reagan has the special ability to evoke these images and sentiments in politics. He can make us feel nostalgic for the America that never was. He can make us feel that everything will turn out all right. Reaganism is a structure for understanding dreams so that we can make them come true for ourselves and for America.

The first myth of Reaganism—a community myth about an earlier, preindustrial America—honors the traditional world for which Russell Kirk longed. Like many community myths, this one is about a paradise on earth, a land of infinite plenty, open to all, where dreams come true and true merit is rewarded. Those who cleared the land brought order out of chaos. The land gave ungrudgingly, nurturing a special people, a community of faith. “The success story of America,” Reagan said on April 24, 1982, “is neighbor helping neighbor.” One big happy family lived here. For those who had fled a corrupt Old World, it was a new beginning.

There was a divine hand in this creation. “Call it mysticism if you will,” said Reagan in his July 4, 1968, message. “I have always believed there was some divine plan that placed this nation between the oceans to be sought out and found by those with a special kind of courage and an overabundant love of freedom.” This is a God of plenty, of “overabundance,” who has more than enough for His chosen people.

In the “divine plan” America exists as a New World, or not at all. And the chosen people have the gift to draw upon the primal power of creation itself. “There are no words to express the extraordinary strength and character of this breed of people we call Americans,” Reagan said in his 1980 nomination acceptance speech. “Everywhere we have met thousands of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans from all economic conditions and walks of life bound together in that community of shared values of family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom. . . . They are the kind of men and women Tom Paine had in mind when he wrote—during the darkest days of the American Revolution—‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’”*

The second myth that contributes to the grand mythology is the way of Von Hayek. It explains the way the mundane world works, where there’s no image of paradise. Outside the gates of Eden, the way of the world is hard work; and progress is the survival of the fittest. (It was Reagan, after all, who as host of GE Theater intoned: “Progress is our most important product.”) This world is dynamic, and the more risks that are taken, the more luck and fortune result. The free-market myth equates competition with liberty and economic planning with tyranny, individualism with prosperity and government with stagnation.

The third and perhaps most potent myth is about the demonic power of big government, a myth explaining why the world is in such pathetic shape and why the first two myths have been confounded. Through the demonic power of the state about which Whittaker Chambers warned, progress has been limited, competition restrained, the moral fiber of the people weakened, and true merit gone unrewarded. The “compact” of community has been violated and the free market displaced. “For too long now, we’ve removed from our people the decisions on how to dispose of what they created,” Reagan said in 1981. “We have strayed from first principles. We must alter our course.” Only a special evil could lead Americans away from their “first principles.” There can be no accommodation with this evil.

Of course the biggest big government is Communism, and the New Deal is logically construed as an opening wedge for the greatest evil. “For some decades now,” Reagan wrote, “the liberal movement has worked to centralize government authority in Washington and to increase government’s power. . . . We find the ultimate in government planning in the Soviet Union.”¹⁷ Liberals, by leading in the establishment of the welfare state, deprive us of our liberty. They have made a treacherous bargain. Some liberals, Reagan learned in Hollywood, were in league with those who would destroy us. And he became an FBI informer in order to thwart them. “We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars,” he wrote. “There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is not fiscal and economic stability in the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation.”¹⁸ The devil gains power by the trick of appealing to our good instincts. “It is in the area of social welfare that government has found its most fertile growing bed,” Reagan wrote. “So many of us accept our responsibility for those less fortunate. We are susceptible to humanitarian appeals.”¹⁹

From the perspective of Reaganism one can see just how demonic big government is. It makes you want what doesn’t really belong to you. Entitlements, such as welfare or Social Security, aren’t seen by recipients as charity or rewards, but as rights. Reagan said, on January 14, 1982, “Did we forget that the function of government is not to confer happiness on us, but to give us the opportunity to work out happiness for ourselves?”

Big government establishes a system that tries to satisfy infinite desires. These desires, by the recipients of entitlements, fuel the expansion of government. “Because no government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size, government programs once launched never go out of existence,” Reagan wrote.²⁰

Big government turns wants into needs. And if one’s desires can never be sated, more is demanded no matter what the ruinous consequences. This makes growth necessary but seemingly impossible because the gluttonous always feel empty. All standards of measurement are lost. Reagan wrote: “Government tends to grow, government programs take on weight and momentum as public servants say, always with the best of intentions, ‘What greater service we could render if only we had a little money and a little more power.’ But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.”²¹ And since government feeds off the deadly sin of gluttony, how can anyone know then who is “truly needy”?

Through taxation, big government takes from those who have made money and gives it to those who haven’t, contradicting the lesson of hard work the market should be teaching. “Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive surtax and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation?” Reagan asked in his memoir.²²

Because big government promises to solve all of our problems for us without demanding individual initiative in return, it creates rising expectations that can’t be met. Riots of the frustrated and envious, gluttonous looting, disrespect for authority, and excessive litigation follow. The demonic power of big government fosters a world of chaos.

This threat to order is manifested politically in interest-group liberalism, which makes people think of themselves first as members of an interest group, not as Americans. Through this system of profane interests, government expands, entitlements increase, and politicians stay in office: tax, spend, elect is the liberal formula. The American identity is shattered, the community violated. “We hear much of special interest groups,” said Reagan in his 1981 Inaugural. “Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. . . . They are . . . ‘We the people.’ This breed called Americans.”

When big government supplants the free market as a new kind of impersonal force, it reduces the elements of risk and incentive that have made the American character. Our spiritual condition is at stake. “I would like to have a crusade today, and I would like to lead that crusade with your help,” said Reagan during his October 28, 1980, debate with Jimmy Carter. “And it would be one to take government off the backs of the great people of this country, and turn you loose again to do those things that I know you can do so well, because you did them and made this country great.”

Reagan’s “crusade” is a mythic battle for a Restoration. He does not hold Americans responsible for the existence of the national government: I’m OK, you’re OK. The devil is an external enemy, whose origin is some mysterious netherworld of history. But the devil’s mischief is evident in the disorder of the interest groups and the rigid tyranny of government planners. There is no original-sin motif in his mythology. We can therefore go back in time to the creation, where we will recover our “first principles” and our power. When the Restoration occurs, the dream of a Conservative Opportunity Society will come true. The vivid rhetoric about an ideal community and an ideal free market will be reality.

The Restoration appears like Disneyland, the “Magic Kingdom,” an amalgam of various theme parks whose coherence comes from the dreamy sensation they arouse. (Appropriately, Reagan was the television broadcaster at the 1955 opening of Disneyland.) In the world of community, everyone has come home to stay. And everyone shares the same faith, even when it’s different; this is the vague “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which is timeless. The highest form of knowledge is common sense, and luckily everyone has it. But loss of faith inevitably leads to expulsion from the community.

Then one can enter the world of the free market, where everyone succeeds by striking out on his own. Here time is money, and common sense is no substitute for inside information. One can fall from grace by filing for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which, if handled properly by accountants and lawyers, might be a condition for future success. Faith that supply creates its own demand is helpful, but creating demand to meet supply can lead to a higher state than faith: market confidence.

Reagan’s economic program is the Restoration in action. Cutting the budget severs the chains shackling citizens to government; the regimen of budget-cutting makes the citizen active in the market again; deregulation slashes bureaucratic authority. It becomes clear that government isn’t as important as we had thought and is really a meddler. The supply-side tax cut, rather than encouraging gluttony by giving us more money to spend, provides rewards and incentives so that we can make our own way in the free market. Cutting taxes also starves government, forcing it to reduce its size. “I believe it is clear,” Reagan said in his 1980 acceptance speech, “our federal government is overgrown and overweight. Indeed, it is time for our government to go on a diet.”

Policies ought to be the gauge of a President’s program. But Reagan himself stresses that public actions derive from psychic sources. He wants more than the enactment of laws; he wants a New Beginning. “We have every right to dream heroic dreams,” he said in his 1980 Inaugural. We must “resurrect” our dreams, according to the Republican Party platform. “America’s future is in your dreams. Make them come true,” Reagan said on January 14, 1982. (“If you can dream it, you can do it,” said Walt Disney.)

To make the dreams of Reaganism come true, Reagan invokes magic— “the magic of the marketplace,” a phrase he uses repeatedly. Here is the underlying principle of the mythological method. “When I spoke about a New Beginning,” the President said on January 14, 1982, “I was talking about much more than budget cuts and incentives for savings and investment. I was talking about a fundamental change in the relationship between citizen and government, a change that honors the legacy of the Founding Fathers. . . .” By making one myth—the free-market myth—come true, another myth—the community myth—will come true, too. And then the spell of demonic power will be broken. This is a special kind of magic, early defined by Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough as “contagious magic.” “The logical basis of Contagious Magic,” he wrote, “. . . is a mistaken association of ideas; its physical basis, if we may speak of such a thing . . . is a material medium of some sort which, like the ether of modern physics, is assumed to unite distant objects and to convey impressions from one to the other.”²³

To Reagan, the “magic of the marketplace” restores prosperity and thus community. The magic reconciles economic selfishness and community obligation. The dilemma of private versus public interests is neatly resolved, and the sum of all individuals becomes a nation. No matter that the central values of the community and free-market myths are absolutely contradictory: when government relocates to smaller quarters, neighborly volunteers will assume the running of social services and the rich will be generous, the poor grateful, the hard-working eventually successful.

Reagan has thought about and refined these themes for decades. He expresses them in every important public statement he makes as president. His most stirring and memorable speeches are the most clearly mythological. In his acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican convention, for example, he spoke of a land placed here by “Divine Providence.” The chosen community of Americans cherished values that “transcend persons and parties.” These values created “a previously undreamed of prosperity.” But big government is “eroding our national will and purpose.” We must experience a “rebirth,” make a “new beginning.”

On March 8, 1983, the President spoke to the National Association of Evangelicals, telling them that “modern-day secularism” is “discarding the tried and time-tested values upon which our very civilization is based.” American history is the “story of hopes fulfilled and dreams made into reality.” Against us stands the Soviet Union, “an evil empire.” Reagan quoted Whittaker Chambers, who “wrote that the crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God.”

Reagan’s mythology is a variant of what the sociologist Robert N. Bellah has called “the civil religion.”²⁴ (Bellah’s intellectual construction has been taken up with a vengeance by the neoconservative Secretary of Education William Bennett, who presents “the civil religion” as some sort of timeless catechism.) Reagan talks about returning to “first principles,” as though they were valid for all times. Yet “the civil religion” has not been static, handed down from generation to generation like a meticulously preserved museum piece. It is almost infinitely pliable and has meant different things in different periods. Reagan’s version is not a perfect restatement of the original “civil religion.” Rather, his account is a major revision, a departure from that expressed by the Puritans, the Founding Fathers, and Abraham Lincoln.

Reaganism is compatible with the traditional “civil religion” in two key respects: Reagan believes that we can start the world over again, with America as the model; and he believes that we need only look at our relationship with America to know where we stand with God. After this, Reagan is a radical revisionist.

In his conception of the chosen people and their obligations, he proposes a direct reversal of both the Puritans’ and Lincoln’s ideas. For Reagan, it isn’t self-denial and sacrifice that make one part of the chosen people, one of the elect. His presidential campaigns, in fact, have been built on derision of sacrifice. In 1980, he sneered at Jimmy Carter for suggesting that the “moral equivalent of war” might be needed to meet “limits to growth.” And in 1984, he dismissed Walter Mondale’s calls to face the federal deficit as “gloom and doom.” The issue in both cases, according to Reagan, was optimism versus pessimism.

But what happens when the Restoration arrives, when it’s “morning again in America,” as his 1984 television ads proclaimed? In Reagan’s “civil religion,” election is manifested by conspicuous consumption. What God wants for us is a good description of what Reagan, the self-made man, and his millionaire friends have accumulated. This God takes most pleasure in those who are most pleased. Our enjoyment of the bounty is a sign of piety. The dissatisfied exhibit envy, the sign of failure. And the reason they are malcontents is that big government pretended it could make them happy. Since it’s really Satanic, those who place their faith in it will always be disappointed. But once they are shaken from their false faith, their chronic agitation will cease. Then, when everyone believes, dreams will be resurrected, the free market will be reopened, like the old frontier, and we will again travel to glory.

Reagan’s “civil religion” is soothing. He makes use of the symbols of the past, but requests nothing more than credence. He claims that his “civil religion,” his mythology, is eternal. But, above all, it lacks a sense of history. Reaganism is about a time that is out of time, memory without history.

A month after the attempt on his life, on May 17, 1981, Reagan spoke at a packed Notre Dame football stadium, the site of one of his cinematic triumphs, the alma mater of George Gipp. Now Pat O’Brien, the actor who had played Knute Rockne in the movie, was on the stage with him. The film, the President told the crowd, wasn’t just about a football team. It was an archetypal story about another “little band of men we call the Founding Fathers,” who “gave us more than a nation.” It was up to us to restore their dream. “We forgot to challenge the notion that the state is the principal vehicle of social change; forgot that millions of social interactions among free individuals and institutions can do more to foster economic and social progress than all the careful schemes of government planners. Well, at last we are remembering.”

Reagan’s mythology tells us not only what to remember, but what we can conveniently and without guilt forget. In the course of the battle against demonic government, we must forget, among other things, that the dramatic expansion of the federal government began in the Civil War, under the aegis of Abraham Lincoln, illuminating the American national idea and stoking the fires of economic growth. Reagan wants to take us backward, but the nineteenth century (and the eighteenth century even more) violates all of his precepts and assumptions.

Reaganism, however, cannot be disproved by history or events. To believers, the flaws are in the world, not in the doctrine. Reaganism can always explain the cosmos. Reagan is a radical reactionary because his image of the past is so ahistorical that to return there would indeed be a radical change. Thus, Reaganism can never reach a culmination; the Restoration can never take place. Reagan’s dream of the past is beyond our reach. Yet it’s indestructible because the path to it is always open in our imaginations.

Followers of Reaganism believe Reagan expresses certain quintessential American ideals, which are summarized by the word “conservatism.” But Reaganism is hardly classical conservatism, justifying the status quo as a moral order that must not be tampered with. Reaganism is the popular expression of a sectarian worldview, that of a rising policy- and opinion-making elite—the Counter-Establishment.

Traditional conservatives cherish continuity above all, want to preserve existing institutions and customs, and fulminate against radical innovation. The great English conservative Edmund Burke warned of “metaphysical” politicians who attempt to govern by abstractions. He viewed the state as a father whose failings could not be cured by the voodoo of the son. He urged prudence, caution, and patience. And he counseled against new beginnings when he wrote:

To avoid therefore the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe, and trembling sobcitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horrour on those children of their country, who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds, and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate their father’s life.²⁵

It is hard to imagine a better summary of the mythological system of Reaganism.

*Like all major political figures, Reagan has speechwriters. But his White House aides insist that his speeches are really his own. He almost always rewrites them. In any case, he often doesn’t pay any attention to his staff. What makes Reaganism genuine as a social creed is not that Reagan writes much of his own material, but that many Americans could write it instinctively. He expresses widely shared feelings and beliefs.

*In 1983, Reagan told the Israeli leader Yitzhak Shamir that at the end of the war he personally helped liberate the Nazi death camps as an army photographer and, deeply moved, made a filmic record. By this method, the preserved memory would presumably prevent historical distortions.

* Paine indeed argued for making the world over again. He regarded the reign of the past over the present as despotism. And he devoted himself to this subject at length in The Rights of Man, a reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke argued that posterity was bound to honor the laws established by a wise antiquity. Paine countered that “every age and generation must be free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation any property in the generations which are to follow.”¹⁶