In his biography of Ronald Reagan, Lou Cannon calls him the “Rodney Dangerfield” of ideas. Even conservatives, notes Cannon, rarely value Reagan as an idea man. The Conservative Bookshelf, for example, examines the ideas of Pat Buchanan and Whitaker Chambers but excludes Reagan. In his work The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, George Nash writes, “This book is about conservative intellectuals—those engaged in study, reflection and speculation; purveyors of ideas; scholars and journalists.”1 Nash continues that he does not study men like Ronald Reagan who are merely political activists. Liberals are reluctant to offer any intellectual abilities whatsoever to Reagan. The Democratic stalwart Clarke Clifford famously described Reagan as an “amiable dunce,” and the notorious atheist Christopher Hitchens declares, “The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump.”2 One can more easily find scholarly intellectual treatments of men like Stalin and Hitler than of Reagan. I want to disprove the notion that Reagan was stupid and elevate him to the rank of an intelligent, thinking person. His ideas need to be studied.
This work was largely inspired by an intellectual biography of President Barack Obama published in 2012. The author of that book describes Obama as “ very much an intellectual.”3 After reading that book, I realized a biography of President Reagan was needed too, because Reagan’s thought is just as profound as that of Obama. Obama expresses no original ideas. Reagan, in contrast, took conservatism in a new direction because his thought was, in many respects, a rejection of the traditional conservatism proposed by the likes of Edmund Burke, Klemens von Metternich, and Russell Kirk. Reagan sought to bring radical, dramatic change to the world, specifically by spreading freedom to the people of Eastern Europe and rolling back parts of the Great Society. This was far more original than anything proposed by Obama. One biographer writes, “More so than any other American figure of the twentieth century, he endowed freedom with a conservative meaning, in the process appropriating for the right what had once been a liberal concept.” The scholar Hugh Heclo contended that no twentieth-century president dedicated so much of his career contesting political philosophy. “To appreciate this significance, one must pay as much attention to Reagan’s pre-presidential years as to his White House years. In that regard, Reagan belongs less to the twentieth century and more to the estimable company of Jackson, Madison and Jefferson.”4 In terms of ideas, Reagan trumps Obama.
Another task of this work is to explain Reagan to those who have spent so much time studying him. Reagan baffles historians. He was often called an enigma, even by those who knew him best. He authorized one biography as president, and it became one of the most controversial biographies of the twentieth century because in his effort to elucidate Reagan, the author, Edmund Morris, introduced fictional characters. Morris called Reagan one of the strangest men who has ever lived. Even most of Reagan’s close friends and family acknowledge they never really knew the man who would became the fortieth president of the United States. Biographers have attempted to shine a light on Reagan, but with only limited success, maybe because they have employed conventional methods in order to try to understand an unconventional man. Former president Gerald Ford remarked that Reagan was one of the few leaders he had ever met whose speeches revealed more about him than did private conversations. Consistent with this, I am less interested in Reagan’s personality, even less so in Reagan the president, and more so in his mind, or his cosmology. A traditional biography examines (usually chronologically) the personal and emotional life of a subject, and an intellectual biography may incorporate some of these methods, but this work analyzes Reagan’s ideas by establishing a rationale for them. I place them in their historical and cultural context. In doing so I do not try to supplant other Reagan biographies but rather augment them by allowing readers to view Reagan through a different paradigm, one practiced by intellectual historians. An example of this is the fact that this work, unlike almost every other Reagan biography, excludes the most important person in Reagan’s life, his wife Nancy. This is done because she did little to contribute to his political philosophy.
One other intellectual historian, John Patrick Diggins, attempted to study Reagan, but I found his work wanting. Despite its title, Fate, Freedom and History provides little analysis of how Reagan developed an ideology of freedom. Diggins contends that Reagan’s core beliefs have their origins in the nineteenth century, particularly in Ralph Waldo Emerson and his idealism. He deems Reagan an “Emersonian president.”5 I agree with this, but I think Diggins’s outlook is a bit provincial, since he reduces Reagan’s intellectual sources to nineteenth-century America. I think we need to broaden our outlook and ask, What forces created nineteenth-century America? How was the American cultural landscape, and subsequently Reagan, shaped in the first place? Like all Americans, Reagan must be placed within the broader Western tradition. This requires us to venture outside of America history.
When asked why I study European history instead of American history, I answer that it is because America descended from Europe, just as a child descends from a parent. In order to understand American cultural history, one must understand its European roots. The Puritans provide an example. Most educated Americans recognize the Puritanical influence on American society—such as the Blue Laws that exist in parts of the United States today—but one must study European history to fully understand the Puritans. Similarly, in order to understand the American cultural values that shaped Reagan, one must study some European history.
Diggins, for instance, is right when he calls Reagan Emersonian, but where did Emerson get his ideas from? The answer is Plato. Plato was the first transcendentalist, arguing that the spiritual world transcends this earthly world. Reagan, like Plato, downplayed material things, instead favoring the spiritual. Plato was both an Idealist and an idealist, the former because he stressed the primacy of the mind and ideas, the latter because he believed in an ideal, utopian system of government. Both can be said of Reagan too. He lived in the world of ideas more than any other twentieth-century president. And Reagan, like Plato, advocated an ideal system of government, which he, like Plato, believed was universal. The casual reader may be surprised to learn that an ancient philosopher such as Plato could shape the thought of those who live 2,500 years after him and who probably have read very little of him! But ideas traverse eras and civilizations. Plato’s ideas were transmitted to Reagan through Christianity. Plato’s philosophy contributed to the Christian dualist philosophy, which shaped Reagan by minimizing the significance of the material world in favor of an extrasensory world.
Three specific historical forces shaped Reagan and produced a political philosophy that continues to exert profound influence across the country today, and none of them originated in the United States. The first of these are the same Christian values that have nourished Western and American cultural history, especially the concept of the Kingdom of God. Christians believe that God’s eternal kingdom transcends any earthly value. This kingdom is universal; it is meant for all people, of all ages, and of all nations. Second, Reagan was shaped by the American emphasis on freedom and an aversion to a strong centralized government. Reagan wasn’t a conservative; he was a liberal in the true sense of the word because he deemed freedom to be the highest political value, trumping equality, education, and sometimes even peace.
This belief in freedom has fundamentally shaped American culture since colonial times, but the intellectual origins of this belief, at least in modern times, lie in Western Europe. During the Enlightenment, philosophers argued that freedom was best achieved by minimizing the power of a centralized government, and this idea led to American revolutionary documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Enlightenment thinkers were the first “freedom fighters,” from whom all other demands for liberty descend. Although today we consider Reagan to be a figure of the right, his notions of freedom are actually descended from Enlightenment thinkers. The Enlightenment gave birth to America, with its emphasis on freedom being the handmaiden. Significantly, too, most Enlightenment philosophers believed freedom to be universal, applicable to all people at all times.
The period between the two world wars, when Western powers acquiesced to—rather than confronted—Hitler was the third historical force that shaped Reagan. He used history as much as any American president to buttress his cosmology because he lived through one of the most catastrophic events in human history, World War II. Reagan could not escape the lessons of the appeasement era, when Western powers placated Hitler, allowing him to annex Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia. Reagan used the lessons learned from this era of appeasement to further his case that the United States needed to actively confront the Soviet Union. Reagan drew on the fact that extreme attempts at peace, negotiation, and compromise only strengthened Hitler, leading to the most deadly war in history. This spurred his activist foreign policy, which aimed at ending the Soviet Union, even if this policy seemed aggressive and confrontational to observers. Most of Reagan’s baby-boomer critics emphasized Vietnam as their lesson. They used the debacle in Southeast Asia as evidence when arguing that the United States should not try to promote freedom to distant corners of the globe. Reagan, on the other hand, was a product of World War II. He looked at the world through a different prism.
My primary sources are Reagan’s own writings. He was one of the most prolific writers in American presidential history. I suspect no other twentieth-century president, save Richard Nixon, spent as much time putting pen to paper as did Reagan. Reagan didn’t write any books other than a couple of autobiographies, and this further explains why he isn’t considered a thinker. From the dawn of civilization until the twentieth century, thinking people expressed their ideas in book form, or at least some sort of manuscript. But the twentieth century introduced new mediums, like television and radio, which allowed thinking people to postulate ideas outside of the published medium. Reagan was particularly deft at using the radio. After leaving Sacramento in 1974, he hosted a radio show on which he continued promoting his ideas. His handwritten notes for some of these speeches still exist. They, along with many of his letters, were brought to public attention by Kiron Skinner, Martin Anderson, and Annelise Anderson in the early 2000s. These writings revealed to the public a man engrossed in ideas.
Reagan’s most famous early speech was given at the 1964 Republican National Convention and called “A Time for Choosing.” It is a gold mine of political ideas, and it ignited my own interest in Reagan as an intellectual figure, defined as someone with significant ideas. It contains seeds of not just Reagan’s philosophy and presidency but also, to some degree, the contemporary American conservative movement. Anyone interested in American history should read it. Reagan delivered countless other speeches during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. As governor of California, he routinely spoke out on national and even international issues. And unlike modern politicians, he wrote his own speeches before becoming president. With a few exceptions, I refrain from using any of Reagan’s presidential speeches, as it is not always clear whether these came from Reagan or from his speechwriters (although these men and women maintain that their greatest source was Reagan’s earlier writings, and Reagan always made adjustments to important speeches before he gave them).
All of Reagan’s writings and speeches contain an ethical philosophy, a theory about how the good life can be achieved, and this can be summarized in one word: freedom. How do we make the world a better place for future generations? Spread and maintain freedom. What is immoral? Denying freedom. These writings reveal that in accordance with our modern era, where earthly affairs dominate our life and thought, Reagan tried to bring freedom to earth. This is not to say he abandoned faith in a theological heaven on earth, but rather he expanded this notion with the idea that freedom could be brought to earth. Combining the Christian and Enlightenment traditions, Reagan believed in a Kingdom of Freedom. He reconciled the dominant idea of the Middle Ages, the Kingdom of God, with the most powerful idea of our era, the concept of freedom. Reagan blended traditional Enlightenment notions with Christianity. He felt that all of our efforts must be invested in spreading freedom, because if we lose, hell will reign on earth. The process may be a titanic struggle, but ultimately we will win. Good will conquer evil. This synthesis did not originate with Reagan, but no president in history had made this the central theme of his presidency. Where presidents before Reagan tried to protect freedom, Reagan audaciously sought to spread the Kingdom of Freedom around the world. By using this paradigm to understand Reagan, we can begin to make sense of his mind, something at which few people, whether friends or foes, have succeeded.
Specifically Reagan sought to expand and protect freedom through ideas like reforming social security, shrinking government, reducing welfare spending, promoting free trade between nations, lowering the top marginal tax rate, and increasing defense spending. These ideas continue to exert influence in American politics today, and not just on the Republican side of the aisle. It was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, with some support from his party, who signed NAFTA and welfare reform into law. Today both sides agree that social security needs fixing. Furthermore Reagan’s tax cuts, decades later, still have faced no serious efforts to repeal them, even during times when the Democrats controlled Congress. Reagan’s foreign policy ideas live on in the minds of neoconservatives. He insisted that America had a moral obligation to overthrow tyranny and spread democracy to the farthest reaches of the world because democracy is a universal value, not a Western one. Before Reagan, containment, which accepted the existence of dictatorships in places like Eastern Europe, was the dominant theme in American foreign policy. Reagan rejected this, insisting that America could and should end tyranny, an idea that is one root of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Was Reagan an inchoate neocon? I will explore this contention.
I would like to respond to a couple of criticisms I anticipate. Critical readers will point out inconsistencies between Reagan’s thought and his presidency, or between what Reagan said and what he did. But no historical thinker can claim perfect consistency. Describing contradictions in his thought does not weaken my argument that Reagan is a significant intellectual figure in American history. Marx, Newton, Freud, and Descartes, all have their indefensible inconsistencies, which their contemporaries noted. Jefferson, the man who penned the words “all men are created equal,” owned slaves. Describing these inconsistencies is a worthwhile endeavor, but it does not render these people’s thoughts meaningless. Intellectual historians do not play the “gotcha” game, in which inconsistencies mean intellectual futility. If all thinkers were required to be perfectly consistent and completely intelligible, intellectual history would be void of figures.
Likewise, arguing that Reagan was not original in some of his ideas does not weaken his position as a significant thinker in American history. He was, in fact, a derivative thinker whose thought was influenced by others positing similar philosophies, from Enlightenment philosophers to our own founding fathers. For that matter, Freud was not the first to discuss the existence of the unconscious; Newton did not discover gravity; Darwin did not discover evolution; and Marx was by no means the first socialist, communist, or materialist, or even the first to suggest class struggle. Jefferson was not the first to suggest that men, by nature, are free and equal. An intellectual biography of any of these men must include a mention of their predecessors. They were all great synthesizers; they wove together diverse ideas into a comprehensive cosmology that influenced Western thought and culture. In fact a detailed analysis of the thought of Marx, Freud, Darwin, and Newton will reveal that their intellectual insights were the result of their ability to synthesize what, at least until their time, had been distinct and unrelated currents of thought. This describes Reagan. He wove together various themes of American cultural history—such as its egalitarianism, its belief in a divinely sanctioned mission, its religious tradition, and its emphasis on freedom—and created a comprehensive cosmology that continues to dominate the American political landscape. He was influenced by a host of thinkers that spanned centuries, from Adam Smith to James Burnham, from St. Augustine to Milton Friedman.
Some skeptics may question Reagan’s intellect entirely. There is a natural human tendency to deem different people inferior, and this is just as true in the intellectual realm. Intellectually debasing “the other” is an unfortunate occurrence but completely normal. The reasoning goes something like this: I am intelligent. Therefore people who think like I do are intelligent, while those who think differently than I must be less intelligent, because if they were intelligent, they would believe what I believe. In Reagan’s case, this could be applied to ask, How can an intelligent person believe that increasing military spending promotes peace? Or, How can creating favorable policies for the wealthiest Americans in any way benefit the downtrodden? This is ludicrous. No intelligent person could believe this. Therefore Reagan can’t be intelligent. I contend this way of thinking is flawed. We naïvely believe that our political and philosophical opinions derive from our intelligence, when in fact most people develop an ideology at a relatively young age. People don’t become educated and then develop a political or religious ideology; rather they adopt a value system in their teens or early twenties, and then become educated. Lou Cannon, after describing Reagan’s intelligence as an “enigma,” uses the ideas of psychologist Howard Gardner to understand Reagan’s intellect. Gardner argues for “multiple intelligences,” and Cannon contends that Reagan lacked the type of intelligence usually associated with politicians, professors, and lawyers but ranked very high in “interpersonal intelligence.” This may explain why Reagan succeeded in his meetings with Gorbachev; ultimately Reagan got what he wanted.
Finally, Reagan’s cosmology made him who he was. Those who study his personality are left confused because his personality didn’t define him. Instead, his ideas did. In the Platonist tradition, Reagan believed in the power of ideas. These included ideas about freedom, ideas about democracy, ideas about government intervention in the economy, ideas about the transitory nature of communism, ideas about confronting the Soviet behemoth, and ideas about abortion. Reagan was an idea man. For my purposes, whether one agrees or disagrees with his ideas is irrelevant. Most historians don’t agree with and can find serious fault in the ideas of Marx, but he remains a salient intellectual figure because of the influence his ideas have exerted on Western history. I am not a Marxist, but I go to great pains to explain to my students the principles of Marxist philosophy because of its significance for the modern world. For the same reason, even if you aren’t a Reagan supporter, his philosophy remains important for anyone curious about the world. Reagan, like all American presidents, was a polarizing figure, and I urge the reader to briefly suspend your opinions in order to gain insight into him. That is the goal of this work.