We can lose our freedom all at once by succumbing to Russian aggression, or we can lose it gradually by installments. The end result is slavery.
—Reagan, “Losing Freedom by Installments”
Reagan returned to civilian life after World War II, critically examined the society to which he returned, and was not happy: “Like most 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, that the whole struggle was simply the immolation of the phoenix of human liberties and that the bird of happiness would rise out of the ashes and fly everywhere at once.”1 The post–World War II era was still sin-ridden. Sacrifice, death, violence, and destruction didn’t improve humankind, as it was supposed to. This frustration is what led Reagan to enter politics. He maintains in his 1965 autobiography, “I would work with the tools I had: My thoughts, my speaking abilities, my reputation as an actor. I would bring about the regeneration of the world I believed should have automatically appeared.”2 Reagan says he joined a host of political organizations in the wake of World War II, as he was “hell-bent on saving the world from Neo-Fascism.”3
Part of Reagan’s frustration may have stemmed from the realization that his best acting days had passed, even though he was only in his forties. The war curbed Reagan’s momentum toward acting immortality, which up to that point had been a realistic ambition. In a 1941 “Stars of Tomorrow” poll, he finished second to Early Flynn and ahead of James Cagney as one of Warner Brothers’ most likely future stars.4 By any standards, Reagan was an acting success. Some of his detractors denigrate his career by calling him a “B actor,” but this is misleading. He played roles in B movies, but he also starred in major films, like Knute Rockne, All American. He routinely worked with A-listers such as Eddie Albert, Humphrey Bogart, Pat O’Brien, and Shirley Temple. He signed a million-dollar contract in late Depression-era dollars; his acting skills made him a wealthy man. He earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960, before any of his political success. During his lifetime he was a celebrity, but the type of celebrity that is forgotten. New men, future immortals like Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, and Rock Hudson, moved in and ascended to the heights to which Reagan aspired. Reagan’s career resembled that of a professional baseball player who played in the major leagues for ten years, even made a couple of All-Star games, yet was not quite a Hall-of-Famer.
Reagan’s time in Hollywood wasn’t over, however. He still had an important role to play, just not on the big screen. His election as SAG president meant that now he could butt heads with the studio execs, like Jack Warner, who had denied him the A-list stardom he felt he deserved. As president of SAG, Reagan negotiated on behalf of actors during labor disputes. During his time in this role, he gained some critical concessions for actors, including residuals for film actors when their movies appeared on television. Big-screen movies had begun to be shown on the small screen, and film actors felt they were being deprived of compensation. When actors demanded residual payment and producers declined, Reagan led a Hollywood strike. This was the first major strike in showbiz history, and it worked: studios agreed to pay actors deserved residuals. Furthermore these events honed negotiating skills that served him well as president. (Reagan once declared that it was easier working with Gorbachev than with Jack Warner.) This would not be Reagan’s last time at the center of a strike.
By the late 1940s the future president was so politically engaged it contributed to the breakdown of his first marriage, with Jane Wyman. (The fact the couple lost a child roughly one year earlier must have played a strong role too.) During the divorce proceedings, she complained to the presiding judge, “In recent months my husband and I engaged in continual arguments on his political views. . . . Despite my lack of interest in his political activities, he insisted I attend meetings with him and be present during discussions among our friends.”5 Reagan routinely had parties at his home in the Hollywood Hills where political ideas bounced around the room.
Reagan’s initial leanings were liberal. He blamed Republicans for the Great Depression, voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt all four times, and supported the New Deal. He considered FDR a demigod who saved America, both from fascists abroad and Republicans at home. His attitude toward FDR mirrored the attitude many conservatives have toward Reagan today. FDR’s death in 1945 did nothing to change Reagan’s political passions. He campaigned for Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey in 1948. In one campaign address, Reagan states:
I remember listening to the radio on election night [in 1946]. Joseph Martin, the Republican Speaker of the House, said very solemnly and I quote, “We Republicans intend to work for a real increase in income for everybody by encouraging more production and lower prices without impairing wages or working conditions,” unquote. Remember that promise: a real increase in income for everybody. But what actually happened? The profits of corporations have doubled, while workers wages have increased by only one-quarter. In other words, profits have gone up four times as much as wages, and the small increase workers did receive was more than eaten up by rising prices, which have also bored into their savings.6
Two years later, he campaigned for Helen Gahagan Douglas in her high-profile Senate race against Richard Nixon. Los Angeles Democratic leaders even deemed Reagan too liberal to run for Congress. Lou Cannon suggests that Reagan was not as liberal as he portrayed himself in his memoirs, and this may be true, but he was certainly a staunch Democrat. Truman lambasted communists, despised Stalin, and provided material assistance to those threatened by communists, so one could plausibly loathe socialist variants and still support the Democratic Party. Truman even signed an executive order that allowed the FBI to determine if any federal government employee had communist ties. The divide between Republicans and Democrats on the issue of communism was narrow, at least during the late 1940s. This would change soon. And so would Reagan.
Between 1948 and 1952 cracks appeared in Reagan’s political philosophy and in America that still reverberate today. Like many Americans, Reagan always opposed Nazism and fascism, but he claims naïveté to the true nature of communism until the late 1940s, when he realized that communism posed the same threat that Nazism did, because both encroached on freedom. In one of his first political overtures in 1947, after being described by the interviewer as a liberal who cared about freedom, the thirty-six-year-old Reagan stated, “[America’s] highest aim should be the cultivation of freedom of the individual, for therein lies the highest dignity of man. Tyranny is tyranny, and whether it comes from right, left or center, it’s evil. I believe the only way to save our country from all of the extremists is to remove conditions that supply for the totalitarian fire.”7 When Reagan said these words, one could describe him as liberal, proclaiming freedom as his highest value. But a new movement, a left-wing movement, was fomenting in United States, and it seemed to threaten freedom, at least economically. By 1948 communism seemed aggressive, and Reagan, for the first time, viewed it as the new enemy: he began associating Nazism with communism, deeming both evil movements that denied freedom to humankind. Reagan began to pivot, shifting from one end of the political spectrum to the other, in the name of freedom.
As the 1947 interview continued, however, Reagan said that he was not in favor of banning the Communist Party, reasoning that if the American people knew all of the facts, they would never support communism anyway. He insisted before Congress, “As a citizen I would hesitate to see any political party outlawed.”8 Reagan had faith in the American electorate.9 A real populist, he wasn’t cynical about the American people or the democratic process, unlike socialists and communists in the 1940s. Despite legitimate fears about communism, he never believed democracy should be usurped to stop it. Reagan questioned the American government, but not the American people.
The communist threat after the war seemed even greater than the Nazi threat, because the Nazis didn’t have the technological capacity to detonate an atomic bomb, which the Soviets did, partly thanks to communist spies working in the United States, like Klaus Fuchs, who in 1950 admitted that he was a Soviet spy. Neither did the Nazis have groups within the United States (the fifth column) working to promote revolution. The situation grew dire in October 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed, even as Americans offered material assistance to its enemies. Now the world’s two largest countries were communist. Marxist predictions about the inevitable victory of the proletariat seemed real. The paranoia that gripped the nation during the 1950s was not irrational. The deadliest war in human history had just ended, yet another one seemed imminent. And this one could be nuclear.
As Reagan’s son Michael recounts, “The year 1949 was a terrible year for Dad. He had already lost his wife and his children. That year he also broke his leg in an amateur baseball game. . . . He had stopped making movies for a time and was going through the worst dry spell of his career. He carried a gun because of threats against his life.”10 In academic lingo, 1949 was Reagan’s annus horribilis. He lost a newborn baby (Christine) a day after her birth in 1947, and his wife filed for divorce in 1948.11 This devastated Reagan, and he was grieving. One way people cope with pain is with anger. And politics provides a way to release that anger because it’s socially acceptable to hate political figures and ideas. It’s easier to release anger against political figures and ideas than friends, family, neighbors, or coworkers, although they may become targets too. Communism and those who didn’t share his political opinions were about to bear the brunt of Reagan’s frustrations. Like millions of Americans today, Reagan cast his personal frustrations, fears, and desires onto political figures and political ideas. A new American leader was born.
Reagan’s extreme anticommunism accordingly emerged in the late 1940s. Next, he needed intellectual sources to provide him with ammunition to confront the perceived enemy. Today liberals and conservatives learn from people who have similar views. Sources of this information include Fox News, MSNBC, Huffington Post, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, and many social media sites. Each of these sources provides fuel for the ideological war. Reagan didn’t have Fox or Limbaugh, of course, but there were plenty of conservatives he could draw upon as he developed his new conservative views. Some were even former communists. One example is Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon. Koestler’s work allegorically describes Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, tacitly showing similarities between the Soviet and Nazi totalitarian regimes. Koestler’s story also appears in The God That Failed (1949), another book Reagan read. It contained a collection of stories from six writers and thinkers who left communism, each for his own reasons. “The only link, indeed, between these six very different personalities,” the work states, “is that all of them—after tortured struggles of conscience—chose Communism because they had lost faith in democracy and were willing to sacrifice ‘bourgeois liberties’ in order to defeat Fascism. Their conversion, in fact, was rooted in despair—a despair of Western values.”12 This shows how the rise of communism and fascism were, at least to some degree, consequences of declining faith in Judeo-Christian values. More so than people in other Western nations, Americans like Reagan held onto their past.
Maybe the most important intellectual influence from this time was Whittaker Chambers, another former Communist Party member who busted the communist chains in the late 1930s because they suffocated religion. Chambers’s 1952 work, Witness, is a story of a young communist and his disillusionment with the movement. It remains high on conservative must-read lists. In his explanation of his own rejection of communism, Reagan cites Chambers’s conversion to Christianity and break with communism: “Chambers marked the beginning of his personal journey away from communism on the day that he was suddenly struck by the sight of his infant daughter’s ear as she ate breakfast. He realized, he said, that such intricacy and precision could be no accident, no freak of nature. He said that while he didn’t know it at the time, in that moment, God—the finger of God—had touched his forehead.”13 This “intelligent design” argument has been propounded by Christians for centuries. The argument runs that random chance could never explain something as magnificent as the ear or eye, as evolutionists suggest, and therefore they must have been created by an intelligent and providential Creator, or God. Interpreting atheist communism and Christianity as two antagonistic faiths struggling against each other for supremacy, Chambers, a melancholy and pessimistic figure, believed that communism was the wave of the immediate future but decided he would rather lose with the righteous than side with evil.
Whereas Chambers was pessimistic, James Burnham was optimistic about American cold war prospects. Like many young intellectuals in the 1920s, Burnham, who was born in 1905, was seduced by the Marxism-Leninism that waxed after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s did nothing to dissuade him and thousands of other Marxist intellectuals. However, the Stalin era divided Marxists into those who supported Stalin, and those, repulsed by his brutality, who mostly gathered around Leon Trotsky. Burnham was in the latter camp, even coediting the Trotskyite journal, New International. He now mingled with all leading Marxists.
Burnham changed his political allegiance during World War II, when he took the heretical stance of renouncing dialectical materialism.14 Partly prompted by the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, Burnham began viewing communism and Nazism in a similar light. In The Struggle of the World (1947) he defines communism as “a world-wide, conspiratorial movement for the conquest of a monopoly of power in the era of capitalist decline. Politically, it is based on terror and mass deception; economically it is, or at least tends to be, collectivist; socially it is totalitarian.”15 He continues by arguing that communism and fascism are different only as two boxers competing for the heavyweight championship are different; they look different on the surface, but they both share the same means and ends. Burnham demanded a hardline policy against the Soviet Union that would undermine the First Socialist Society. He rejected containment for moral reasons, for how could the United States be passive when so many inside the contained region perished?16 Would containment have thwarted Nazism? His The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950) is a sort of “What Is to Be Done?” for anti-Marxists. Burnham lambasted containment for being defensive. He asserted, “Containment, however, cannot be the end objective of a policy. More generally, a defensive policy—and containment is a variant of the defensive—can never win.”17 The United States must seek liberation, by force if necessary.
There have always been noninterventionist conservatives (Donald Trump successfully earned the votes from this crowd in 2016), and Burnham tried convincing them that America must take an active role against communism abroad. All conservatives opposed the spread of any sort of socialism or communism at home, but that didn’t mean that the United States should lead the crusade fighting communism abroad. Burnham insisted that the fate of humanity was at stake. He can be classified as an early neoconservative, among those who seek to spread democracy. The final chapter of his work is “The Inevitability of Communist Defeat.” Insisting that there are enough determined men in the world with the resolve to fight communism, Burnham believed the victory of democracy was inevitable. Reagan cited Burnham as an influence and awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Another critical work published in 1953 was Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Kirk can best be described as a traditional conservative, in the mold of Edmund Burke, whom Kirk discusses in the second chapter of his work. Like Burke, Kirk believed in the rule of law and real permanent morality, not the type that changes every few generations as new intellectuals emerge, each seeking to establish an independent identity. Like Burke, Kirk distrusted those who tried to construct the ideal society based on human intellectual principles. Burke’s target was French philosophes who sought an ideal society based on reason. Kirk refuted Marx, who insisted a perfect communist could and would emerge from the ashes of capitalism. Accepting the Christian idea about the inherently flawed nature of man, Kirk believed that humanity can never be perfected, at least not by human minds in this world. Therefore external restraints like government are needed, sometimes strong external restraints. Like Burke, Kirk argued that change should not always be passively accepted as inevitable. Vestiges of the past should be preserved because they contain wisdom. (For Marxists, the communist stage in history discards all elements of the backward bourgeoisie-capitalist era in history.) Kirk writes, “Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors. . . . They are dubious of wholesale alteration.”18 That is not the same as saying that most change is bad. Burke and Kirk accepted change, but cautiously.
From the twenty-first-century conservative perspective, the third chapter of Kirk’s work is the most interesting. It is titled “John Adams and Liberty under the Law.” Kirk calls Adams the father of American conservatism. Kirk conventionally places Alexander Hamilton alongside Adams. Their opponent was Thomas Jefferson. Kirk favored the strong central government that curbed short-term populist impulses. He distrusted the masses. Freedom was good, but it was worthless outside the context of Christianity because “political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.”19 Politics, religion, and morality can never be separated. He even critiqued modern-day capitalism, insisting that if it’s taken too far, without any restraints, it weakens traditional bonds between man and man. Kirk supported capitalism, but not the extreme laissez-faire that he associated with the early days of the Industrial Revolution. His brand of capitalism opposed the libertarian model that many conservatives espouse today.20
Political events in the United States, specifically trials, further created a New Conservatism. Chambers was a key figure in the Alger Hiss case, an important event in forging the modern American left and right. Chambers showed the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss was a communist spy. Hiss swore under oath that he had never been a communist or Soviet spy, but when Chambers produced evidence he kept hidden in a pumpkin (where else would one hide sensitive documents?) Hiss was exposed and found guilty of perjury in 1950. The Hiss trial not only brought Richard Nixon to national prominence, but it fundamentally altered American public opinion. Whereas most conservatives sided with Chambers, in this case many leftists sympathized with the alleged communist. A second notorious accusation of espionage that altered the American political landscape, and therefore Reagan as well, was that levied against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were accused of giving atomic secrets to the Soviets. The Rosenbergs were found guilty of espionage and ultimately sentenced to death. Their trial in 1951 further divided the American public, with the left mostly supportive of the Rosenbergs, whereas conservatives presumed guilt. A new political landscape burgeoned in response to communism.
These events and writers like Kirk, Chambers, and Burnham helped launch a new American conservatism that emerged in the wake of World War II and helped create Ronald Reagan. These voices and many others were amplified by the new periodical, National Review, started by William F. Buckley in 1955. Reagan was an early subscriber and read it regularly for three decades. National Review and Reader’s Digest were his favorite magazines. At National Review’s thirtieth-anniversary dinner Reagan said, “The man standing before you was a Democrat when he picked up his first issue in a plain brown wrapper; and even now, as an occupant of public housing, he awaits as anxiously as ever for his biweekly edition.”21 National Review urged political activism against liberalism and war against communism. It contained articles by virtually all of the twentieth century’s leading conservative voices, including the ones analyzed in this work and even Reagan himself. Burnham and Kirk were editors. Reagan would have read articles by Burnham. For example, in his contribution to the July 18, 1956, edition, Burnham wrote:
And as they rolled over Polish bodies the Communist tanks flattened also the soft rhetoric of our George Kennans and Stewart Alsops, our experts and smug journalists, who have been telling us how the Soviet regime has come to be accepted by its subjects, how (in Kennan’s servile words) “there is a finality, for better or worse, about what has occurred in Eastern Europe.” The people of Poznan, clasping hands as they faced the tanks demanding food and decent working conditions and an end to Moscow’s rule, and the soldiers who joined them instead of firing on them: these in one day communicated more of the truth about the Soviet Empire than a decade’s dispatches by correspondents and diplomats.22
Arguing for big-tent conservatism, the magazine published voices from across the conservative political spectrum. Paleoconservatives, neoconservatives, Zionists, isolationists, Christians, libertarians, Jeffersonians, and Madisonians have all used the National Review as a sounding board.
One attempt to unify these disparate voices came from Frank Meyer, another regular contributor to National Review. Meyer can best be described as a libertarian. He believed government should exist only to protect freedom. Rejecting the traditional conservatism of Kirk and its emphasis on tradition and order, Meyer argued for individualism. This should not be confused with the objectivism of Ayn Rand, however. Meyer believed that the individual was the highest good, but not the only good. The individual exists within what Meyer called an “organic moral order” that taught virtue and required nourishment. Rand disagreed, insisting that man exists only for man. Meyer retorted that God and objective morality exist. His philosophy sought to reconcile Kirk’s traditional conservatism with the new, more freedom-centered conservatism that emerged in the wake of World War II. Occupying a middle ground between Kirk and Rand, Meyer tried to unify Christianity with freedom:
The principles which inspire the contemporary American conservative movement are developing as the fusion of two different streams of thought. The one, which, for want of a better word, one may call the “traditionalist,” puts its primary emphasis upon the authority of transcendent truth and the necessity of a political and social order in accord with the constitution of being. The other, which, again for want of a better word, one may call the “libertarian,” takes as its first principle in political affairs the freedom of the individual person and emphasizes the restriction of the power of the state and the maintenance of the free-market economy as guarantee of that freedom.23
His philosophy came to be called fusionism, and it still plays a critical role in twenty-first-century conservatism. There has been no truer political fusionist than Reagan, maybe because he understood both sides better than anyone else. At a political conference for conservatives in March 1981 Reagan told his audience, “It was Frank Meyer who reminded us that the robust individualism of the American experience was part of the deeper current of Western learning and culture. He pointed out that a respect for law, an appreciation for tradition, and regard for the social consensus that gives stability to our public and private institutions, these civilized ideas must still motivate us even as we seek a new economic prosperity based on reducing government interference in the marketplace.”24
Differences existed among all of these conservatives, but they were bound together on one principle: an unequivocal opposition to communism. Communism is the right’s version of racism: it is the scourge of the earth, and every semblance of it must be eradicated in every degree, for moral reasons. The further we move away from communist ideas, the better the world becomes. Any policy that contains a whiff of communism, according to the right, or racism, according to the left, must be opposed. There are different degrees of both, from the extreme and obvious (less common), to the more subtle brands (more common). The latter are almost ubiquitous, often coded, peering around every corner, on the verge of ruling society, unless the strong and morally righteous remain vigilant. Sometimes exaggerated, political opponents melt into this awful extreme. To the right, those who support government-run health care are communist; to the left, those who seek to build a wall to curb illegal immigration are racist. Many on both sides of the political spectrum ascribe the worst possible human instincts to the other. This may be a secularized version of the Christian idea that man is innately sinful and fallen. The left-wing and right-wing minds share much in the way they perceive racism and communism, respectively, because both minds evolved out of the broader Western tradition.
Reagan also began encountering new economic theories that emerged in the wake of World War II. They attempted to explain the Great Depression and Nazism. In his economic thinking Reagan drew upon three twentieth-century classical economists: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. These men embraced the orthodox Enlightenment economic philosophy as propounded by Adam Smith, the baron de Montesquieu, and David Hume, as opposed to the greatest government interventionist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes. The latter was by no means a Marxist, but he riled classical liberals with his advocacy of drastic government interventionist policies in times of economic despair, like the Depression. Keynes reasoned that monetary flow drives the economy, from patron to business, from business to employee, so the more money flowing through the economy, the better the economy. The Great Depression, Keynes believed, was caused by a lack of monetary flow as people hoarded money in fear. Government must therefore lubricate the movement of money by pumping it into the economy. Expensive? Yes, but the government can recoup what it spends during economic upswings by raising taxes. Although subsequent conservative economists like those described below have refuted Keynes, he was more of an economic centrist because he accepts many classical economic positions, such as the idea that lowering taxes promotes economic growth. Keynes was a pragmatist who contended that sometimes the ends justify the means.
Keynes’s ideas spurred myriad responses from those who argued that government policies are ineffective and impinge upon freedom. Mises provides one example. Like thousands of other German intellectuals in the 1930s, Mises fled Nazi Germany for the United States, but unlike many other German intellectuals, he was an ardent capitalist. He attempted to refute socialism by arguing that centralized planning led to tyranny. In Planning for Freedom (1952) he wrote, “Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.”25 You can’t control the economy without controlling the people. Political and economic systems aren’t distinct. Based on his firsthand experience in the 1920s, Mises argued that nothing ruins a nation more thoroughly than national debt (Keynes accepted debt during economic crisis) and that the best way to limit debt is to limit spending. Everyone knows that Germany’s attempts to repay reparations by merely printing more money led to economic and political calamity, but why did Germany need to print so much money? Because of its debt. All government expenditures must be repaid. By curbing spending and limiting debt, Mises argued, governments ward off totalitarianism.
His friend Friedrich Hayek agreed. In his “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945) Hayek argued that government planning promotes prosperity less efficiently than does the private sector because the architects of a centrally planned economy can never understand the needs of society like the private sector can. Marx argued that capitalism will collapse, partly due to its inherently uncoordinated nature. Hayek countered that the free market, although technically uncoordinated, does coordinate people’s actions in a (mostly) rational fashion and directs them in a socially constructive way. Hayek defended the free market, even in the wake of the Great Depression. Moreover, he believed that government should be feared in times of peace because the larger the government grows in size, the more restrictions it will impose on personal freedom, whether it be of the left or of the right.26 Many consider Nazism and communism to be two antagonistic movements since they conventionally are placed at two ends of the political spectrum. Hayek early recognized the practical totalitarian outcome of both ideologies due to their collectivist natures.
In The Road to Serfdom (1944), Hayek reduced economic theorists to two groups: individualists, like himself, and collectivists or totalitarians. Nazis and communists demonstrated collectivism because both argued for a state-centered economy designed to promote the greater good, like society and the nation. Hayek insisted that this only paves the way for totalitarianism: “The authority directing all economic activity would control not merely the part of our lives which is concerned with inferior things; it would control the allocation of the limited means for all our ends. And whoever controls all economic activity controls the means for all our ends [and] must therefore decide which are to be satisfied and which not. This is really the crux of the matter. Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest.”27 Again, you can’t control the economy without controlling the people. Moreover, Hayek explained that socialism never arrives overnight. Instead it is an evolutionary process as government (with the support of many intellectuals) takes control of one sector of the economy after another, or creeping socialism.
Another freedom-centered economist who fueled Reagan was Milton Friedman, hailed by the Economist as the most influential economist in the second half of the twentieth century. Originally a disciple of Keynes, Friedman moved away from Keynesian government activism, fearing these policies would lead to inflation and low growth rates. To some extent he was right: the Great Society years of the 1960s were followed by a period of rapid inflation and a sluggish economy. Friedman consistently stressed the advantages of a free market, not just economic but social. In contrast to the ubiquitous Soviet bureaucracy, he stressed that a free society must have a free economy, for how could one freely challenge the system if everyone was economically dependent on it? Friedman was not an economic libertarian who wanted to banish all government; he argued that government was needed to ensure that everyone played fairly, but he feared the expansive American government that emerged in the wake of the Great Society.
Friedman’s interpretation of the Great Depression appealed to conservatives like Reagan because it contended that the federal government’s monetary policy caused the calamity, not laissez-faire economic policies. Friedman argued, “The Great Depression in the United States, far from being a sign of the instability of the private enterprise system, is a testament to how much harm can be done by the mistakes on the part of a few men when they wield vast power over the monetary system of a country.”28 Too much power in one institution means when that one institution fails, the consequences are widespread. (Many on the right used these same arguments when they maintained that the inept Federal Reserve Board policies of low interest rates, not conservative economic policies, led to the housing crash of 2008 and the subsequent recession.) Friedman’s theories appealed to Reagan, who had initially blamed the Depression on Republicans. Friedman allowed Reagan to interpret the most traumatic event of his youth with a new conservative twist. Laissez-faire economic policies did not lead to the misery that directly hurt Reagan’s family, but rather too much government control. Friedman later served in the Reagan administration.
Hayek, Mises, and Friedman are all on the Mount Rushmore of American conservative economic theorists, but one lesser-known figure whom Reagan regarded highly was the great Muslim fourteenth-century philosopher Ibn Khaldun. One of Islam’s foremost intellectuals, Ibn Khaldun stated over six hundred years before modern conservatives that eventually taxes will become so high that they will become burdensome. When this happens, “the interest of the subjects in cultural enterprises disappears, since when they compare expenditures and taxes with their income and gain and see the little profit they make, they lose all hope. Therefore, many of them refrain from all cultural activity. The result is that the total tax revenue goes down, as individual assessments go down. . . . The costs of all cultural enterprise are now too high, the taxes are too heavy, and the profits anticipated fail to materialize. Finally, civilization is destroyed, because the incentive for cultural activity is gone.”29 Conservatives too can rationalize that civilization will perish if their values aren’t supported. It’s no wonder Reagan liked Ibn Khaldun. He preached what Reagan wanted to hear.
In modern times the theory that high taxes can lead to less productivity and therefore less tax revenue was argued by Arthur Laffer, another hallowed conservative economist whom Reagan followed. Laffer conceptualized the advantages of a capitalist system with lower tax rates. The reasoning of the Laffer Curve is this: We can all agree that a tax rate of 0 percent brings no money to the federal treasury, so how can the government collect money without taxes? The controversial side of the Laffer Curve theorizes that a tax rate that is too high, say 100 percent, will decrease worker productivity, leading to declining incomes and therefore less government revenue. Higher taxes means less tax revenue because workers will have no incentive to work since all of their earnings will be taken from them. Individuals will have less incentive to be creative and productive since they will receive none of the fruits of their labor. Fewer people working hard and fewer people making money lead to less government revenue. The Laffer Curve is by no means scientific, but conservative adherents, including Reagan, maintain that government tax revenue can be raised by reducing taxes, and tax revenue can be decreased by raising tax revenue. This defies conventional wisdom, which holds that the more government taxes, the more money it accrues. Reagan was no economist, but he was familiar with all of these ideas. He wrote in 1977 that economists like Laffer, Paul McCracken, and Arthur Burns “have each made it clear that government can increase its taxes and create the jobs we need without inflation by lowering the tax rates for business and individuals.”30
Reagan’s own domestic activities also contributed to his burgeoning conservatism. When seeking to understand Reagan’s evolution from liberal to conservative, many biographers cite his experiences at General Electric (GE), which he called a “post-graduate course in political science”: “I was seeing how government really operated and affected people in America, not how it was taught in school.”31 Before becoming president and even before becoming California’s thirty-third governor, Reagan honed his political philosophy in speeches, television appearances, and radio shows while promoting GE. From 1954 to 1962 he crisscrossed the country as a spokesman for GE, an experience he believed gave him the ability to understand the political needs of the common man. Reagan estimated that as a GE spokesman, he met with 250,000 employees, “and with speeches sometimes running out fourteen a day, I was on my feet in front of a mike for almost 250,000 minutes.”32
Reagan’s mentor at GE was Leonard Boulware. Notorious for his tough stand against labor unions, Boulware encouraged his employees to read conservative economic writers, such as Henry Hazlitt.33 Hazlitt can best be described as a popularizer, someone who introduced nonspecialists like Reagan to many of the economic experts mentioned earlier. In any field, outsiders have difficulty digesting the works of experts due to nomenclature. This is especially true in the hard sciences, partly true in the soft sciences like economics and psychology, and even true in the humanities, in fields like philosophy and history. All great thinkers have popularizers. Hazlitt was one of the great conservative economic popularizers in the post–World War II era. A friend of Ayn Rand’s, his most important work is titled Economics in One Lesson. Based on the ideas of Hayek and Mises, the work encourages free trade and low taxes. In a chapter titled “Taxes Curb Production,” Hazlitt contends, “These taxes inevitably affect the actions and incentives of those from whom they are taken. When [a business is heavily taxed] its policies are affected. It does not expand its operations, or it expands only those attended with a minimum of risk. People who recognize this situation are deterred from starting new enterprises.”34 Hazlitt also spread the classical liberal economic philosophy through his time at Newsweek, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Although GE hired Reagan to promote their products, he spent much of the time discussing political issues with ordinary middle-class Americans. His biographers suggest these years turned Reagan from an opponent to an advocate of big business and corporate America.35
Thanks to his time at GE and the thinkers analyzed above, by the late 1950s Reagan feared not only expanding communism but also expanding government. He began arguing that excessive tax rates curbed production and therefore hurt the little guy. He testified before Congress in 1958 as a representative for the Motion Picture Industry Council, “The high tax rates and limitations imposed by the capital gains [tax] structure tend to make futile the capital investment required in the production of a motion picture. . . . An even greater deterrent to the motion picture industry in this county is the reluctance of high income earners in the talent field to make more than 1–2 pictures a year [due to high taxes]. Good story material has always been scarce. It is double so when successful writers curtail their output because of diminishing returns due to excessive surtax rates.”36 This, in turn, hurt everyone who worked in production. Reagan claimed, “The result is unemployment in our industry, and it is also a loss of tax revenue to the government.”37 He began believing that higher taxes lead to declining tax revenue. The more the government intrudes in the economy, the less prosperity there is for the people.
Reagan feared the growth of government that continued with the support of President Eisenhower, who expanded social security and raised the tax rate in 1956. In a 1958 speech titled “Business, Ballots and Bureaus,” Reagan said, “If I had to choose one salient characteristic of the revolution of our times, the word would be collectivism—the tendency to center power of all initiative in one central government.”38 Reagan even began critiquing Social Security, fearing that government would have to rely on excessive taxation to pay future recipients. This, of course, meant socialism. He stated in the same speech, “We must recognize that socialism through taxation may be slower, but it arrives at the same end as outright nationalization of industry. . . . This entire theory of progressive tax was spawned by Karl Marx more than 100 years ago. He gave it as the necessary basis for a socialist state. Karl Marx said that the way to impose statism on a people, socialism on a country, was to tax the middle class out of existence.” A 1959 headline for GE’s Schenectady News read, “Reagan Sees a Loss of Freedom through a Steady Increase in Taxes.”39
Reagan was reared by his father to be skeptical of big business, but this was changing. Before his employment by GE, Reagan viewed the federal government as a positive force for society, but after his time at GE he viewed business much more favorably. His second wife, Nancy Reagan, maintained that the experiences he had traversing the country for GE were pivotal in shaping his values, particularly his fear of government intrusion. Cannon agrees.40 Reagan himself writes in his second autobiography that one day in about 1960 he told Nancy, “You know something just dawned on me: All these things I’ve been saying about government in my speeches . . . all these things I’ve been criticizing about government getting too big, well it just dawned on me that every four years when an election comes along, I go out and support the people who are responsible for the things I’m criticizing.”41 Some may see this as the time period when Reagan first became a front for the bourgeoisie.
The struggle against communism became personal for Reagan, because during the 1950s communists began infiltrating Hollywood. Communists believed they could alter American culture through movies since they provided a way to educate the masses or, in Marxist lingo, “raise class consciousness.” As president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan was on the front line during a contentious period in American history. He received numerous death threats and even bought a license to carry a concealed weapon. Despite these personal threats and despite his anticommunist passions, however, Reagan’s biographers agree that he was no McCarthyite. He lamented that some of his liberal friends were unjustly accused as communists. As Edward Yager notes, Reagan “opposed Communist activity in Hollywood without the extremism of Joseph McCarthy.”42 He successfully steered a moderate course among conservatives: he hated communism, yet he wasn’t reckless in his accusations. Usurping civil rights had no place in his ethical philosophy; the ends did not justify the means. Upon testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (Nixon had no questions for him), Reagan refused to name names. “I do not believe the communists have ever at any time been able to use the motion picture screen as a sounding board for their philosophy and ideology,” he said.43 At the same time, Reagan warned actors that if they offended public opinion to such a degree that movie studios refused to hire them, they wouldn’t have his union’s support. He was not completely innocuous when it came to modest coercion in his fight against communism; Reagan was an FBI informant, and he fell for the Republican line that communists were infiltrating America. He was influenced by the mass hysteria, just not to the same degree as many other conservatives. He didn’t see communists everywhere, for example, and he believed suspects were innocent until proven guilty. When informed that a member of SAG was a communist, he carefully studied the evidence against him or her before making a judgment. This allowed him to navigate around the political landmines of the era.
These events in the late 1940s and 1950s contributed to Reagan’s shifting allegiances, not away from communism, as he never supported that cause, but rather away from the Democratic Party. Reagan actually maintained that he did not leave the Democratic Party but rather the Democratic Party left him. During the 1930s and 1940s thousands of leftist German intellectuals escaped Nazi Germany for the United States, helping to change the Democratic Party, forging a New Left. Largely the brainchild of ex-communists, the New Left recognized the futility of authoritarian and highly centralized political systems, such as that which existed in the Soviet Union. Whereas Mises and Hayek reacted by embracing free-market capitalism, New Left writers just rejected communism. They were socialists or democratic socialists. They sought to change American society by introducing more secularism and economic equality, but through peaceful democratic politics, not revolution. The Soviet experiment had shown them what a left-wing society looked like when taken to the extreme. Besides some form of socialism, they adhered (like all German leftists of the time) to some Marxist principles, including class distinction, secularism, and an aversion to nationalism. Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno are quintessential examples. They ascended intellectually and added a new vein to American liberalism that would expand under subsequent left-wing luminaries such as C. Wright Mills, Abbie Hoffman, Noam Chomsky, Bill Moyers, Howard Zinn, and a host of other scholars and writers. Politically maturing in the 1960s, they rallied around causes like fighting Jim Crow laws and protesting the Vietnam War. As neo-Marxists they shared a more cynical attitude toward American capitalism, history, and religion than did pre-1960 Democrats like Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy. By the 1980s these intellectuals had obtained powerful academic positions in the humanities and media that allowed them, to some degree, to rewrite American history in accordance with their values. (All groups write and rewrite history in accordance with their beliefs.) For them, America was never a shining city on a hill, a beacon for the downtrodden. How could it be? It was the most capitalistic nation on earth, ripe with inequality and oppression.
Herein lie the origins of the “culture wars.” They can largely be reduced to a clash between conservative Christians and neo-Marxists—the former, the most powerful intellectual and cultural force the Western world has ever seen; the latter, the second-most powerful. Neo-Marxism is newer, of course, and some of its adherents believe this gives it precedence, a fact that is demonstrated by their progressive thinking. Marx believed that history moves in a linear fashion, as we grow toward a more secular and socialist society. More socialism and secularism is considered progress, even for almost all leftists today.
The neo-Marxist influx into the Democratic Party means Reagan spoke truthfully when he stated that he did not leave the Democratic Party, but instead it left him. The Democratic Party changed in composition during the 1950s and 1960s, welcoming baby-boomer leftists who were more secular at the expense of traditionalists like Reagan and other conservative Democrats. The latter were marginalized. The germs of the social chaos of the 1960s, even within the Democrat Party, emerged. The times were changing. The Reagan who was too liberal to run for Congress in the early 1950s campaigned for Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, the same man he had campaigned against in 1950. A letter Reagan wrote to Nixon in the midst of this presidential election demonstrates this new conservative cosmology:
Unfortunately, he [Kennedy] is a powerful speaker with an appeal to the emotions. He leaves little doubt that his idea of the “challenging new world” is one in which the Federal Government will grow bigger and do more and of course spend more. I know there must be some short-sighted people in the Republican Party who will advise that the Republicans should try to “out liberal” him. In my opinion this would be fatal. . . . One last thought—shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a Government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his “State Socialism” and way before him it was “benevolent monarchy.”44
Consistent with modern-day conservatism, by 1960 Reagan began conflating (sometimes correctly, sometimes not) left-wing economic theory with Marxism. This became common in Reagan’s post-1960 writings and speeches and was a direct result of studying Mises, Hayek, and other writers.
The inaccurate association of liberals, socialists, and communists (those on the left make the same mistake when they equate conservatives with racists and fascists) was partly also inspired by Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, published in 1960. Deeply influenced by Hayek, Senator Goldwater from Arizona united everyone on the left wing of the political spectrum by calling them “collectivists.” He declared, “The collectivists have not abandoned their ultimate goal—to subordinate the individual to the state—but their strategy has changed. They have learned that socialism can be achieved through welfarism quite as well as through nationalization. They understand that private property can be confiscated as effectively by taxation as by expropriating it. They understand that [the] individual can be put at the mercy of the state—not only by making the state his employer—but by divesting him of the means to provide for his personal needs from cradle to grave.”45 Government enslaves those who become dependent on it. The final goal, for all socialists and communists, is the enslavement of man. Therefore, for Goldwater, all of their ways must be rejected, including the creation of the welfare state. Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative influenced Reagan by inspiring in him a sense of economic urgency. Conscience didn’t much necessarily teach Reagan much since he had already expressed many of the same concepts, but it could only heighten Reagan’s belief that America was going to hell because the welfare state was growing so rapidly in the post–World War II era.
Reagan projected these ideas in 1961 in a piece he wrote for General Contractor, a trade magazine, titled “Losing Freedom by Installments.” Reagan argued, “We can lose our freedom all at once by succumbing to Russian aggression, or we can lose it gradually by installments. The end result is slavery. Professor Schlesinger says ‘The political argument for the welfare state is that the welfare state is the best insurance against revolution.’ This just isn’t true. Our defense against [communism] is individual freedom and our free economy.”46 Reagan was referring to the American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center (1949), which argued that in order to ward off communist totalitarianism, the American government had to take an active role in promoting a welfare state. Otherwise the poor and downtrodden would revolt, duplicating the 1917 Russian Revolution. This made as much sense to conservatives as arguing to liberals that we should adopt slightly right-of-center policies in order to ward off far-right candidates (although Schlesinger insisted his policies were centrist). Reagan continued, “Under high flown phrases ‘freedom from want,’ ‘human rights,’ we see the federal government laying its hand on housing, health, farming, industry and education.”47
Reagan worried about the same creeping socialism that Hayek had warned about. He explained in 1962, “Our friends seek the answer to all of the problems of human need through government. Freedom can be lost inadvertently this way. Government tends to grow; it takes on a weight and momentum in government programs that goes beyond the original purpose that caused their creation.” Expanding New Deal programs meant more government encroachment, at the expense of liberty.48 Reagan makes these ideas the centerpiece of his famous “A Time for Choosing” speech.