What do we want for ourselves and our children? Is it enough to have material things? Aren’t liberty and morality and integrity and high principles and a sense of responsibility more important?
—Reagan, “The Value of Understanding the Past”
Reagan’s disregard of class and his demands to reduce some government programs designed to help the poor, combined with his Christian faith, has led opponents to ridicule him. Christ helped the poor, his detractors point out; Christians are supposed to help the poor, but conservatives oppose government programs intended to help the poor. How can their apparent apathy toward the American poor be reconciled with their alleged Christianity? Even many of Reagan’s biographers and friends could not comprehend how such a compassionate and Christian man could cut federal funds aimed at helping poor people. Many assumed that Reagan lacked compassion and empathy. Mario Cuomo said, “At his worst, Ronald Reagan made the denial of compassion respectable.”1 Biographer John Diggins wrote, “Once he was in public office, the religious duty of benevolence was no part of [Reagan’s] public policy.”2
This reasoning is too simplistic, however. A deeper examination of Reagan’s thought and Christian principles reveals that he never rejected the teachings of Jesus; rather they were the inspiration for his entire cosmology. Reagan’s class blindness did not reject Christianity; it descended from it. The denial of the significance of material things is concordant with Christian heritage. Arguing that Jesus insisted that we help the poor and yet Reagan ignored the material needs of the poor, so therefore his philosophy can never be reconciled with Christianity builds another straw man. The criticism is valid only if one interprets Christianity materially, emphasizing the parts of Jesus’s teachings that conform to a materialistic philosophy. In the twenty-first century this may make sense, since we live in such a materialistic age. However, by suspending our materialistic biases and treating Christ’s mission as spiritual, as most Christians historically have, Reagan’s ideas make more sense.
The Roman Empire of Jesus’s time resembled in many ways the United States today: it was strong, rich, diverse, and possessed both great wealth and extreme poverty. Equally important, Rome possessed a vast bureaucracy and an efficient (though deeply unpopular) tax-collection system that ensured the emperor was never short of funds. Yet Jesus never demanded that the Roman emperor or any earthly ruler alleviate the sufferings of the poor. The materialist Kingdom of Caesar shared nothing with the eternal immaterial Kingdom of God. Jesus did not tell the tax collectors they should tell their bosses to share their wealth. Instead he encouraged individuals to privately do good works: “When you give to someone in need, don’t do as the hypocrites do—blowing trumpets in the synagogues and streets to call attention to their acts of charity! I tell you the truth, they have received all the reward they will ever get. But when you give to someone in need, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:2–3). Helping the poor is, in the Christian worldview, a private affair. Reagan put this into practice: he regularly gave money to charities and even wrote personal checks to the needy during his tenure in the White House.3 The individual, not the government, must help poor people.
And the Bible is explicit about how much we should help the poor. Reagan wrote in 1961, “For an illustration of the difference between proportionate and progressive tax, we can look to the Bible. There [tithing] is explained as the economic basis of our Judaic-Christian religions. The Lord says you shall contribute one-tenth and He says, ‘If I prosper you 10 times as much you will give 10 times as much.’ That is proportionate but look what happens today when you start computing Caesar’s share. A man of average income [who] suddenly prospered 10 times as much would find his personal tax increased 43 times.”4 Reagan associated a progressive income tax (whereby the rich pay a higher percentage of their earnings than the poor) with Marxism. The Bible, at least for Reagan, demands a flat income tax.
Anyway, Christianity downplays the significance of this material and fallen world. This world means little because it is so brief compared to the eternal duration of our next lifetime. Those who spend their lives focusing on the material aspects of this world are misguided: “One’s life does not consist of possessions,” Jesus proclaims. “For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” (Matthew 6:25). Jesus emphasized the next world, the spiritual world. Bringing heaven (the immaterial world of goodness) and God to earth trumps everything. Helping the poor is noble, but it was never a sacrament. Helping the poor is morally righteous, but never at the expense of the spiritual world, because the gospel states, “People do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). The spiritual world transcends everything. Jesus explicitly denies any significance to this material, earthly world by begging his followers to focus their efforts on reaching the next world, the Kingdom of God. There is even a strand of Christian thought that denies any significance whatsoever to this material world, and this gave the world monasticism and hermeticism. These ascetic movements teach that relinquishing earthly desires and material goods brings us closer to God, the ultimate good.
Reagan opposed many government means to help the poor because these programs conflicted with freedom, his highest good. All ideologies and religions have their values, which they place above everything else. For the Muslim, it is submission to Allah; for the Christian, living like Christ; for the socialist, economic equality; for the fascist, the love of nation; and for the environmentalist, living in accordance with nature. For Reagan, it’s freedom. Reagan ponders, “What do we want for ourselves and our children? Is it enough to have material things? Aren’t liberty and morality and integrity and high principles and a sense of responsibility more important?”5 This is a question that has plagued philosophers since the time of Socrates. How do we live the good life? Is it by obtaining material things like money, cell phones, cars and computers? Can one live a satisfactory, fulfilling life without these things? Are they necessary for human happiness? Is freedom more important?
These are basic ethical questions that we all must answer. How to live a moral life, not how to help the less fortunate by providing them with material things, was of central importance to Reagan. He contended, “The world’s truly great thinkers have not pointed us toward materialism; they have dealt with the great truths and with the high questions of right and wrong, of morality and integrity. They have dealt with the questions of man, not the acquisition of things.”6 He is mostly right. The world’s great philosophers have been spiritualists like Socrates, Plato, Augustine, Kant, and Hegel, not materialists like Marx, Hobbes, and Holbach. Socrates, Plato, and Augustine were not moral relativists, and Marx, Holbach, and Hobbes were not great philosophers. Western antimaterialist conceptions of the good life actually began with the father of philosopher, Socrates, who claimed, “I spend all my time going about trying to persuade you, young and old, to make your first concern not your bodies or your possessions but the highest welfare of your souls.”7 The greatest work in Western political philosophy, Plato’s Republic, criticized materialism. Plato insisted that truth and subsequent happiness lie in the immaterial realm, what he called the form or idea. Plato’s ideas inspired many early Christian thinkers, so naturally they, and their followers, Reagan among them, minimized material concerns.
Helping the poor is good, but not if it comes at the expense of freedom.8 One supersedes the other. For this reason many conservatives continue to push for “faith-based” poverty relief programs, which, in contrast to government-run relief programs such as welfare, do not rely on taxes and are strictly volunteer, thereby maximizing freedom while also helping the poor. Reagan advocated soup kitchens and other, similar programs to help the poor, arguing that churches had a “duty” to assist the needy.9 Material considerations were not absent from Reagan’s thought; they were just secondary. This prioritization allowed citizens to maintain their freedom while simultaneously helping meet the needs of the poor.
The Kingdom of Freedom is the end of humankind, at least until the Kingdom of God arrives. In Platonic terms, freedom, like form (idea), is something greater than any one of us. What is humanity for? Plato argued that it was for seeking the immaterial form; Christians reply it is for finding the spiritual God and His immaterial riches; and Reagan insisted that all goodness and beauty can be found in freedom. When man finds freedom, he finds the good life. Freedom transcends race, class, culture, gender, and religion. Reagan writes in a private letter to a couple who came to the United States from the Soviet Union, “I dream of a day when all of the world[’s] people can know this freedom and escape from communist rule. I promise you that I shall do everything I can to preserve the freedom that you have found here.”10 Continuing the Socratic, Platonic, Ciceronian, and Christian traditions that argued for a timeless, perfect concept that transcends all cultural and temporal values, Reagan believed in one law, and this law was freedom. Like the Kingdom of God, Reagan felt, freedom is a universal realm that we must actively seek. Rich and poor, men and women, American, Russian, Pole, and Iraqi, all deserve to find this highest good. The Kingdom of Freedom does not discriminate. All are welcome to enjoy its righteousness.
Reagan’s leading biographer, Lou Cannon, recognized the religious passion Reagan had for freedom when he wrote, “Reagan believed in the magic of individual freedom. He believed that the appeal of free markets and personal freedoms ultimately would prove irresistible to all people everywhere. He believed in spreading the gospel of freedom.”11 Reagan reconciled the most powerful concept of the Middle Ages, God and his Kingdom, with the dominant idea of our time: freedom. Fused together, the two form a coherent cosmology and ethical system that provides not just the foundation for Reagan’s thought but the key component in conservative policy. This Hegelian interpretation that stresses synthesis insists that Reagan reconciled the two most powerful ideas in Western history, forging a cosmology that combines the best elements of Christian and modern values.
Freedom has always reigned supreme in America. “An empire of liberty” is what Jefferson desired for America, initiating America’s freedom-centered cultural history. Since the founding of the republic, an influential strand of political thought has argued that a powerful government infringes on the rights and liberties of its people. During the creation of the new republic, all of the Founding Fathers agreed that some sort of constitution was necessary in order to safeguard the rights of citizens against a strong central authority, such as a hereditary king. Yet whereas Federalists believed that the original Articles of Confederation (1781) were too weak and needed a stronger central authority, anti-Federalists argued that a strong central authority would usurp both state and individual rights. They drew inspiration from two eighteenth-century British sources, Cato’s Letters by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon and Political Disquisitions by James Burgh. Both works agreed that the love of power is natural and that in order to curb it, government must be limited. An inverse relationship existed between the power of the government and freedom: the more powerful the government, the less freedom the people have. Continuing this, anti-Federalists maintained that the strong central government proposed by the Federalists fostered the tyranny that caused the Revolutionary War, so they fought for a weak central government in order to maximize individual rights and freedoms. In order to placate the fears of the anti-Federalists, the Bill of Rights was implemented, with its promise of certain rights and liberties, such as the freedom of speech and the right to bear arms, thus keeping the central government in check. If the goal of the new nation was to protect liberty, the thinking went, the constitution had to keep the central government as weak as possible. Reagan descends from this tradition.
Strong monarchs dominate European history, some of whom are glorified even today, but for the American people there are no examples of leaders who centralize control. . In contrast to most nations, American history lacks a single great king. In fact America was created as a reaction against a strong, central leader. King George III—the only king American children ever encounter in grade school—is a bête noir in American history.
The Enlightenment era saw the first debates about the proper type of government. From the dawn of civilization until the seventeenth century, most Westerners were ruled by a king or an emperor. The Sumerians, the Greeks (with the unique exception of the Athenians), the Romans, the barbarian tribes, and most European nations were ruled by a single, authoritarian ruler. In the Middle Ages this ruler reigned by “divine right.” This system began to break down during the Enlightenment, however, when ideas appeared that weakened the traditional relationship between the rulers and the ruled, bringing, in theory, more freedom to society. The Scientific Revolution discredited parts the Bible as literal truth, and subsequent Enlightenment philosophers believed society could be transformed and improved by eliminating traditional Christian morality and, by extension, the idea that God had placed kings on the throne to rule over others as subjects.
The French Enlightenment began with Voltaire, and Voltaire’s intellectual odyssey began in England. Admiring the freedom he found during his exile in England, Voltaire proclaimed, “An English man, as a free man, goes to Heaven by whatever way he pleases.”12 He and other Enlightenment philosophes felt that freedom needed to be contrasted with a powerful church and state. Even Rousseau, who hardly fits the Enlightenment mold and was an enemy of Voltaire, contended, “With liberty, wherever abundance reigns, well-being also reigns.”13 He also wrote, “To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For he who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.”14 Rousseau’s friend David Hume wrote in his famous History of England, “We, in this island have ever since enjoyed, if not the best system of government, at least the most entire system of liberty that ever was known amongst mankind.”15 Attempting to summarize the entire Enlightenment era, Diderot maintained, “Every age has its own dominant idea, that of our age seems to be liberty.”16 Diderot did not celebrate justice, equality, nature, or peace; these were subordinated to freedom. The significance of the Enlightenment for Western civilization lies in the philosophes’ championing of liberty.
Conceptions of and demands for liberty litter the Middle Ages—from St. Augustine’s City of God to the speech by Pope Urban II that inaugurated the Crusades—but Enlightenment philosophers made liberty the foundation of their ethical philosophy. The Enlightenment elevated freedom to an ethical end. Political freedom, religious freedom, free trade, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press reign in a just world. During the Enlightenment freedom became an end in itself, a cherished noble virtue, even greater than God for some. Enlightenment thinkers argued that governments should be judged on how well they promoted freedom, not on how well they served God. This was a radical new idea. In creating a new Western culture, Enlightenment philosophes were the first freedom fighters. They attempted to rupture Western civilization from its Christian heritage by placing the freedom of man above everything else. For the philosophes, man was Homo libertas.
The ideas of Voltaire and his contemporaries must be contextualized by an understanding of the absolutist time period that characterized the age, proving their distaste for a strong, centralized state. Louis XIV and Louis XV were the two most absolutist monarchs in history; all power was concentrated in their hands and in the hands of their small clique of advisors. Aristocrats provided military and political support for the monarchy yet were always subordinate. This centralized system of government, a government that consolidates all power, was what most of the philosophes rejected. Montesquieu, for example, declared, “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no freedom.”17 They were not radical republicans (defined as those who wanted no king at all), nor did they believe in participatory democracy, but they associated a strong central government with tyranny. In order to thwart tyranny, we must weaken (the central) government.
One of the most controversial aspects of Enlightenment thought was its insistence on free trade. In contrast to the mercantilist economic philosophy, which advocated an active government that embraced tariffs in order to limit imports, leading eighteenth-century economic theorists argued that productive workers, if left alone, would create national wealth. Adam Smith preached specialization, the breaking down of large jobs into smaller components so that each worker becomes an expert in one specific area, thus increasing that worker’s productivity. Wealthy nations have workers who produce goods of value. Smith’s quintessential Enlightenment laissez-faire economic ideas meant that, at least in the macro economy, government interference must be limited. Smith championed a free economy, which led him to this observation: “Every workman has a great quantity of his own work to dispose of beyond what he himself has occasion for; and every other workman being exactly in the same situation, he is enabled to exchange a great quantity of his own goods for a great quantity, or, what comes to the same thing, for the price of a great quantity of theirs. He supplies them abundantly with what they have occasion for, and they accommodate him as amply with what he has occasion for, and a general plenty diffuses itself through all the different ranks of the society.”18 Never a true economic libertarian because he believed government should play a role in promoting education, Smith’s ideas nonetheless laid the foundation for classical liberal economic thought, which holds that government intervention retards growth and prosperity. Herein lie the origins of “trickle-down” economics.
Smith wasn’t the only laissez-faire Enlightenment thinker, just the most famous one. Montesquieu felt that commerce and free trade even promote peace, because “two nations who traffic with each other become mutually dependent . . . and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities.”19 Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, the Enlightenment’s second-most influential economic theorist, believed that economic barriers hindered progress. Economic inequality was necessary for technological innovation to occur, he contended. Smith and Turgot were particularly popular among philosophes and early revolutionary leaders, as well as economic theorists in the nineteenth century. A man who exerted influence on both sides of the Atlantic, Thomas Paine, took a similar position: “I have been an advocate for commerce, because I am a friend to its effects. It is a pacifist system, operating to unite mankind by rendering nations, as well as individuals, useful to each other. . . . If commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable of, it would extirpate the system of war and produce a revolution in the uncivilized state of government.”20 This free-market ideology gradually took the name “liberalism.” It is often called “classical liberalism” today in order to distinguish it from twenty-first-century liberalism that doesn’t necessary vest faith in the free market. Besides free markets, nineteenth-century classical liberals demanded freedom of speech, freedom of religion, free elections, and equality before the law. Classical liberals drew from the Enlightenment and attempt to apply Enlightenment ideas to government and society. They tried to politically implement Enlightenment ideas about the natural freedom of man. Despite the fact that liberal thinkers were blamed for the excesses of the French Revolution (tens of thousands killed in the Reign of Terror, millions more in the ensuing Napoleonic Wars), Enlightenment works exploded in popularity in the early nineteenth century, including in the United States.
The free-market liberal ideas of classical liberals like Smith and Turgot would be refined by Frederic Bastiat in the middle of the nineteenth century. Bastiat remains a favorite of American conservatives, and his 1850 work On Law was part of Reagan’s private library. Hazlitt utilized Bastiat, probably leading to Reagan’s interest in the French thinker. While reading this work, Reagan would have encountered passages like the following:
God has implanted in mankind all that is necessary for them to accomplish their destinies. He has provided a social form as well as a human form. And these social organs of persons are so constituted that they will develop themselves harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations! And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.21
One hundred years before Hayek and von Mises, Bastiat criticized government planning, insisting that freedom comes from God.
The spread of liberalism favored by Bastiat was uneven and inconsistent, however. On the one hand, liberals won important battles, such as universal male suffrage, which was achieved in the United States, England, and France in the first half of the nineteenth century, yet on the other hand, this was a time of tremendous social upheaval engendered by the Industrial Revolution. With the onset of the new capitalist economy favored by liberals, as prescribed by the economic theorists above, lives had not universally gotten better by the middle of the 1800s, as Smith, Condorcet, and Bastiat had promised. Instead, at least for millions of new workers, misery triumphed. Harsh working conditions and child labor characterize this age. Laissez-faire economic policies wrought great wealth for some by hastening the decline of the landed aristocracy in favor of the bourgeoisie, but this wealth remained a distant dream for workers. Enlightenment thinking had brought both success and failure, so it still needed some tinkering. The leading voices for reform came from Germany.
In Germany the seeds of anti-Enlightenment thought date back to the upheavals of the French Revolution, when, counting the victims of the Napoleonic Wars, millions lost their lives. In many respects Napoleon was a liberal, as he advocated education, constitutions, and equality under the law, but in Germany he was viewed as the anti-Christ. The French Revolution, coupled with the Industrial Revolution, spawned a new intellectual and cultural movement in Germany called romanticism. Romantics blamed Enlightenment figures and their obsession with reason and science for social chaos. They believed that reason does not create a better world, but instead stifles creativity. The maxim of the romantic movement was “I feel, therefore I am.” Harkening back to the Middle Ages, romantics glorified the countryside and collectivism because to them, rampant individualism led not to freedom but to misery, as demonstrated by the hollow existence of the working class. True freedom, they felt, must be understood in relationship to other people. The concept of the Volk (the people) comes from this era. It explicitly asserts that the group trumps the individual. J. G. Herder, for example, minimized the importance of individuals, stressing culture instead. He argued that each culture is unique, possessing its own language, history, philosophy, and literature.
Probably the most important intellectual source of nineteenth-century anti-Enlightenment philosophy was, in fact, the Enlightenment philosophe J. J. Rousseau. Rousseau was a contrarian among contrarians, as demonstrated by his skepticism toward science and an epistemology based on emotion more than on reason. Like Nietzsche in the next century, when his philosopher brethren zigged, he zagged. Although Rousseau desired freedom and rejected many French social and political institutions that characterized the Ancient Regime he questioned the Anglo (which would become American) conceptions of freedom. Shaping the views of twentieth-century social critics like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, Rousseau pointed out that freedom is more than voting and having freedom of speech and to worship. While his peers, especially Voltaire, celebrated the English system, with its (relative) religious tolerance and limited monarchy, Rousseau questioned this system: “The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as the Members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing.”22 Rousseau’s concept of the general will attempted to reconcile the ideal of freedom with the needs of society. The general will is the common good of society, and it should never be opposed. It curbs rampant individualism by projecting a virtue that transcends individuals. It’s collectivist. Rousseau’s popularity among nineteenth-century romantics and socialists, coupled with his conception that people are “forced to be free,” has led some to argue that he contributed to the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century. Individual rights and liberties play a secondary role among all of Rousseau’s disciples, which include most nineteenth-century German intellectuals.
This is the intellectual context for Marxism, the foremost intellectual nemesis of Reagan and American conservatives. Arguably, Marx did little more than put a material spin on Hegel’s thought by adopting Hegel’s dialectic, dualism, teleology, and emphasis on history. Hegel argued that history progresses due to conflict between two antagonistic ideas, the thesis and the antithesis; Marx substituted classes for ideas. The history of the world is the history of class struggle. Each era has its own ruling and ruled class, oppressor and oppressed. The ancient era witnessed the struggle between citizen and slave, the Middle Ages between lord and serf, and the modern era, Marx’s era, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or between the wealthy factory owners and the working class. The proletarians need the bourgeoisie for their material existence, just as the bourgeoisie rely on the workers to perpetuate the capitalist system. Neither group, contrary to what they are taught and what they believe, exercises any freedom in this ghastly system. Defying Enlightenment principles, Marx called free trade the most unconscionable of all freedoms. For Marx, all so-called freedoms, such as parliamentary forms of government, were mere pseudo-democracies, serving the interests of only the bourgeoisie class. In effect the world’s most powerful socialist thinker created a New Left, a left—distinct from classical liberals—that after the social chaos wrought by the Industrial Revolution sought to temper, if not completely overthrow, the malignant capitalist system.
Marx condemned attempts to spread bourgeois freedom around the world, for example voting and free speech. He believed that all attempts to spread bourgeois freedom were economically motivated because all reality can be reduced to economics. Philosophers call the study of reality metaphysics, and Marx’s metaphysics can be defined in two words: economic determinism. All history, political systems, ideas, morality, religion, elections, laws, wars, and vast amounts of other human behavior are guided by economics. In twenty-first-century American political discourse, this means that wars are fought for oil, the wealthy create laws in their own interests, and corporations give us the news they want us to hear. We are all slaves to the economic interests of the wealthy. America is an oligarchy, not a democracy, because the government merely represents the wealthy elite. Maybe the best way to understand economic determinism is to realize that it is merely the idea that God controls most events turned on its head: economics is providential, argue Marxists. It guides everything.
The real roots of bourgeois attempts to spread democracy lie in the desire to spread capitalism, Marx believed. The French and American revolutions must be understood as the bourgeoisie’s attempts to expand their political power and create a political system that benefits them, or parliamentary democracy. World War I and World War II must be understood as conflicts between capitalists in their search for new markets. Only by eliminating bourgeois freedom, capitalism, and subsequent exploitation can we achieve real freedom. Upon the inevitable death of capitalism there will arise a new society: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonism, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”23 Marx’s ultimate end is a world of utopian freedom, but not the type of freedom that those of us living in Western democracies assume. Influenced by romanticism, this freedom is not achieved by rampant individualism but must be placed within the context of the group. For Marx and many subsequent left-wing writers, freedom comes only once we have equality; freedom exists in relation to others. Marx slammed traditional Enlightenment thought and its advocacy for free trade because he believed free trade is really only free for the bourgeoisie. One of Marx’s most famous disciples, the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, wrote, “We have already described the guerilla fighter as one who shares the longing of liberation, who once peaceful means are exhausted, initiates the fight. . . . From the very beginning of the struggle he has the intention of destroying an unjust order.”24 Thus, according to Guevara, capitalism breeds unfairness, and true liberation occurs only when capitalism and Western notions of democracy are eradicated.
Unfortunately “Marxism” has become a pejorative term, so describing the Marxist influence on our society and culture can be a sensitive subject, but whereas Enlightenment philosophes favored a free economy, after Marx leftists favored a more tempered capitalism, one concerned with the lower classes and Marx’s protagonist, urban dwellers. For Marx, free-market capitalism favors the bourgeoisie, or upper classes, at the expense of the lower classes, but conservatives like Reagan begged to differ, insisting that free trade benefits all. They proudly look to Adam Smith for intellectual justification. The contemporary conservative, including Reagan, blends Enlightenment (especially its economic side) and Christian elements, while the contemporary left wing marries Enlightenment ideas (especially its social ideas) with Marxism in order to create a comprehensive cosmology and fundamental value system. Both cosmologies are ethical cosmologies as well as metaphysical systems that attempt to explain the world. They should never be underestimated when trying to understand interpretations of reality, both past and present.
How can both the American left and right draw inspiration from the same intellectual movement? The Enlightenment was the handmaiden of America, so both sides of the political spectrum have inherited some of its principles. Modern American conservatives like Reagan have grafted its free-market principles onto their conservative social values. Conservatives thus may fairly be described as “classical liberals,” at least economically. Their economic thought was the original liberal philosophy, until the rise of Marxism. Modern American conservatives believe that freedom benefits everyone. Contemporary leftists, however, assert class distinction, in the tradition of Marx. This division of the world into two classes (rich and poor) descends as well from the German intellectual tradition. The German Marxist Adorno epitomizes the sentiment by contending, “People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they have left.”25 According to this view, class precedes freedom. The more freedom the rich have, the more oppressed the poor are. Yet for Reagan and conservatives, rich and poor collaborate to form society and the economy. Since the two classes are related, what is good for one is good for the other. For the left, the relationship between rich and poor is antagonistic; everything that helps the wealthy (e.g., tax cuts) hurts the poor. Since the rich keep getting richer, the poor must get poorer. Reagan’s trickle-down theory asserts a direct relationship between rich and poor: whatever benefits the wealthy will ultimately help the poor too. After all, rich and poor are not separate classes. Giving one group freedom helps everyone. Republicans like to cite John F. Kennedy, who argued, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”26 These two philosophies, at their core, are merely a continuation of an economic debate between classical Enlightenment economic liberals (whom today we call conservatives) and the more socialist-minded.
But economic freedom does create economic equality. In his biography of Reagan, John Sloan contended, “Since the quest for equality is such a vital component of the American political culture, I believe that Reagan’s ridicule of attempts to promote social justice will lessen the chances of his being evaluated as a great moral leader by anyone other than his most conservative supporters.”27 Insisting that Reagan ridicules equality oversimplifies the issue because it assumes only one type of equality: economic. In fact, Reagan’s domestic philosophy is premised on the equality of all people. To be sure, equality has played a pivotal role in shaping America. I would contend that it is not the socialist equality many of Reagan’s critics pine for, but another type of equality that epitomizes the Anglo-American cultural tradition: political equality.
One of the intellectual fathers of the Enlightenment and America, John Locke, argued that in the state of nature, people are free and equal: “Man being, as has been said, by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his estate and subject to the political power of another without his own consent, which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe and peaceable living, one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties.”28 Equality and liberty are linked. When people impose their will on others (including in the material sphere), equality is reduced. In a system with political equality, people are not governed by an elite power (e.g., a hereditary king or a powerful government) but rather govern themselves. People are free because they are equal. Equality and freedom, therefore, are not maximized by a powerful government but rather by a weak one, where ordinary people make the decisions that shape their lives, or at least do so through their elected representatives. This position rejected Plato, who favored an aristocratic form of government because he held that people are inherently unequal.
Marx contended that freedom comes once we have equality, but for Locke, freedoms come because we are equal. Locke argued that all differences arise merely from experience, so no one person or group deserves special privileges without explicit consent. A contract exists between the governors and the governed, Locke believed, and when the governors do not live up to their end of the contract, the people have the right to break the chains that tie them to their government. Why? Because we are equal. These ideas provide the intellectual foundation for modern democracy and for limited government.
Like Locke, most Enlightenment thinkers preached some sort of primitive and theoretical equality; this was rarely extended to the economic sphere. With a couple of exceptions, most condemned any attempts to level society economically. Holbach, for one, believed that fostering economic equality would only abridge freedom. Those who worked hardest, he argued, should be rewarded the most.29 Nothing promoted misery more than the abolition of private property for the leading Federalist, John Adams.30 Jefferson, whose credentials as an advocate for equality are impeachable, rejected a powerful central government. Traces of socialism can be found in the works of Rousseau, but Rousseau was hardly a characteristic Enlightenment thinker. Rousseau’s general will, Herder’s belief in the significance of groups, and Marx’s critiques of bourgeois capitalism are all anti-Enlightenment ideas, so they are on the fringes of the American cultural heritage. The intense debates between Federalists and anti-Federalists in the eighteenth century lacked socialist ideas. The Federalist Party preferred a larger and more powerful federal government because they sought to promote stability, not economic equality. This doesn’t invalidate any attempts to use government to promote economic equality; it just places it outside of American traditions.
The greatest student of nineteenth-century American equality was Alexis de Tocqueville. The French aristocrat admired the equality he found in America: “The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that this equality of condition is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived.”31 It wasn’t economic equality, or material condition, that defined America for Tocqueville. It was an abstract equality that precedes economic equality. It’s the equality that leads to freedom, as described by Locke. When Tocqueville came to America, he was struck by the fact that no man bowed before another. Why not? Because we are all equal! More so than in European countries, Americans are equal in their relationships. No one man or group of people should govern others without their explicit consent.
This is the equality that Reagan promoted. It isn’t economic equality but a belief that all people really are equal. Reagan declared in 1964, “This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”32 Equality (as opposed to elitism) is practiced by shrinking the size and scope of the federal government, creating a more equitable power distribution. The larger the government, the weaker the citizen. The government expands by taking power from the people, Reagan believed.
Some scholars have a hard time accepting that the right actually seeks power to the masses. Corey Robin begins his unsympathetic analysis of the conservative mind with this typical description of our modern era: “Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors in the state, church, workplace and other hierarchal institutions . . . and shouted different slogans about freedom, equality, rights, democracy and revolution. In virtually every instance, their superiors have resisted them, violently and non-violently, legally and illegally, covertly and overtly. The march and demarche of democracy is the story of modern politics or at least one of its stories.”33 Robin reduces history to two sides: his side, the left, which believes in freedom, progress, and power for the masses, and conservatives. Robin interprets twenty-first-century conservatism through a nineteenth-century Marxist prism because he asserts the centrality of class distinction: “Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders.”34 This was truer of Marx’s age than it is today. Robin’s account ignores twentieth-century history, specifically real experiments with socialism and economic equality. In practice, socialism leads to political power in the hands of those in government, and for conservatives, too much power in the hands of the few reduces political equality. Reagan and his disciples saw themselves as being on the side of the powerless who fight against an ever-expanding government, in the name of equality. Twenty-first-century conservatives, such as those in the Tea Party, who marched against expanding government, fight against those who wield power. Robin counters that the Tea Party protestors are related to the conservative reactionaries of the nineteenth century. And he is right. They are related, but critical differences exist too, just as a child is simultaneously related to and different from his or her parents. There are similarities and differences between nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century conservatives. Ideologies (and even religions) change over time. Some progressive beliefs change too. Early twenty-first-century progressives don’t mimic all of the beliefs of their early twentieth-century progenitors. (Early twenty-first-century progressives were far more likely to adhere to Christianity, for example.) Conservatives and progressive both change over time. They are different, yet related.
Robin, following Marx, would contend there is more political equality under socialism than under capitalism because there is more economic equality. That is debatable. From the conservative perspective, socialism breeds political inequality because those few who hold the levers of power in government control the system. Conservatives contend that socialism leads to rule of the few over the many. Even Marx recognized this. Socialism, for him, was just a transitory episode that paved the way for communism, when true freedom and equality would reign.
Marx made economic equality a precondition for political equality, and it may be argued that socialism promotes equality because the poorest Americans become materially and socially equal with the wealthiest Americans, then they exert equal political power. By cutting welfare spending, these people claim, we are only giving more to those who already have material wealth. This leads to political inequality. The most contemporary proponent of the idea that freedom requires equality was the American political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls published his Theory of Justice in 1971 (the same year Reagan passed welfare reform in California), arguing that only in theory is one allowed to pursue freedom in an ideal society. Rawls critiqued freedom, insisting that first everyone must have an equal opportunity to achieve freedom. Moreover, he insisted, there must be limitations on freedom because if everyone freely pursues their own ends, mass inequality will ensue, denying some their rightful chance at freedom. He stressed justice and fairness. Rawls wasn’t a communist, but his philosophy was more community-oriented than the classical economic approach favored by Smith, Turgot, and Montesquieu (all of whom had been influenced by Locke) and their classical liberal disciples, who by the 1970s were becoming the Republican Party.
A new twentieth-century conservatism burgeoned, reacting against Soviet socialism and other forms of state planning. Explaining his shift away from the Democratic Party, Reagan said in 1976, “I was once a Democrat myself and I believed that party represented our core values faithfully. . . . But the intellectual and political leadership of [the] Democratic Party changed. The party was taken over by elitists who believed that only they could plan properly the lives of the people.”35 Reagan was at the vanguard of a new conservative movement, one deeply committed to democracy, equality, and populism. Populism is premised on the idea that all people really are equal. These concepts were originally advanced by left-wing thinkers in the nineteenth century and opposed by traditional conservatives. But the 1960s also saw the advent of a New Right. It championed populism by contrasting itself with socialism; state planning became elitism. Reagan’s new conservative populism challenged “big government” and quasi-socialist, New Left liberalism. This is how Reagan helped pave the way for Trump and his alleged populism.
Critics of conservative populism call it anti-intellectualism. There is some truth in this because populism minimizes the power of the intellectual class too. A radical idea? Not necessarily. It’s completely consistent with modern democracy, wherein everyone, regardless of their intelligence level or political education (just to name one intellectual skill) get precisely one vote. The educated and uneducated, the wise person and the dunce, get the same number of votes. Why? Because we are in fact equal. Those who preach intellectualism, wittingly or not, promote a system in which power is unevenly distributed, particularly favoring those with certain intellectual credentials. Why should the intellectual classes wield more power over society? In his Pulitzer Prize–winning work, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), Richard Hofstadter insists, “Anti-intellectualism was not manifested in this country for the first time in the 1950s. Our anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older than our national identity, and has a long historical background.”36 Hofstadter continues that America’s egalitarianism leads to a distrusting of those with alleged expertise.
At the same time Reagan was promoting this new conservative populism, Russell Kirk was preaching against it. Kirk asserted that populism is merely “a revolt against the smart guys.”37 Today it’s American conservatives who more often rebel against “the smart guys.” Reagan led this rebellion. Late in his life the archconservative Kirk lambasted the burgeoning neoconservative movement, wistful for a return to the old conservatism of Burke, a conservatism opposed to radical change and popular democracy. Traditional conservatives, like the nineteenth-century Austrian aristocrat Metternich, writing in the wake of the French Revolution, believed maintaining traditional social patterns was less disruptive to life. They were skeptical of change and freedom. Reagan, in contrast, sought change. Specifically he wanted more freedom for American citizens, and even for the people of Eastern Europe. Neoconservatives are heirs to this tradition. They are not traditional conservatives precisely because they reject the hierarchical and elitist values of traditional conservatives like Burke, Metternich, and Kirk.
Accordingly, Reagan quoted the nineteenth-century abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher (1867): “The real American idea is not that every man shall be on a level with every other, but that every man shall have the liberty . . . to be what God made him.”38 Beecher, one of the leading Christian proponents of equality in nineteenth-century America, believed in the equality of all men, but this didn’t mean economic equality. It meant liberty. He writes about democratic American man, “There shall be no prejudice against him if he be high; and that no disgrace shall attach him if he be low; that he shall have supreme possession of what is his and what he has; that he shall have liberty to use his forces in any proper direction; that whether he be born of Caucasian, African or Indian parents, he shall have all the rights which God have him.”39 Beecher, who spent time in England defending the North’s cause in the Civil War, is just one example that Henry Steele Commager used in his work about the American mind. Commager writes, “Intellectually eighteenth century America was very much part of the European Enlightenment—particularly in its English, Scottish and French Manifestations.”40 The German intellectual movement that entered the United States after World War II was a distinct intellectual movement, one separate from America’s intellectual heritage. It is more socialist, seeking more economic equality. This underscores my argument about Reagan’s working within the traditional American cultural milieu, while many of his opponents are descended from a different European tradition, one at odds with America’s heritage. This partly explains why self-described conservatives outnumber self-described liberals by a 3.5 to 2.5 margin in the United States.41 Reagan’s political ideas cannot be completely separated from American cultural history.
It’s hard to argue against American cultural history. Twentieth-century America produced some of the greatest achievements in human history, including, but by no means limited to, rescuing Europeans from themselves in three world wars (including the cold war), putting a man on the moon, and creating the personal computer, quite possibly the most significant invention in the past five hundred years. Reagan extolled American virtues, history, and contributions: “In the past thirty years, we have fought three wars and helped rebuild the countries that were devastated by those wars. We have given more than $150 billion of our national resources to help our friends—and even some of our former enemies—to become economically self-sufficient. We have opened our own markets to imports because we believe in the principles of free trade.”42 Scholars still have not satisfactorily answered the critical question of why Germans, Italians, and the French were deluded by Nazi, fascist, socialist, and communist ideologies, while these ideas appeared only on the fringes of the American political scene. Are American voters smarter? Doubtful. The best answer comes from analyzing the Anglo-American cultural heritage, especially its emphasis on individual rights and freedoms. The radical European ideologies of socialism, communism, Nazism, and fascism all promised better worlds, as long as the people were willing to sacrifice some of their individual rights and liberties. Americans resisted.
American culture has helped make America the richest nation on earth; its middle-class citizens enjoy a wealth unknown to much of the world. Reagan explicitly rejected the idea common among Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu and Jefferson that climate or environment explains why some nations are richer than others, insisting in 1967 that “backward nations are backward and underdeveloped nations are underdeveloped not because of their climate and not because of their soil.” Instead Reagan reduced American economic power to the American capitalist system, or freedom:
In the United States we have been blessed, not alone by our natural resources—other nations have great resources, too—but by our people, the world’s most industrious, ingenious, enterprising and inventive, and by our political system—one of the few devised by man that is both stable and free. Stable enough to let a prosperous economy evolve and free enough to allow initiative and ingenuity to triumph over the dead hand of bureaucracy and regulation. . . . Here we unleashed the genius of every man by giving him freedom to an extent never known before by man anywhere.43
He reiterated these ideas in a radio address nine years late:
Our productivity is phenomenal. We raise 37% more wheat per acre than the world average. We are 6% of the world’s population on only 7% of the world’s land, but we produce almost half of the world’s corn, 2/3 of its soy beans, 1/3 or more of the world’s paper, electrical power, college graduates and 1/3 of the farm machinery. Just to round it off we make more than 2/3 of its computers & 80% of all passenger aircraft. . . . All this because our system freed the individual genius of man. Release[d] him to fly as high and as far as his own talent & energy would take him.44
Reagan related freedom to productivity. Productive workers, by definition, produce goods and services of value to society. They bring wealth to a nation. Feeding soldiers and innovating technologically leads to military victory, and this is what America has done better than any other country else in the twentieth century. More than any other society in history, the United States has an ample supply of guns and butter. Why is America so rich? Is it because of its exploitative history? European countries engaged in slavery and exploitative nineteenth-century imperialism far more brutally than did the United States. American freedom explains everything for Reagan:
We have a very visible example of the contrast between the free market and government ownership in a household necessity we take for granted. The invention of Alexander Graham Bell—the telephone offers us irrefutable proof of the superiority of the free market. As recently as 1880 there were only 34,000 miles of telephone wires on the whole North American continent. There were dozens and dozens of small telephone companies using several different kinds of equipment and there was no inter-connection between these different companies. The same situation prevailed in all the other so-called advanced nations. If someone had openly advanced a plan to put a phone in every home, on every farm, in every hamlet & city and hook them all together I’m sure someone would have said, “only govt. has the resources to do that.”45
Many leftists promote public or communal ownership of what Marx called the modes of production, or the ways human produce material goods. Reagan, on the other hand, argued for private ownership. By minimizing government influence, we promote freedom and subsequently creativity, productivity, and ultimately national wealth. For Reagan, history has vindicated the American capitalist system.
Some have interpreted the American capitalist system as selfishness. Reagan counters, “We are generous people. We have shared our wealth more widely among our people than any society heretofore known to man. We support more churches, more libraries, more symphonies, and operas, and more nonprofit theaters than any other country. We publish more books than the rest of the world put together. . . . Now all we need is to be reminded of our destiny—that God intended America to be free; to be the Golden hope of all mankind.”46 America is a beacon of hope for the rest of the world, just as it was during World War I, when Armageddon characterized the Western Front before American involvement; during World War II, as Nazism enveloped Europe; during the Korean War, when communist forces invaded the democratic south; when Stalin blockaded Berlin in 1948; and when the Berlin Wall was constructed and the West Germans pleaded for American intervention.
America was different from other nations, Reagan believed. Besides its love of God and liberty, it had another unique characteristic. He proclaimed at the end of World War II, “America stands unique in the world—founded not on a race but on a way and an ideal.”47 Decades later Reagan described a letter he received from a man who reminded him, “You can go live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman; you can go to Germany, but you cannot become an German. . . . But anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in America and become an American.”48 Whereas Marxists deplored America as a force of capitalism and therefore misery in the world, Reagan had a different attitude: America, the harbinger of light and freedom, was a positive force in the world. Having defeated evil ideologies like Nazism and Japanese fascism, America even helped rebuild those countries that had tried to kill our young men and women. Tens of billions—hundreds of billions in today’s dollars—were spent in hopes of improving lives ravaged by war. What better evidence for American generosity could there possibly be?
Reagan was an avid reader and writer. One of his former speechwriters who has combed through most of Reagan’s pre-presidential speeches contends that Reagan wrote at least 500,000 words, or several large books. When asked about his most vivid memory of his father as a child, Michael Reagan replied, “Easy. Back before he became governor, he did a lot of work at his home [in Pacific Palisades]. When I’d get back from school in the afternoon, I’d toss my books and go into the master bedroom to say hello. Dad had a big desk there, and he was always at the desk, writing. Not almost always. Always.”49 Reagan read and wrote more than most twentieth-century presidents. Nonetheless some of his critics believe that he was as dumb as an ox. Even some of his aides disparaged his knowledge. Reagan’s deputy national security advisor Robert MacFarlane and his speechwriter Peggy Noonan acknowledge that they questioned Reagan’s intellectual abilities. Reagan’s biographers are left with the question, What did Reagan know? The answer: way more than he let on.
His ability to convince others that he was naïve worked on many levels. It allowed him to exercise his acting skills and outsmart those who thought they were wise, while being funny and getting the last laugh. Reagan, the actor, was playing his most convincing role, feigning ignorance and disguising the true depth of his knowledge. Reagan was, first and foremost, an actor. He prided himself on this. Edmund Morris revealed that four years after leaving the Oval Office, Reagan returned to Washington to receive the Medal of Freedom. Morris, who spent several years in close proximately with Reagan during his presidency, recounted, “Afterward, in the receiving line, he [Reagan] took my hand and nodded with patent lack of recognition. . . . Well it had to happen, I told myself. . . . Dutch [Reagan’s nickname] finally stopped recognizing me. Yet the following afternoon, Fred Ryan, his retirement Chief of Staff, called from Los Angeles to say that Reagan had remarked . . . ‘I saw Edmund in the reception line this morning. . . . I think he’s waiting for me to die before he publishes his book.’”50 Reagan sometimes pretended not to recognize people. This was his sense of humor, and he was the only one who got the joke. He was one of the funniest presidents of the twentieth century. Upon seeing Nancy after getting shot in 1981, he apologized to her, saying, “Honey, I forgot to duck.”51 Alan Greenspan, a former chair of the Federal Reserve, described Reagan as “a professional comedian, a professional raconteur.”52 His sense of humor ranged from wry to raunchy. I have encountered other figures in history (and in life) who liked to play the role of the village idiot in order to fool those who think they are wise. They think it’s funny. And deceiving others can make people feel powerful. It was a game Reagan liked, a game he could never lose. He may not have always been the smartest guy in the room, but by feigning ignorance, he could outsmart those who believed themselves to be superior. They didn’t know as much as they thought they knew.
This may explain the oft-cited quote by Clark Clifford that Reagan was an “amiable dunce.” The quote appears in many Reagan biographies and it needs to be contextualized. Clifford was the quintessential Washington insider; he advised all Democrat presidents, from Truman through Carter. He wanted to meet President Reagan, so he contacted Michael Deaver, Reagan’s deputy chief of staff. Deaver writes, “[Reagan] was in a festive mood, but it soured somewhat when I brought up Clifford. ‘Why would I want to meet with Clifford,’ Reagan asked, somewhat bemused. . . . Reagan would normally meet with anyone, Democrat or Republican, it didn’t matter to him, but some sort of warning signal seemed to go off in his brain. He didn’t want to do it, but he left it to me.”53 Finally Reagan acquiesced. However, when Clifford met Reagan in the Oval Office, Deaver recounts, Reagan was subtly different with Clifford than with his hundreds of other guests. “I think he sensed that the old man [Clifford] had come to take his measure, and Reagan—a different drummer in ways both large and small—simply wasn’t going to have anything to do with it.”54 As he did with Morris, Reagan may have just been playing a convincing role. It is what he liked to do best.
Reagan’s sharp mind displayed itself in a debate with Robert Kennedy in 1967.55 At the time, Reagan was California’s new governor and Kennedy was a senator from New York. The event, broadcast on CBS, was not a formal debate between Reagan and Kennedy but rather a debate between Reagan, Kennedy, and a group of students, most of whom were critical of American foreign policy. Reagan impressed more than Kennedy. Suggesting the debate may be a harbinger of future contests between the two politicians, Newsweek reported, “The political rookie Reagan . . . left old campaigner Kennedy blinking when the session ended.”56 David Halberstam wrote that the general consensus was that Reagan destroyed Kennedy in the debate.57 Reagan’s intellectual strengths were not his analytical skills, but he was very sharp. He was more intelligent than his detractors claimed.
Reagan’s fear of flying meant he crossed the country on trains, an activity more conducive to reading than is flying. Many who met Reagan commented on the small library he always carried with him, filled with works on political philosophy and economics. One early biographer wrote that while interviewing Reagan in his home in 1965, he perused Reagan’s personal library. The biographer, Lee Edwards, recounts, “I began pulling the books out of the shelves and looking at them. They were dog-eared. They were annotated. . . . It was clear that he had read them, had digested them, and had studied them.”58 Edwards remembers three of the authors already studied here: Chambers, Hazlitt, and Bastiat. A consultant for Reagan’s first gubernatorial campaign noted that Reagan’s library was stacked with books on political philosophy.59 Larry Williams, an actor who appeared with Reagan in five films, recalled, “Statistical information of all sorts was a commodity Ron always had in extraordinary supplies, either carried in his pockets or in his head. Not only was this information abundant, it was stunning in its catholicity. . . . Ron had the dope on just about everything: this quarter’s up-or-down figures on GNP growth, V. I. Lenin’s grandfather’s occupation, all history’s baseball pitchers’ ERA, the optimistic outlook for sugar-beet production in the year 2000. . . . One could not help but be impressed.”60 Reagan did have a photographic memory. David Gergen, a member of his administration, maintained that Reagan had a “steel-trap mind” for things he read.61 Reagan wasn’t intellectually curious unless he was passionate about the topic, but he was passionate about current events and politics. Milton Friedman said that Reagan “was an intellectual in the sense that he had a real interest in ideas. He read widely and was interested in what was going on.”62
Reagan’s analytical and critical thinking skills understandably left many frustrated. He believed almost everything he read, which became sacred truths for him, but these facts and figures then had to be researched for accuracy by his aides. He sometimes introduced fictional characters into real-life events, no doubt believing they were real. Reagan really did occasionally confuse what he saw in movies with real life. Morris, insisting Reagan liked numbers with lots of zeroes at the end, tells the story of how Reagan once said on TV, “I’ve been told that something like forty-two trillion rate decisions were given by the ICC [International Commerce Commission] in its eighty-five-year history.”63 Reagan always had facts and figures ready to support his views, and sometimes they were only half true, at best. If he had lived in the twenty-first century instead of the twentieth, one wonders how he would have grappled with the exponential increase in information available. If there were ever a person who needed to heed the adage “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet,” it was Reagan. Cannon postulates that Reagan never needed to develop any analytic skills early in life because he had a photographic memory that allowed him to succeed all the way through college without much intellectual effort, while his strong people skills and imagination allowed him to thrive in professional environments.64
Reagan had little interest in scientific or psychological issues. Intellectuals study the world around them in hopes of understanding and subsequently explaining it. Different academic paradigms offer different ways to understand the world. None of this interested Reagan. He wanted to create a wonderful new world, not understand the one in front of him. Peggy Noonan claimed, “Ronald Reagan did not have the natural talents and cast of mind of a businessman or economist or political figure, he has the natural talents and cast of an artist. . . . And indeed he went all through his life drawing faces, caricatures, designing leather crafts and memorizing poetry.”65 Reagan’s intelligence was more intuitive than intellectual; he gathered knowledge by instinctively analyzing what he felt rather than synthesizing what he read. Reagan saw the world as a romantic. Instead of employing reason and logic, which nineteenth-century romantics argued was cold and lifeless, he relied on his instincts and feelings; the world could not be understood only by analysis and calculation.
Even more than his photographic memory, Reagan’s greatest intellectual gift was his imagination. Knowledge is important, but it’s limited. Imagination is boundless. Only imagination can lead to change and to human improvement, because before any human endeavor exists, it must be imagined. Reagan’s imagination surpassed every other post–World War II president. Always more concerned with the way the world could be than with the way it actually was, he was one of the few people who could imagine a world without a Soviet Union, a world bereft of the Berlin Wall, a world without communism.
Reagan preferred concrete examples to abstract thought; as a Hollywood actor, when his personal income taxes sometimes reached 90 percent, Reagan recalled that this discouraged some actors from working, producing, and being creative. Cannon pointed out, “Reagan was an inductive thinker; as economist Annelise Anderson observed, he always thought in concrete examples.”66 In order to discover the truth, Reagan began with his own experiences. They taught him that high tax rates discourage work and creativity, and therefore, in order to increase productivity and wealth, he needed to cut taxes. Inductive thinking begins with experience, believing these experiences to represent reality. For Reagan, this meant that since in his experience a 90 percent tax rate discouraged work, all 90 percent tax rates must discourage work. The problem with this type of reasoning, of course, is that one’s experience may not be universal. Just because I see one hundred white swans does not mean that all swans are white. Just because the 90 percent top marginal tax rate discouraged Reagan’s peers from working does not mean that such a tax rate would produce the same result at all times.
This inductive epistemology too descends from the Anglo-American intellectual tradition. Comparing it with deductive reasoning helps illuminate why Reagan was often deemed an intellectual simpleton. Philosophers and intellectuals prefer the deductive method, especially on the European Continent, with Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Marx being the most prominent examples. Most philosophers prefer deductive reasoning, starting with abstract, theoretical principles they have discovered, such as Cogito ergo sum or the idea that the history of the world is a history of class struggle. These do not necessarily derive from immediate experience; they begin with mind. Deductive reasoning allows them to construct comprehensive systems of thought, potentially capable of explaining vast amounts of observed phenomena. Cartesian metaphysics explains a remarkable array of physical, religious, and mental phenomena from the simple notion Cogito ergo sum. Marxism magnificently explains all historical events, from the war in Iraq to the rise of Christianity and the French Revolution with one word: economics. The explanatory powers are amazing. Intellectuals are curious people, so Descartes’s and Marx’s deductions prove seductive, since they provide answers to vexing questions, creating order and rationality in a world that may appear chaotic and unpredictable. Their ideas are to students of the humanities what a unified field theory is to physicists. Of course, if the fundamental principle of deductive reasoning is false, then this type of reasoning falters and everything collapses like a house of cards. What if my thinking does not prove my existence? What if the history of the world is not the history of class struggle? All beliefs, all deductions are invalidated. Basing all opinions on an opinion (regardless of how secure we find this opinion to be) is therefore epistemologically risky.
The German intellectual tradition, above all others, is far more rationalistic and deductive, meaning truth and knowledge come from the human mind. Experience is subordinated. This tradition (which contributed to the Frankfurt School, postmodernism, and other twentieth-century intellectual and cultural movements) has disproportionately shaped contemporary academia, social scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals through the works of great German thinkers like Marx, Max Weber, Freud, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and, more recently, Jürgen Habermas. Taking a cue from Kant, all of these thinkers argued for a world beyond our experiences. Experience gets subordinated.
For example, probably the most influential left-wing academic of the second half of the twentieth century was Marcuse, often called the “guru of the New Left.” Marcuse attempted to reconcile Marxist principles with the reality that the socialist Soviet Union promoted not freedom but oppression. By the time Marcuse started writing, the Soviet Union was losing credibility due to famine and purges. Did this mean that Marx, the greatest left-wing philosopher in history, had it all wrong? Not so fast. Marcuse railed against American capitalism, employing such concepts as “false consciousness.” Freud, with his characteristically German emphasis on the sublime, deeply influenced Marcuse, who contended that although Americans might feel free, no truth can be gleaned from this. Only by delving beyond surface appearances can we understand the malignant capitalist system. It is hard to imagine that Marcuse’s personal experiences with American capitalism were that unfortunate: one of his primary residences in the United States was in La Jolla, California, one of the wealthiest communities in Southern California. The other two members of the Marcuse-Adorno-Horkheimer trio wrote in their classic critique of capitalist society, Dialectic of Enlightenment, “The individual is entirely nullified in the face of economic powers.”67 They wrote this while living in Pacific Palisades, a posh region of Los Angeles. That doesn’t invalidate their work; it just suggests that they didn’t draw their theories from experience.
Michael Harrington’s famous socialist work, The Other America: Poverty in the United Sates, rejected empiricism. Harrington, like many other socialist writers, condemned American capitalism by arguing that its true nature exists in areas beyond our experiences, such as poverty in the rural mountains and inner cities, places most Americans never visit. He even described “invisible Americans.” Capitalism brings suffering into the world, but the suffering is beyond our experiences. American capitalism must be understood by looking beyond our senses. Harrington, like any good socialist, argued that Americans needed to invest in more areas rife with poverty.68 According to the left, although a person’s experiences with the American capitalist system may be favorable, these experiences do not sufficiently describe American capitalism. The fabric of reality lies below superficial appearance. In America, adherents to this type of reasoning believe, malignant, latent forces control the system, even for those who live posh middle-class lifestyles.
Reagan vehemently disagreed, insisting that experience best yields truth. After describing Marxism as a fanatical ideology, Reagan insisted, “Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on, but from what happened before. The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation of a dozen, but in all of the combined experiences of mankind.”69 Reagan proposed empiricism. He believed experience with the capitalist system reveals its true nature. He wanted to fly Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the USSR, in a helicopter over American cities, believing that after experiencing American capitalism and talking to ordinary Americans, the general secretary would abandon his socialist pretensions.70 Direct experience with the capitalist system would yield truth. The difference between the two systems of thought can be most simply addressed with a question: Are my personal experiences as a middle-class American indicative of the true nature and reality of the American system? For conservative inductivists, the answer is yes, while for left-wing deductivists, like Marcuse and Adorno, the answer is no. For the latter, personal experiences do not necessarily yield truth. They use ideology (mind) to understand the world. These two traditions continue to battle in the culture wars and subsequently in American politics.
Reagan’s faith in experience further explains why so many left-wing thinkers minimize his intelligence. Most intellectuals rely on the powers of their marvelous minds, not the external world, in order to understand reality. Socialism is more a product of the human mind (ideology) than is capitalism. This may further explain its appeal to intellectuals since they become more useful in a socialist system because people are needed to orchestrate the economic system. The advantage Reagan and conservatives have is that their method is more consistent with America’s intellectual and cultural heritage. Locke, the great empiricist whose philosophy contributed to the American Revolution, castigated the deductive rationalism of Descartes and Platonists. (And subsequent German thinkers like Kant, Hegel, and Marx condemned British empiricists like Locke.) Rationalists maintained that truth could be discovered by reason (the mind) alone, a priori, or without experience. They weren’t the intellectual architects of America, however. In the same immortal speech where he exclaimed “Give me Liberty or give me death,” one of America’s most famous patriots declared, “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.”71 This all helped shape Reagan’s own political philosophy and his rejection of abstract, metaphysical principles. It is the American Way.
These ideas led to the distinctly American philosophical movement called pragmatism. Generally, pragmatists shun the abstract reasoning favored by traditional philosophers, instead favoring a more practical, down-to-earth approach to ideas. Ideas should not be judged on their popularity nor on how rational they seem, but on how well they actually work. The idea that socialism is good because it works in theory would be rejected by the pragmatists because nothing can be deemed good until it is actually tried. Tocqueville, writing decades before the pragmatist movement crystallized, studied why Americans prefer practical to theoretical sciences and concluded, “Those who cultivate the sciences among a democratic people [Americans] are always afraid of losing their way in visionary speculation. They mistrust systems; they adhere closely to facts and study facts with their own senses.”72 Pragmatism explains why Americans are more averse to academic philosophy than are Europeans. It also explains and contributed to what has justly been called “anti-intellectualism” in America today. This, in turn, explains why Americans (and those who prefer its traditions, like conservatives) are sometimes considered to be less intelligent. In reality they are just different philosophical systems.
There have been some attempts to reduce Reagan’s political success to his deft skills as a communicator and media manipulator. Pejoratively calling Reagan the “Teflon president” for his ability to deflect blame and criticism, some Democrats use this as a means to explain his political success. The Democratic congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, who coined the term, recalls, “As a young congresswoman, I got the idea of calling President Reagan the ‘Teflon president’ while fixing eggs for my kids. He had a Teflon coat like the pan.”73 No criticisms of Reagan stuck. From one perspective, attributing Reagan’s political success and personal popularity to his communicative skills, or ability to deflect criticism, conveniently allows critics to minimize the significance of his ideas and policies. According to this reasoning, Reagan was a popular president not because of his conservative ideas but rather because of his ability to communicate. In the same way, Republicans explain Clinton’s and Obama’s success by maintaining that they were “great politicians.” What I want to suggest is that Reagan’s success can be attributed to his ability to postulate ideas concordant with America’s religious and cultural heritage. His “Teflon coat” can be explained by the fact that his entire cosmology was consistent with American traditions. He spoke the American language fluently and his ideas found receptive ears.