A cunning rock ‘n roll showman, David Lee Roth, once opined that, “The key to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Vice President Richard M. Nixon defended himself when he was struggling to stay on the ticket with Ike by calling attention to his family’s pet dog and his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat.” Those were the days when it was an article of faith for Republicans to equate security with solvency — sometimes unwisely. To maintain a balanced budget, Ike short-changed conventional forces and relied heavily on nuclear weapons for national security.
Times change. I remember wandering around D.C. during President Reagan’s inauguration week. My fellow citizens decided they had had enough of the Carter administration’s austerity and tentativeness. I felt stunned, not just by the loss of a job, but by the party goers’ ostentatious display of wealth. Washington was awash in mink coats and stretch limos. No apologies needed. Now the mink coats rarely come out of the closet, but the stretch limos have gotten longer. Both parties now thrive on the ostentatious display of wealth from their supporters while the country seeks deeper in debt.
My sense is that the Reagan years were a cultural as well as political watershed. One big shift, of course, related to the traditional Republican equation of solvency and security. The progressive tax code was bent to allow tax cuts for high-end incomes. Not surprisingly, commensurate cuts in government spending did not accompany losses in revenue. The Clinton administration accepted the thankless job of re-balancing the budget through revenue increases. A budget surplus resulted, and Democrats were then hammered as the Party of Taxation.
An old professor of mine, Robert W. Tucker, wrote:
The principal Reagan legacy in foreign policy may well be just this: that the nation’s 40th president transformed what had been a disposition not to pay for the American position in the world into something close to a fixed resolve not to do so.
The cultural aspects of the Reagan shift harkened back to the 1920s. A newspaperman who covered the Harding administration, Samuel Popkins Adams, wrote in Incredible Era, The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding, that “the country wanted an anti.” Harding was elected because he was so unlike his austere, demanding predecessor, Woodrow Wilson. Harding arrived in Washington “with little more knowledge than the average man in the street of the issues on which the world’s future was to hang… He was an actor, cheerfully responsive to the direction of the playwrights.”
Reagan was, of course, a far more accomplished actor and politician than Harding. He surprised both his critics and supporters by reducing nuclear dangers in heroic and historic ways. Reagan flummoxed wonks by demonstrating that a grasp of detail mattered far less than having sound instincts. Garry Wills, in Reagan’s America, Innocents at Home, explained Reagan’s political success this way: “Because he acts himself, we know he is authentic.” Reagan was, in Wills’ view,
… the great American synecdoche… He is just as simple and just as mysterious, as our collective dreams and memories… He is the perfect carrier: the ancient messages travel through him without friction. No wonder he shows little wear and tear… Reagan does not argue for American values: he embodies them… We make the connections. It is our movie.
When politics becomes indistinct from stagecraft, masters of fiction can be our keenest observers. Here’s E.L. Doctorow on Reagan (in “The State of Mind of the Union,” The Nation, March 1986):
The new attitude [of the 1980s] borrows something of the accelerated sense of life in the 1920s, when precocity and a daring irrelevance caught up young people as the stock market had their fathers. But there is something unrecognizable here: it is not a spirit of selling out because it lacks that moral reference entirely; it is a kind of mutancy, I think, a structural flaw of the mind that suggests evolution in a social context.
The “evolution in a social context” of American politics continues apace. The George W. Bush administration fought two wars with tax cuts. It’s hard to be secure when you are insolvent. And now my fellow Americans have elected another “anti.” Think of this: Barack Obama could never have been elected President without George W. Bush.