The Official End of the Reagan Era

(3 of 3)

The very debate is a tribute of sorts. (Stop and think: When was the last time you heard anyone arguing Franklin Pierce's legacy?) Moreover, if you doubt Reagan's continuing influence, look no further than the dueling tax cuts offered by Obama and John McCain to a populace awash in red ink. That said, no President is immune to the law of unintended consequences. By decoupling conservatism in the 1980s from fiscal responsibility, he unwittingly sanctioned future deficits and helped usher in a consumerist society gaudily living beyond its means. The result: credit-card conservatism. Deprived of their green eyeshades, the Cold War and the Soviet Union, Reagan's ideological children have little to unify their fractious family except love of country and loyalty to the past.

Related

Specials

Top 10 Actors Turned Politicians

Certainly the campaign they ran this fall was anything but Reaganesque. One wonders what Reagan the onetime movie star would make of a campaign that made an epithet out of celebrity. More than tactics, ideas mattered to Reagan. He was the proverbial conviction politician, and his midlife conversion from New Deal liberal to Goldwater conservative owed more to Friedrich von Hayek than Joe the Plumber--the latter a perfect symbol of a party running on intellectual fumes. While Reagan thought in decades, if not centuries, his political heirs define success as owning the news cycle. Thus Halloween came early this year, as GOP operatives lurched from Ayers to acorn to questioning their opponents' patriotism and flinging allegations of socialism. The last claim in particular rang hollow coming from one who voted to recapitalize Wall Street and partly nationalize the banking system with $700 billion in taxpayer funds.

A base campaign indeed. McCain is a better man than his robocalls. Yet he became enmeshed in the red-state-vs.-blue-state, hot-button, wedge-issue, 50%-plus-one formula that has dominated and degraded our politics in these locust years of racial, regional and cultural polarization. Reagan at his best was a happy warrior, who put a smile on the sometimes dour face of conservatism and recast his political faith as both optimistic and futuristic. He was no hater, and cultural scapegoating wasn't his style. Indeed, in 1978 Reagan courageously opposed a California referendum that would have made it easier to fire gay schoolteachers simply on account of their sexual orientation.

Conservatives wishing to honor their modern founding father might begin by practicing what Reagan preached in his valedictory address to the 1992 GOP Convention in Houston. "Whatever else history may say about me when I'm gone," he told us, "I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts." Some things are ageless.

The populist Jackson, a war hero, snatched power from the élite and spread it to farmers, laborers and the common man

THE ERA OF JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 1820s to the Civil War: a voice for frontiersmen

Defeating Depression F.D.R. created federal jobs and retirement security, changing our relationship with government

F.D.R. AND THE NEW DEAL 1930s to mid-'60s: Washington as interventionist

Supply sider Reagan rejected Big Government and cut taxes. And he pursued economic deregulation--to a fault

THE REAGAN REVOLUTION 1966 to 2006: a conservative revival

A historian and biographer who has headed five presidential libraries, Smith is now scholar-in-residence at George Mason University

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

See the Cartoons of the Week.