IN MEMORIAM: RONALD REAGAN
A funny thing happened during the Reagan era. Young people became Republicans. Not all of them, of course, but a plurality. It was strange. After all, everyone knows you're supposed to be liberal and idealistic when you're young. You're supposed to vote for people like Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.
Yeah, right.
Those young people aren't young anymore. We're middle aged, and the world bears little resemblance to the one we grew up in. It is, despite its obvious ills, a lot better.
Whatever impressions nostalgic TV shows may leave with those too young to remember the real decade, the late 1960s and 1970s were a scary time to grow up. The world just kept getting worse and worse, and nobody seemed to know why.
The Soviets were expanding, and the Cold War seemed destined to end in defeat or destruction. When the joke issue of my college paper announced the Soviet invasion of Iran, lots of students believed it.
The Saudis could--and did--cut off the oil whenever they got mad. People in the northeast froze from lack of natural gas; my father turned our thermostats down to 65, as though it would help. (Deregulation, Reagan's first act on becoming president, helped more.)
Prices went up and up, not just on a few things but on everything. After taxes, cost-of-living raises couldn't keep up. Interest rates hit two digits. Nobody my age would ever be able to own a house.
As a teenager, I didn't worry much about crime--burglaries and petty thefts seemed as normal as political assassinations. But a lot of people did worry. They made folk heroes of movie vigilantes like Dirty Harry.
The policies Nixon and Ford tried didn't work, and Carter told us that was just the way the world was. We should get over our selfishness, our materialism, and make do with less. The problems of the world were our fault, a sign of our fallen nature, as individuals and a nation. Oh yes, and while we were addressing our crisis of meaning, we needed oil import quotas and a SynFuels Corporation.
No wonder Reagan attracted the young.
Amazingly, his prescriptions worked. The economy got worse at first--much, much worse, so bad Reagan himself called it a depression. But he stayed the course, and helped Paul Volcker stay it. The economy got better, and stayed better--mostly good and sometimes even great, except for a few short bumps--for decades.
Most miraculously, the Cold War ended without a nuclear war. And the president took a bullet and lived and told jokes on the way to the hospital.
In some ways, surviving that assassination attempt in good health was the most important thing Reagan did. It robbed history of its inevitable tragic ending. (Remember, too, that the pope similarly survived a bullet, and Margaret Thatcher made it through an IRA bombing.) Reagan became living proof that things do not have to end badly.
Many of his conservative allies, taught by the terrors of the 20th century, firmly believed that history is a tragedy, that the best we can do is to fight a long, twilight struggle. They believed that evil is as strong as, perhaps stronger, than good, and that tyranny is more powerful than freedom. At the time, I believed them too.
Reagan believed in the triumph of good and the strength of freedom. He acted on those convictions, and he was right.