Getting Reagan Right I

Ronald Reagan, whose statue has been unveiled outside the American Embassy in London, was ostensibly the great hero uniting fiscal conservatives, national security conservatives, and social conservatives. But privatisation, globalisation, deregulation and demutualisation have turned out, in the most spectacular fashion, to be anything but fiscally responsible. The same is true of a generation of scorn for full employment, leading to the massively increased benefit dependency of the 1980s and to the institutionalisation of that mass indolence down to the present day.

The transfer of huge sums of public money to ostensibly private, but entirely risk-free, companies in order to run schools, hospitals, railways, rubbish collections, and so many other things: is that fiscally responsible? Bailing out Wall Street or the City at all, never mind so that it can carry on paying the same salaries and bonuses as before: is that fiscally responsible? Even leaving aside more rarefied academic pursuits, is it fiscally responsible to allow primary education, or healthcare, or public transport, or social housing to fall apart? Is that good for business?

Will it be fiscally responsible to allow the private health insurance companies to charge the American taxpayer whatever they like, because the absence of a public option or a single-payer system was the price of the votes of Blue Dogs who still voted against the Bill anyway and of wavering Republicans who turned out not to exist at all? It is no wonder that Jerry Brown turns out to have been far more of a fiscal conservative, as that term is generally employed, than Ronald Reagan. Even to a fault on occasion.

But what of the other two legs of the stool that was the Reagan Coalition? The only two conservative things that Reagan ever did were to begin nuclear arms reduction in Europe and to withdraw from Lebanon because no American interest was at stake; Obama is the worthy heir of the first, but would that he were of the second. Reagan was no more a national security conservative, as that term in generally employed, than he was a fiscal conservative, as that term is generally employed, both uses being wholly erroneous and such as to render meaningless any concept of conservatism.

Bringing us to the third leg, the social conservatives, "the Religious Right". The moral, social and cultural consequences of massively increased welfare dependency and the glorification of selfish greed were wholly of a piece with the rise of Political Correctness in the 1980s, and with that decade's general moral chaos. Reagan was an extremely infrequent churchgoer and did not formally belong to any parish, congregation or denomination. He remains the only President of the United States ever to have been divorced, his Californian no-fault divorce legislation having since been copied by almost every state. And, as Governor of California, he signed into law the legalisation of abortion in that state. Read that last sentence over again.