This column on the Reagan presidency reminds us of the power of joy in politics and the imperative of compromise. T

The New York Times

Opinion

Guest Essay

Conservatives Fighting Over Reagan’s Legacy Overlook What Made Him Successful

Aug. 30, 2024

By Jacob Heilbrunn

Mr. Heilbrunn is the editor of The National Interest and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He has written two books about the American political right.

The small town of Dixon, Ill., where Ronald Reagan grew up, last week celebrated the premiere of a Hollywood film called “Reagan,” which is scheduled for theatrical release on Friday. A citywide parade began in the early evening at Mr. Reagan’s boyhood home and ended at The Dixon, a local theater, for the screening. There, the actor Dennis Quaid, who plays Mr. Reagan in the movie, declared, “He was my favorite president.”

Such reverential treatment of Mr. Reagan has been a constant in American political culture for several decades. The new film is based on a 2006 book called “The Crusader” that suggests a parallel between Mr. Reagan’s teenage experience as a lifeguard and his readiness as president to rescue America from the Communist threat. Several other fawning books about Mr. Reagan have been published this year, including “What Would Reagan Do?” by Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, and “The Search for Reagan” by the political consultant Craig Shirley. (A judicious biography, “Reagan,” by Max Boot, is scheduled for publication on Sept. 10.)

But all this fanfare can’t obscure the fact that Mr. Reagan’s reputation has come under fire in recent years from an unlikely quarter: conservatives.

“Boomer porn,” Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, scoffed when I told him about the event in Dixon. “Reagan may have been a conservative, but he wasn’t a nationalist. Reagan got the big issues of the future wrong — foreign policy, trade and immigration.”

The ascendancy of Donald Trump, whose economic populism and nationalist instincts are at odds with the free-enterprise principles and foreign-policy idealism of Reaganism, has been the main driver of Mr. Reagan’s reassessment. A Pew poll last year found that 41 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents named Mr. Reagan as the best president of the past 40 years, while 37 percent awarded that laurel to Mr. Trump.

The result is a veritable schism on the right over Mr. Reagan’s legacy, and more broadly, over whether the conservative past should shape its future. What’s perhaps most telling about this internal battle, however, is that the various factions — those who reject Reaganism, those who defend it and those who stress the commonalities between Reaganism and Trumpism — all tend to paint portraits of Mr. Reagan that omit the very attributes that made him such a broadly popular political figure: his pragmatism and nose for compromise.

That oversight, unless and until it is corrected, bodes poorly for the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

The group driving the debate over Mr. Reagan’s legacy — call them the dissenters — seeks to bury his influence. Writing in the online magazine Compact in 2022, for example, the journalists Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Schmitz excoriated the “policies pursued by G.O.P. elites since the Reagan era,” which they claimed plunged America “into costly wars while accelerating the decline of the middle class.”

Thankfully, they argue, Mr. Trump rejected the Reagan-like foreign policy that neoconservatives such as William Kristol and Robert Kagan espoused in the 1990s and that helped lead to the second Iraq war. Mr. Trump’s America First program, the dissenters claim, promises a return to restraint abroad as well as a revival of American economic prowess through protectionism and industrial policy at home.

A second group in the debate — call them the traditionalists — would like to see a return to Reaganite support for free markets and a more idealistic foreign policy. Mr. Trump’s enthusiasm for government intervention in the economy has prompted figures such as the Washington Post columnist George F. Will and the political strategist Karl Rove to endorse a manifesto titled “Freedom Conservatism.” It defends a view that was once conventional wisdom on the right: “Political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom.”

Another traditionalist, John Lehman, who served for six years as secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, published an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal this year titled “Reagan Would Never Vote for Trump.” He lauded Mr. Reagan as an unswerving friend of America’s democratic allies and criticized Mr. Trump’s unstinting admiration of foreign dictators such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

A third group — call them the ecumenicists — argue that there is considerable continuity between Mr. Reagan and Mr. Trump. This faction includes figures such as Dan Negrea, a State Department official during the Trump administration and a co-author of a recent book arguing that Mr. Reagan laid the foundation for Mr. Trump’s foreign policy. Likewise, a former Trump national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, invoked Mr. Reagan’s mantra of “peace through strength” in making a case for Mr. Trump’s foreign policy.

As these camps spar over Mr. Reagan’s legacy, a line that Mr. Reagan delivered as an actor in the 1942 movie “Kings Row” (which he later used as the title of a 1965 autobiography) comes to mind: “Where’s the rest of me?”

The secret of Mr. Reagan’s success was not that he represented an immutable conservative orthodoxy about foreign or economic policy or even tried to codify one. A former liberal, Mr. Reagan admired Franklin D. Roosevelt, ultimately marrying Roosevelt’s sunny optimism to a conservative credo. Far from being an inflexible crusader, Mr. Reagan repeatedly exhibited a pragmatic streak that often dismayed his more ideological supporters.

As the Republican governor of California in the 1960s and ’70s, for example, Mr. Reagan signed bills supporting the environment, gun control and abortion rights. As president, after the passage of his sweeping tax cuts in 1981, Mr. Reagan raised taxes to lower the federal budget deficit, and he signed a major tax reform bill in 1986. Rather than seek to overturn Social Security, he shored up its finances.

Mr. Reagan’s realism also manifested itself in his approach to foreign affairs. To the distress of foreign policy hawks, he withdrew troops from Lebanon after the U.S. Marine barracks was bombed there in October 1983. He aided anti-Communist groups around the globe rather than intervening directly to confront the Soviet Union and its client states. (It was only when he gave the hawks free rein, as with his administration’s illegal sale of arms to Iran, that he came to grief politically.)

Above all, Mr. Reagan never believed that a nuclear arms buildup should be an end in itself, only a means to bring the Cold War to a peaceful end — which he accomplished by signing a sweeping arms-control treaty in his second term with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Here, too, the hawks denounced him. Some complained that a cabal of more moderate Republicans was subverting his administration and demanded, “Let Reagan be Reagan” — overlooking the fact that he always was himself.

As the last president to win successive landslide elections, Mr. Reagan offers many political lessons, but not the rigidly ideological ones that both his admirers and detractors are too often drawing. Returning to Reaganism might be a plausible path forward for the G.O.P., but only if Mr. Trump loses the election in November. In that case, the battle over what Mr. Reagan has to teach us today would truly heat up — and the combatants would do well to remember the very real qualities that made him a unifying force.

Jacob Heilbrunn (@JacobHeilbrunn) is the editor of The National Interest, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the author, most recently, of “America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.”

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 1, 2024, Section SR, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Let Reagan Be Reagan’.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/opinion/ronald-reagan-legacy.html