Barack Obama, of course, made a much more moderate claim on Reagan's behalf and got his ears boxed by Wilentz's pals, the Clintons. And in truth, Wilentz hasn't forsaken any of his old alliances. Even as he acknowledges Reagan's primacy, he homes in on the gaps between his subject's rhetoric and record. Far from reducing the size of government, for example, Reagan created an upsurge in federal spending relative to gross domestic product. Far from shrinking America's tax burden, he left the percentage of national income diverted to federal taxes virtually unchanged between 1981 and 1989 -- even as states went scrambling to offset cuts in federal assistance. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, deficits soared to previously unheard-of levels, and the fabled economic recovery that Reagan presided over may now be attributed, Wilentz says, to the stringent interest-rate policies of Fed chair Paul Volcker (first appointed by Carter) and to the steep drop-off in crude oil prices after 1985.
On top of all that, Reagan and his allies nakedly politicized the appointment of federal judges and gutted the enforcement of environmental and civil rights laws. In the battle against AIDS, the most pressing health issue of his presidency, Reagan was a near-complete no-show. (He refused even his own wife's entreaty to endorse the use of condoms.) His record in the developing world wasn't much prettier. "The Reagan Doctrine," writes Wilentz, "contributed to a bloodbath in Central America, where as many as 200,000 people died in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala fighting left-wing regimes or propping up right-wing regimes, with no discernible impact on the outcome of the cold war."
In the end, though, what fascinates Wilentz is not what Reagan did or didn't do but Reaganism itself: "an outgoing, energizing, even sensuous ideal of a bountiful, limitless American future open to everyone who was determined to succeed." Reagan, a former New Deal liberal, managed to co-opt the "bold, unapologetic nationalism" of FDR and John F. Kennedy on behalf of distinctly right-wing causes: paring back government, freeing up corporate enterprise and advancing American might and right, most especially against Communism. What Goldwater began, Reagan finished, and yet he was more than just the sum of his parts. "Reaganism," writes Wilentz, "was its own distinctive blend of dogma, pragmatism, and, above all, mythology. Although it had tens of millions of followers, its theory resided not in a party, a faction, or a movement, but in the mind and persona of one man: Ronald Wilson Reagan."
Which means that it was every bit as complicated -- and perhaps even as illusory -- as the man in question. It becomes even trickier to pin down when you consider Reagan's often-overlooked talent for compromise. Supreme politician that he was, he made a point of courting political foes like Tip O'Neill while keeping his allies on the religious right at something more than arm's length. (Proposed amendments to overturn Roe v. Wade and to legalize school prayer got nowhere on Reagan's watch.) Most crucially, when Mikhail Gorbachev pronounced himself ready to dismantle communism, Reagan took him at his word, ignoring the hawks in his own administration and helping to usher the Cold War toward a peaceful and unimaginably sudden end. "One of the greatest achievements by any president of the United States," Wilentz rightly calls it, "and arguably the greatest single presidential achievement since 1945." And it came about, one could argue, because Reagan knew when to jettison Reaganism.
That lesson in adaptation has been completely lost on Reagan's most obvious heir, George W. Bush, who practices, in Wilentz's words, "a radicalized form of Reaganism," pushing through regressive tax cuts, driving federal deficits to staggering new levels and expanding the police powers of the executive branch to a degree that would make even Nixon blanch. More decisively than Bill Clinton ever could have, Bush has driven the stake through Reaganism's heart -- simply by carrying it to its ultimate conclusion.
If Reaganism really is on the wane, as Wilentz suggests, what exactly have we lost by it? Perhaps the most conspicuously missing item in today's political culture is the thrill (or horror) of being captive to an Idea. Not the lower-case "ideas" in which all our campaigns currently abound, not even the sweeping futuristic vistas of Obama, but the ability to look at government in a transformative way. Reagan was the classic hedgehog, holding to his "one big thing" as tenaciously as any Marxist. Now, with ideology itself on the sickbed, we have become, by default, foxes, knowing many things -- and maybe nothing, after all -- and even a dyed-in-the-wool liberal can feel the diminution. "How are we to proceed without Theory?" cries the world's oldest living Bolshevik in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America." "And what have you to offer now, children of this Theory? What have you to offer in its place?"
About the writer
Louis Bayard is a staff writer at Salon.
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