July 31, 2007
Another Great Rightist IX Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:45 PM EST Alexander Burns writes, “I disagree with his [i.e. my] statement that Churchill, de Gaulle, and Reagan were not really men of the right.” I don’t believe I made that statement. De Gaulle was certainly, at least by the standards of twentieth-century French politics, a man of the right. But both Churchill and Reagan began on the left. Reagan was a Roosevelt Democrat in his younger days and got his start in politics as a union president, not the usual job of a rightist, although to be sure it wasn’t the usual kind of union either. But Reagan was always a very practical (and gifted) politician first and an ideologue second, which is why he was so successful, making very significant deals with the likes of Tip O’Neill and Dan Rostenkowski. During his days of greatness, on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being lunatic left, 10 lunatic right), I’d rate Reagan at about a 7 in rhetoric and a 6 in practice. To the Dan Rathers of the world, of course, everyone to the right of 5 is automatically a 10. Talk about lack of nuance. Before World War I, when liberalism was the mainstream left, Churchill was an advocate of increased government spending on such matters as unemployment insurance and old-age pensions and therefore definitely of the left. After the war, British politics moved sharply leftwards, and the old Liberal Party—the party of Gladstone, Palmerston, and Lloyd-George—ceased to be a major player in British politics; Labor, avowedly socialist, became the left, making Churchill a man of the right without his having taken a step. Also, of course, Churchill was both a romantic and impetuous. Frankly, he was not a very good politician, in the dog-eat-dog, back-stabbing, finger-to-the-wind sense, although he was an excellent administrator and strategist. He remained a supporter of the empire (“I did not become the King’s first minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire”) long after it had ceased to be fashionable in elite British circles. He opposed giving India dominion status, which was bad politics and, I at least think, plain wrong. The world had moved beyond Rudyard Kipling, and in some ways Churchill never did. And he defended Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson out of a romantic sense of the divine right of kings, when almost everyone else in Britain, from dukes to dustmen, wanted them gone. Mr. Burns writes, “George H. W. Bush received a smaller percentage of the vote in 1992 than any incumbent President since Taft.” True, but not quite fair I think. He faced the first third-party candidate with major national appeal since Taft faced Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was, of course, a far more formidable political force than Perot. My apologies to Roosevelt for even mentioning them in the same sentence. He writes, “It would be unsettling to think that the American people are incapable of a clear-eyed assessment of their Presidents.” Here’s where Mr. Burns and I seriously differ. I don’t think collectives can make “clear-eyed assessments.” Only individuals can do that. The people slowly (or not so slowly) zero in on a collective folk memory that soon becomes quite impervious to scholarly attempts to add a little clear-eyed assessment. Consider two examples: —James K. Polk was a remarkably successful President. Scholars rank him highly, the only president between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln who isn’t totally in the rankings cellar. The panel here ranked him No. 10, ahead of Woodrow Wilson. (I wrote the article on Martin Van Buren but was not on the rating panel, made up entirely of academics.) But how many Americans have even heard of him? Maybe 2 in 10 could tell you he was a President. I bet not 2 in 100 could tell you what he did as President. —Queen Elizabeth I is not only known to everyone in the English-speaking world (and far beyond) but is universally regarded as one of England’s greatest monarchs. But was she? She was hell to work for and chronically unable to make up her mind or even keep it made up when she finally did make a decision. She was neurotically cheap, except when it came to spending (preferably other people’s money) on herself. She shamelessly played favorites, putting people like the earls of Leicester and Essex at the head of armies when far better qualified and talented men were available. (She finally wised up about Essex and had his head whacked off—she coined the phrase “I shall make you shorter by the head.”) She didn’t even defeat the Spanish Armada. It was an astonishingly badly conceived plan, and the weather did the rest. But she was a brilliant propagandist, tightly controlling her own image and never forgetting for a minute that the ultimate source of her power was the people, however much she believed in the divine right of kings, and she played to them always. (“Though God has raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown: that I have reigned with your loves.”) She was also, like Churchill, de Gaulle, and Reagan, a master of public speaking and an instinctive nationalist (“I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too”—Could Shakespeare have written the Tilsbury speech better?). And so she is forever enshrined as the apotheosis of English monarchs, clear-eyed assessments be damned. —When Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter in 1980, he kept asking the question, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” It was a devastating ploy, for the answer was so clearly no, and Jimmy Carter became the first elected President since Hoover to be awarded what Churchill called, after his defeat in 1945, “the order of the boot.” Michael Dukakis did not ask the question, “Are you better off now than you were eight years ago?” when he ran in 1988, because the answer was so very clearly “yes, very much better off, thank you.” Reagan got the credit for that, and he will keep it, just as Carter got the blame for the dismal late 1970s, not all of which belonged to him. The English people in 1603 could equally answer the question if they were better off after Elizabeth than before her in the affirmative. That counts for a lot in the folk memory.
By the way, Rasmussen has a very interesting poll out: Survey of 1,000 Adults
July 24-25, 2007
Political Description of Candidate-Positive or Negative Pos Neg Net
Like Reagan 44% 25% +19
Progressive 35% 18% +17
Moderate 29% 12% +17
Conservative 32% 20% +12
Liberal 20% 30% -10 I sincerely hope we never add any more faces to Mt. Rushmore, but if we do, I’ll bet a very goodly sum that the two that are added will be FDR and Ronald Reagan and there won’t even be much of an argument.
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