Ideas matter most when paired with moral clarity

Before Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” the nation endured a long and difficult twilight. By the mid 1970s, America was experiencing overlapping economic, social, and foreign policy crises. The unemployment rate hit 9 percent in May of 1975 and inflation reached 15 percent by 1980. Between 1960 and 1980, divorce rates doubled, violent crime rates nearly tripled, and drug use exploded. The Soviet Union—far from the weak and doomed enterprise it appears in retrospect—had made communists gains from Cambodia to Angola. In 1964, 78 percent of Americans reported that they trusted government to do the right thing. By 1980, after Vietnam, Watergate, and deteriorating conditions at home, only 26 percent of voters said that. In 1979 Jimmy Carter delivered his notorious malaise speech, in which he described an American “crisis of confidence… threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.”

By the end of Reagan’s first term, America looked and felt very different. American society had gradually begun to shift to the right, with Congress cutting taxes and deregulating the airline and trucking industries. Reagan won re-election by one of the biggest landslide majorities in history. From 1982 to 1990 the American economy grew by about 4 percent a year. By the time he left office in 1988, Reagan’s approval rating stood at 63 percent. The Berlin wall fell a year later.

How did Reagan lead the country out of hard times and rekindle Americans’ faith in themselves? What made Reagan such a successful president?

This is not an easy question to answer. As the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell put it: “Even those who count Ronald Reagan among the handful of great American presidents have a hard time saying exactly where his greatness lay, or how it made itself felt. Reagan was an enigma: affable but friendless, a nonintellectual man of ideas, an ingenuous power politician.” Out of the riddle of Reagan, however, one lesson emerges clearly: that ideas matter most when they’re paired with moral clarity.

One of the keys to Reagan’s success, paradoxically, was that he was old. When he entered the White House at age 69, he was six years older than FDR was when he died in office. Reagan was born in 1911, chronologically closer to Thomas Jefferson’s presidency than to Donald Trump’s. He was formed in an earlier age, before many of the ideological currents that rocked the 20^th century. 

Like his fellow early 20^th century Midwesterner Walt Disney, Reagan came to believe that America is great, people are mostly good, dreams come true, and that the Midwestern small town is the closest thing to utopia on this earth. Throughout his entire life, Reagan carried the middle-class values of the Dixon, Illinois of his youth. These included a strong emphasis on what you might call Boy Scout virtues—industriousness, modesty, and self-reliance—and a strong suspicion of bossy people on the coasts. In a 1952 commencement address he outlined one of his core convictions: “Deep within the heart of each of us is something so God-like and precious that no individual or group has a right to impose his or its will upon the people—that no group can decide for the people as well as they can decide for themselves.” Even life in Hollywood did not alter this orientation.

“Deep within the heart of each of us is something so God-like and precious that no individual or group has a right to impose his or its will upon the people.”
- Ronald Reagan

This vision connected Reagan to the Midwestern working class voters who would eventually be called Reagan Democrats. It also dovetailed with the burgeoning conservative intellectual movement, which had been gaining strength for decades. Friedrich Hayek started the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, giving birth to modern free market economics. Bill Buckley founded National Review in 1955. The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973. The crises of the 1970s produced the neoconservatives, disaffected Democrats who drifted to the Republican side. By the 1970s and 1980s, conservative books bestrode the bestseller lists: Gary Will’s Confessions of a Conservative, Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground. The American right was fractious then as now, but it gave Reagan clarity of vision and thousands of cadres who could develop and execute his ideas.

The conservative movement gave Reagan intellectual momentum that his more moderate Republican rivals could not match. On November 13, 1979, as Reagan announced his candidacy the Washington Post columnist Mark Shields wrote, “In one very important sense, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan has already won the campaign he enters tonight. For, in fact, Mr. Reagan, more than any other national figure, has determined the public agenda for the political campaign of 1980.”

Reagan combined intellectual clarity (what his critics would call ideological rigidity), with a certain level of raw courage. As a lifeguard in Dixon, he saved over 77 lives, rescuing people from the tricky currents of the Rock River. As president of the Screen Actors Guild he fought a brutal struggle against the Communists trying to gain influence. When Paul Volcker started a fierce recession in order the curb inflation in 1982, most politicians balked. Not Reagan. He was willing to stand alone, a trait rare in a politician. “When people say President Reagan brought back our spirit and our sense of optimism, I think what they are saying in part is the whole country caught his courage,” his former speechwriter Peggy Noonan would later write.

Reagan’s courage led to one his most enigmatic traits, what his advisor Marty Anderson called Reagan’s ability to be “warmly ruthless.” Reagan didn’t have a Machiavellian bone in his body. His father had been a cynical man, so Reagan became completely un-cynical. And yet there were times when Reagan could behave in ways that were, well, Machiavellian. He could use the phrase “states’ rights” before an audience of Southern whites and then give a series of pro-civil rights speeches before black audiences the very same week. In 1976, he waged a brutal campaign against Gerald Ford, the sitting president from his own party. Perhaps he was simply oblivious to the underhanded ways he sometimes practiced politics. There were many things Reagan never confronted within himself and his fierce ambition was one of them.

The final quality that contributed to Reagan’s greatness, and perhaps the most important, was his moral sense. He saw policy not through an economic or social science lens, but through a moral one. He believed that by cutting top marginal tax rates he could make Americans more daring, entrepreneurial, risk-taking and creative. He didn’t object to many welfare programs because they cost money but because he believed they sapped people’s self-reliance. He was a foreign policy hawk, but abhorred nuclear weapons as much as any peacenik and contemplated doing away with them altogether.  

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power most Republicans were convinced he was just another die-hard communist apparatchik. But Reagan, with his sunny view of human nature, saw potential for growth. He and Gorbachev ended up cutting deals that made more rigid conservatives howl with rage. It was both Reagan’s toughness and his flexibility that hastened the end of the Cold War.

There was much Reagan couldn’t change and many problems he made worse, like federal deficits. But Reagan did renew the American spirit. In the late 1970s America was despondent. By 1990 it was, if anything, overly triumphalist. 

That astonishing emotional, intellectual, and policy transformation is a testimony to Reagan but also deeply revealing about the American people. The cultural zeitgeist can change with astounding speed. Yes, there are periods of bitterness, but deep in America’s cultural DNA there is a basic optimism, a conviction that the future will be better than the past, that pluralism and diversity are good things, that Americans have a heroic role to play in history. Those core values are still down there in the national soul, waiting to be tapped.

“Those core values are still down there in the national soul, waiting to be tapped.”