Are you better off?

I spent much of yesterday entranced by work and blessedly free of media. Late in the day, I flipped on the car radio and heard the voice of Ronald Reagan, delivering his famous "Are you better off now?" remarks during his debate with Carter. He spoke on that theme at greater length than I recalled, playing on the financial insecurities of the citizenry.

And I thought: "This is brilliant! Kerry's people have finally come up with an ad that will demolish the Bush campaign!"

Of course, I was actually listening to an NPR audio compilation marking the passing of Ronald Reagan. One clip from the Iran-contra scandal particularly interested me: "A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not." (Wikipedia incorrectly says that these words come from Reagan's testimony to the Tower commission; in fact, he spoke them during a televised address to the nation.)

This outrageous comment marks the most astounding example of double-speak ever emitted by any president -- far worse than that much-ballyhooed Clintonian business about the definition of the word "is," a remark which actually made sense in context. (Nowadays, people forget that Clinton's approval numbers soared after the broadcast of his testimony.) Yet many young Americans have never been told that Reagan resorted to a smarmy exercise in verbal bait-and-switch because he could not admit that he lied. I once encountered a twenty-ish fellow who refused to believe that Reagan ever said such words.

Some of you may think: "The old man isn't even in the ground; how dare anyone assail his legacy?" At first, I felt that progressives should mark Reagan's passing in a polite fashion. And then the thought hit me: "What would Coulter do?" That is: How would she react upon discovery that Clinton had died? Everyone knows that she and her fellow neocon propagandists would scream a barbarian victory whoop and paint their faces blue for a tribal dance of triumph, followed by the slaughter of a fatted oxen and a frenzied group rut.

I'll be a little more civilized. I'll just point out that Reagan's passing has already been marked by historical revisionism. For example, take these front-page words from the allegedly-liberal Los Angeles Times:

The disease robbed Reagan of his ability to remember much of his own remarkable history: that he had served eight years as governor of California and eight more as president of the United States, and that he had led America's politics rightward toward the middle. Only one Democrat has succeeded him: Bill Clinton, a "new Democrat," who did as much or more to achieve such conservative goals as balancing the federal budget and changing welfare than anything Reagan himself accomplished.

"Rightward toward the middle"? Had the the period come after the word "rightward," no-one could argue with this statement. But "toward the middle"? By what standard?

Certainly not by the standards found in all other industrialized democracies. The Carter/Ford/Nixon years were no experiment in bolshevism; even Carter listed right of the political centerline as it runs through such countries as Germany, Sweden, France, Denmark, and England.

Although he enjoyed a press bias in his favor (see the analyses offered in books by Martin Lee and Norman Solomon), Reagan did not enjoy universal popularity during his terms of office; his approval numbers often tracked below Clinton's. His administration brought to prominence religious fanatics like James Watt, who felt that the world's prophesied demise belied the need for a sound environmental policy. I am reliably told by a former member of the Reagan White House that quite a few people in the administration read and took seriously such works as The Late Great Planet Earth. Since when does a cabal of fringe religious maniacs gain the right to label themselves centrists? When the administration told us that we would survive nuclear war "with enough shovels," did those words represent "the middle," or did they represent the views of extremists?

Let us return to the Times quote: "Bill Clinton, a "new Democrat," who did as much or more to achieve such conservative goals as balancing the federal budget..."

To aver that Reagan did anything to balance the budget is akin to claiming that Jack the Ripper tried his best to eradicate homicide. Reagan sent to congress budget after budget dripping with red ink. Before Reagan, no-one knew that American deficits could reach such extremes.

What, in my view, was the real legacy of Ronald Reagan? The recreation of the Republican party. Before him, both parties had wings: The Democrats had room for a Scoop Jackson or an LBJ, while the Republicans counted a Nelson Rockefeller among their own. Both parties engaged in more-or-less civilized debate. Insulting terms such as "Demon-crat" and "Repugnican" were unheard of.

After Reagan, the Republican party coalesced into something nefarious. It is now an ideologically-driven mass-movement akin to the Nazi or Communist parties. A party bereft of internal debate. A party marked by fanatical loyalists who parrot the line of the day as set by the leadership. A party seething with unreasoning hatred of the dehumanized Other. A party dependent on stormtroopers who, in the words of Ann Coulter, seek to "physically intimidate" all opposition. A party in which these rank-and-file automatons live their lives without exposure to news and views unapproved by Big Brother.

Those slap-happy party linemen will never know that, before Reagan, the average person working the average dumb "Fred Flintstone"-type job lived better than is now the case. They will never know that the average worker once spent only a quarter of his income on housing, as opposed to the staggeringly high proportion spent nowadays. They will never know that the greatest period of American economic expansion occurred in the 1940s-1960s, well before the age of Reaganism, when our tax system was at its most progressive. They will never know that under Truman, few Americans worked more than 40 hours a week, and one income sufficed for a large family. They will never know that before Reagan, homeless people did not wander suburban streets and there was no such thing as the "working homeless." They will never know that a lower-class person in California who wanted to improve his lot in life could attend free community college classes. They will never know that the Fairness Doctrine insured that radio and television provided spokespersons on all sides with access to the media.

They will never know that the average working person is worse off -- far worse off -- now than he was before Ronald Reagan.