Let’s Tear Down The Wall Obscuring The Real Ronald Reagan

As freedom marches on we’ve now reached twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most people of my group probably cannot remember clearly a time when the wall still stood, despite being a very young man myself in those days. Now as much as this event should be celebrated as a great step for freedom worldwide and the end of the Cold War, it’s already being used as a way to inflate the reputation of the shining star of the conservative movement, Ronald Wilson Reagan. Most modern conservatives will insist that Reagan was one of our great Presidents and that he ended the Cold War by himself through sheer force of will. To mark the falling of the Berlin Wall most conservatives are posting Ronald Reagan’s famous tear-down-this-wall speech as if roughly minutes afterward the wall actually came down.

(h/t Jolemite)

Well, that may not have been the actual video, but let’s tear down the wall between today’s fantasy Reagan and the real Ronald Wilson Reagan.

The recent special election for the New York congressional district has put a spotlight on the seeming political civil war going on between moderates and conservatives in the Republican party. Reagan used to say that the eleventh commandment was thou shall not speak ill of another Republican, but plenty of ill was spoken. But with the backdrop of NY-23 and the anniversary of the wall coming down it’s interesting to look back on actions by Ronald Reagan that most conservatives would prefer stay behind very large walls.

The first wall that conservatives put up has a nasty secret behind it. Ronald Reagan raised taxes. Many conservatives tout Reagan as the champion of the mythology of supply side economics. They proudly point to Reagan’s massive tax cuts in 1981 and the economic growth of 1984 to validate their dogmatic approach to taxation. Any tax cut is all that any economy needs, and tax increases of any kind are akin to murder of kittens and treason. When you tear down this wall you will find that not only did Reagan raise taxes in 1982, his increase as a percentage of GDP was larger than Bill Clinton’s tax increase in 1993.

Yet his massive tax increases weren’t the only portion of the Reagan legacy that conservatives have erected a wall to obscure. His dealings with the enemies of the United States don’t square at all with conservative dogma of today. In last year’s presidential election, conservatives attempted to characterize Barack Obama’s insistence that the time had come to talk to our enemies as treasonous negotiations with terrorists. If you tear down this portion of the wall you will find Reagan’s secret dealings with the very Iranians that modern conservatives fear so much. The Reagan administration sold actual weapons to the Ayatollah Khomeni in violation of American law. President Obama only said that we should talk to them, not give them guns as Reagan did. But Reagan also referred to the Soviet Union as “The Evil Empire.” Yet somehow he was able to talk to the Soviets and work with them to bring about arms control agreements. When excluding the work of several president and hundreds of thousands of people to end this conflict from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the fall of the Berlin Wall, people forget that it involved talking to our enemies.

But talking to our enemies is strictly forbidden in the world of modern conservatism and is only a sign of weakness we are told. Modern conservatives feel that in this new age, torture is the only way to keep the American people safe. Good thing there is yet another wall that obscures Reagan being against torture. Those who joke about waterboarding conveniently forget that Ronald Reagan signed the U.N. convention against torture. Reagan didn’t seem to think it was an means to an end and knew the importance of having the Unites States be a shining city on a hill, at least in this regard.

In most regards conservatives will be celebrating today’s anniversary as an achievement of Reagan and only Reagan. But it takes the erection of many, many mental walls to make the Reagan of the conservative mythology an historic reality. So in the words of Reagan today I ask you conservatives, tear down these walls.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 3:39 pm and is filed under 2008, History, Politics, World Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.