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Recent History |
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Recent posts have addressed the legacies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and the relevance of recent history to the current American political situation.
To really understand Bush, however, we need to understand Ronald Reagan. Bush policies like the War on Terror and tax rebates are copied directly from the Reagan playbook (the "tough guy" approach to the Cold War and Reaganomics respectively). One underlying justification for Bush's policies is the belief that Reagan was a great president.
According to the neoconservative view, Reagan took over from a wimp Democrat, reversed American economic decline, and won the Cold War.
In reality, Reagan's legacy is quite different. His much-touted "accomplishments" - the collapse of the Soviet Union and recovery from the recession of the late 1970s - were complicated events whose causes continue to be debated by experts on Soviet history and economics respectively. Meanwhile, the facts about Reagan's failures are well-established and easy to explain.
Indeed, Reagan can be credited with a number of the economic problems plaguing America today - foremost among them an exorbitant budget deficit. He also perpetrated grotesque distortions of American values by negotiating with terrorists and violating human rights. Most notorious among this part of Regan's legacy are the Iran-Contra scandal and the civil liberties Americans have lost as a result of the War on Drugs.
Finally, it was Reagan's funding of the Afghan Mujahideen during the 1980s that contributed to the formation of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and played a large role in giving us September 11th. Any neoconservative who pins the blame for September 11th on Clinton should think long and hard about who it was that funded the training - including training in terror - of the people behind the attacks. Responsibility for 9/11 is certainly shared among multiple parties, including Republican presidents.
Of course, despite the high number of financial and criminal scandals associated with his presidency, the "teflon" president's image never really suffered in the minds of many Americans. He remains the "Great Communicator," the friendly "Gipper" with a warm, grandfatherly demeanor. The man who enjoyed a more than 40-year long political career is still portrayed as a political outsider, a man of the people quoted as saying things like, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, - I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
Basically, if you forget Reagan's crimes, his secret wars in Latin America, his financial policies whose effects still haunt us today, and his alliances with monsters like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, then the neoconservative agenda will certainly continue to seem sensible. But when we consider the disastrous effects of Reagan's policies in America and abroad (see this article on Pakistan and Afghanistan, or this one on Central America), the image of the Gipper's strong and successful presidency crumbles.
Moreover, the current administration begins to appear as though it is doomed to some of the same failures - as the chaos in Iraq and economic indicators like a growing gap between rich and poor will attest.
The continuity between Reagan and Bush is something many neoconservatives would celebrate. And as my colleague *lgs rightly points out, Clinton made serious errors on a number of fronts, including militarily. For me, however, the Clinton years stand out in recent history as a time of relative sanity against a backdrop of neoconservatives who do not hesitate to make life difficult for the American poor, and to pursue disastrous policies abroad with no thought for the long-term consequences, all while funneling taxpayer money into extravagant defense spending and lining the pockets of their corporate allies.
