How Bush betrays Reagan

September 4, 2007
How Bush betrays Reagan

Reagan never repudiated any of these right-wing political positions. Yet as president, he caved in on every one of them. As Joshua Green argued in 2001 in the Washington Monthly, "beyond his conservative legacy, Ronald Reagan has bequeathed a liberal one." After taking office, he promised to "rebuild the foundation of our society" by slashing the size of the federal government, but during his eight years in office, the federal government expanded. He inveighed against the deficit, but on his watch the deficit grew enormously. Instead of killing Social Security, he saved it with a $165 billion bailout. And, most heretically, he raised taxes -- a whopping $100 billion increase over three years, the largest increase in almost 40 years.

By backing the dictatorial regime in El Salvador, which he saw as a bulwark against communism, Reagan abetted a brutal civil war that cost 75,000 lives. Similarly, his support for the Nicaraguan Contras, whom he infamously described as "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers," led to fighting that killed as many as 50,000 people. Instead of building on Jimmy Carter's breakthrough at Camp David, his incompetence and unwillingness to challenge the right-wing Israeli government of Menachem Begin severely weakened America's ability to broker a Mideast peace. As the Washington Post's David Ignatius wrote, "The Reagan years saw the demise of the Great American Mediation Machine in the Middle East." The consequences of Reagan's Mideast failures haunt us today.

During Reagan's second term, when his conservative supporters realized he was not going to live up to their expectations, they blamed moderates, who, they said, were tying his hands. Their deluded mantra was "let Reagan be Reagan." Bush is the living embodiment of that dream of a "real" Reagan. But the figure from the past is a fake, a Freddy Krueger, wearing a mask adorned not with a smile but a twisted grimace. By summoning up the wrong Reagan, Bush has brought to life not an American dream, but an American nightmare.