thedrifter
11-16-05, 09:17 AM
REALITIES ON THE GROUND
Steynonline
My Telegraph column this week prompted many readers to enquire more about the comparative prospects of the Middle East and Europe. A propos the bombings in Amman, here's what I wrote about Jordan two years ago , at the time President Bush was unveiling his Palestinian "road map":
As it happens, a couple of weeks back, round about the time everyone started going on about the road map, I was in the West Bank and actually had a road map, not knowing my way around too well and being somewhat wary of wrong turns in that corner of the world.
The useful thing about following the geographic road map as opposed to the diplomatic "road map" is you realise how small the place is. I was running late by the time I got to the Jordanian end of the Allenby Bridge, Eastern Gateway to Arafatistan. Twenty minutes later, I was at the Marriott Dead Sea Resort for a meeting with a local bigshot out by the kidney-shaped pool as wealthy Arabs and pudgy Americans floated by. We tucked into a big brunch of pancakes and maple syrup, my enthusiasm for native culture having been temporarily dampened by Arafat's toxic dump. Ten miles away, Palestinian schools were in the midst of a national letter-writing competition. Among the education ministry's first-prize winners was 12-year-old Mahmoud Naji Chalilah for his effortless mastery of West Bank death-cultism:
My heart has turned into a sad block of pain. One day I will buy a weapon and I will blow away the fetters. I will propel my living-dead body into your arms…
Hmm. Prize-winning it may be, but I don't think that's the kind of talk they want to hear at the Marriott. Jordan has an economy and a tourism business, and therefore at least as much interest as Israel in ensuring that the peculiar psychosis of Arafat's squat is contained within its present borders.
That applies equally to the death squads of the depraved Zarqawi. More distant Arab strongmen can afford to indulge the death cultists of both the West Bank and the Sunni Triangle. But, without oil or a coast line, the Hashemites have turned Jordan into a viable state and, indeed, the least worst in Araby. They're not about to kiss off the Marriott and the Grand Hyatt and the rest for any phony solidarity with the head-hackers. As for what I said about Europe in that symposium, it was for the December 2002 edition of The American Enterprise, and three years on it stands up pretty well, I'd say:
I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark. What's wrong with the Islamic world is relatively straightforward. With Europe, it's harder to foresee any happy endings. The good news is we won't have to worry about another Hitler or Mussolini because, on present reproductive trends, the Italians and Germans are going to be out of business in a couple of generations. Few people have ever been in less need of lebensraum. Instead, the European Union figures it will require another 50 million immigrants in the next few years just to maintain a big enough working population to fund the lavish social programs its vast retired army of baby boomers expects to enjoy.
The main source of European immigration is Muslim youth from North Africa and the Middle East. Whether these are the chaps to keep Hans and Pierre in the style to which they've become accustomed is a moot point: According to some Scandinavian statistics, 40 percent of those on welfare are immigrants. And, while it's not true that every immigrant on welfare is an Islamic terrorist, it's a good rule of thumb that every Islamic terrorist in Europe has been on welfare, living in radicalized ghetto cultures with nothing to do but sit around the flat plotting the jihad all day. Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammed, who recently held a pro-Osama rally in London, has demanded the imposition of Islamic law in Britain, and at one time called for the assassination of then Prime Minister John Major. Given that it's Mr. Major's ministry, and now Tony Blair's, that has financially supported Sheikh Omar ever since he arrived 15 years ago, that seems a tad ungrateful.
In defiance of traditional immigration patterns, Europe's young Muslims are less assimilated than their parents and grandparents. Instead of becoming more European, they're becoming more Islamist. If the "root cause" of September 11 is Islam's difficulty with modernity, we shouldn't be surprised that this manifests itself less in Indonesia than in Holland, the epitome of the boundlessly tolerant post-nationalist state, a liberal utopia of cannabis cafés and gay marriage--for now. Sheikh Omar's demand for the imposition of sharia doesn't seem so absurd when you consider that in 20 years the majority of the Dutch under 18 will be Muslim.
A multiculturalist society has a hard time even discussing these things. In the advanced technocratic Euro-state, almost any issue worth talking about has been ruled taboo. Continental voters, faced with a choice between Eurodee and Eurodum, have been turning elsewhere. The electoral beneficiaries of this tune-out, in Italy, Belgium, Denmark, and elsewhere, don't have much in common--some are maverick magnates, some fascist nostalgists, others gay hedonists. What unites them is what they're against: the traditional European cultural consensus that's now sleepwalking its way to suicide. In Holland, a militant vegan killed the flamboyant homosexual nativist Pim Fortuyn during the election campaign - the first time in political history that a fruitarian had killed a fruit Aryan. This murder is an apt summation of what Marx would call the "internal contradictions" of the rainbow coalition.
Populist politicians who survive their campaigns shouldn't expect a congratulatory telegram from the grandees at the European Union. In February, the Belgian foreign minister, speaking on behalf of the E.U., threatened sanctions against Italy if its citizens voted for Umberto Bossi's Northern League. Those Continentals who attacked President Bush for presuming "to tell people who they can vote for" when he gave an anti-Yasser Arafat speech forget that in Europe they do it all the time.
Before it too offended the E.U., the perfect emblem of the post-war European state was Austria, where regardless of how you voted you wound up with the same center-left-right coalition government. That was the whole point. Europe's post-war political structures were specifically designed to stifle the populace's baser urges. Indeed, Europe has been so focused on what went wrong in the past it's been blind to what might go wrong in the future. The future is now here. A collapsed birthrate, accelerating immigration, lavish welfare, an evasive political culture, phony transnational structures: For Europe, this is the Perfect Storm.
Sometimes even a pundit doesn't want to be vindicated. It's very depressing to have been saying these things for four years now and to find the European political establishment still sleepwalking to suicide. Angela Merkel's "new" government in Germany, for example, has just announced that it plans to "revitalise" the European "Constitution". What a tragedy. You can read what Michael Kelly, John O'Sullivan and others had to contribute to the symposium here.
THE REAGAN ERA
Twenty-five years ago - November 4th 1980 - Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. Here's some of what I've written about him, beginning with this appreciation, written on his death last June:
All weekend long across the networks, media grandees who’d voted for Carter and Mondale, just like all their friends did, tried to explain the appeal of Ronald Reagan. He was “The Great Communicator”, he had a wonderful sense of humour, he had a charming smile… self-deprecating… the tilt of his head…
All true, but not what matters. Even politics attracts its share of optimistic, likeable men, and most of them leave no trace – like Britain’s “Sunny Jim” Callaghan, a perfect example of the defeatism of western leadership in the 1970s. It was the era of “détente”, a word barely remembered now, which is just as well, as it reflects poorly on us: the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the free world had decided that the unfree world was not a prison ruled by a murderous ideology that had to be defeated but merely an alternative lifestyle that had to be accommodated. Under cover of “détente”, the Soviets gobbled up more and more real estate across the planet, from Ethiopia to Grenada. Nonetheless, it wasn’t just the usual suspects who subscribed to this feeble evasion – Helmut Schmidt, Pierre Trudeau, Francois Mitterand – but most of the so-called “conservatives”, too – Ted Heath, Giscard d’Estaing, Gerald Ford.
Unlike these men, unlike most other senior Republicans, Ronald Reagan saw Soviet Communism for what it was: a great evil. Millions of Europeans across half a continent from Poland to Bulgaria, Slovenia to Latvia live in freedom today because he acknowledged that simple truth when the rest of the political class was tying itself in knots trying to pretend otherwise. That’s what counts. He brought down the “evil empire”, and all the rest is fine print.
At the time, the charm and the smile got less credit from the intelligentsia, confirming their belief that he was a dunce who’d plunge us into Armageddon. Everything you need to know about the establishment’s view of Ronald Reagan can be found on page 624 of Dutch , Edmund Morris’ weird post-modern biography. The place is Berlin, the time June 12, 1987:
‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ declaims Dutch, trying hard to look infuriated, but succeeding only in an expression of mild petulance ... One braces for a flash of prompt lights to either side of him: APPLAUSE.
What a rhetorical opportunity missed. He could have read Robert Frost’s poem on the subject, ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’ to simple and shattering effect. Or even Edna St. Vincent Millay’s lines, which he surely holds in memory…
Only now for the first time I see
This wall is actually a wall, a thing
Come up between us, shutting me away
From you ... I do not know you any more.
Poor old Morris, the plodding, conventional, scholarly writer driven mad by 14 years spent trying to get a grip on Ronald Reagan. Most world leaders would have taken his advice: You’re at the Berlin Wall, so you have to say something about it, something profound but oblique, maybe there’s a poem on the subject ... Who cares if Frost’s is over-quoted, and a tad hard to follow for a crowd of foreigners? Who cares that it is, in fact, pro-wall?
Edmund Morris has described his subject as an “airhead” and concluded that it’s “like dropping a pebble in a well and hearing no splash.” Morris may not have heard the splash, but he’s still all wet: The elites were stupid about Reagan in a way that only clever people can be. Take that cheap crack: If you drop a pebble in a well and you don’t hear a splash, it may be because the well is dry but it’s just as likely it’s because the well is of surprising depth. I went out to my own well and dropped a pebble: I heard no splash, yet the well supplies exquisite translucent water to my home.
But then I suspect it’s a long while since Morris dropped an actual pebble in an actual well: As with walls, his taste runs instinctively to the metaphorical. Reagan looked at the Berlin Wall and saw not a poem-quoting opportunity but prison bars.
I once discussed Irving Berlin, composer of “God Bless America”, with his friend and fellow songwriter Jule Styne, and Jule put it best: “It’s easy to be clever. But the really clever thing is to be simple.” At the Berlin Wall that day, it would have been easy to be clever, as all those ’70s detente sophisticates would have been. And who would have remembered a word they said? Like Irving Berlin with “God Bless America”, only Reagan could have stood there and declared without embarrassment:
Tear down this wall!
- and two years later the wall was, indeed, torn down. Ronald Reagan was straightforward and true and said it for everybody - which is why his “rhetorical opportunity missed” is remembered by millions of grateful Eastern Europeans. The really clever thing is to have the confidence to say it in four monosyllables.
Ronald Reagan was an American archetype, and just the bare bones of his curriculum vitae capture the possibilities of his country: in the Twenties, a lifeguard at a local swimming hole who saved over 70 lives; in the Thirties, a radio sports announcer; in the Forties, a Warner Brothers leading man ...and finally one of the two most significant presidents of the American century. Unusually for the commander in chief, Reagan’s was a full, varied American life, of which the presidency was the mere culmination.
“The Great Communicator” was effective because what he was communicating was self-evident to all but our decayed elites: “We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around,” he said in his inaugural address. And at the end of a grim, grey decade - Vietnam, Watergate, energy crises, Iranian hostages – Americans decided they wanted a President who looked like the nation, not like its failed government. Thanks to his clarity, around the world, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments. Most of the Warsaw Pact countries are now members of Nato, with free markets and freely elected parliaments.
One man who understood was Yakob Ravin, a Ukrainian émigré who in the summer of 1997 happened to be strolling with his grandson in Armand Hammer Park near Reagan’s California home. They happened to see the former President, out taking a walk. Mr Ravin went over and asked if he could take a picture of the boy and the President. When they got back home to Ohio, it appeared in the local newspaper, The Toledo Blade .
Ronald Reagan was three years into the decade-long twilight of his illness, and unable to recognize most of his colleagues from the Washington days. But Mr Ravin wanted to express his appreciation. “Mr President,” he said, “thank you for everything you did for the Jewish people, for Soviet people, to destroy the Communist empire.”
And somewhere deep within there was a flicker of recognition. “Yes,” said the old man, “that is my job.”
Yes, that was his job.
The Irish Times, June 7th 2004
One thing I miss about Reagan is his rhetorical clarity. Whatever one feels about George W Bush, he's a more consequential president than either Clinton or his own father. Nevertheless, I miss the rhetorical brio Reagan what have brought to the great conflicts of this century. Here's one of those bon mots that trips off the tongue so easily you don't always notice the great wisdom in it:
We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around.
Of all the marvelous Ronald Reagan lines retailed over the weekend, that’s my favourite. He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and it encapsulates his legacy at home and abroad. I like it because too often we “small government” conservatives can sound small ourselves - pinched and crabbed and reductive. Reagan made small government a big idea. I always think of him in those broad-shouldered suits, arms outstretched, an inch of cuff: he was awfully expansive about shrinking government.
In the speech, he meant it domestically: It was an age when every government cure for inflation only doubled it. He slew that double-digit dragon so comprehensively that today the word “inflation” is all but obsolescent, at least as a political issue. But, in the broader sense, Reagan’s line about nations that have governments is a good way to weigh up the world. Across Central and Eastern Europe, from Slovenia to Lithuania to Bulgaria, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments – serving at the people’s pleasure.
The intelligentsia persist in believing this had nothing to do with Reagan or Thatcher: they maintain that the Soviet empire would have collapsed anyway, their belated belief in the inevitable failure of Communism being in no ways inconsistent with their previous long-held belief in the inevitable triumph of Communism. And anyway, they continue, if anyone was responsible, it was Mikhail Gorbachev.
In fact, it was Reagan who was responsible for Gorbachev. The Politburo would have gone on rotating the same old 1950s waxworks – Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov – for another decade or three had not Washington’s military build-up so exposed the old guard’s inability to keep up that in 1985 they turned in desperation to someone new. Gorbachev was doomed from the beginning. He couldn’t turn the Soviet Union into a nation that has a government because at heart it was only a government, not a nation: its purpose was to facilitate Communist rule, and nothing else. Or, as David Frost put it after Gorbachev was detained at his dacha during the abortive 1991 coup, “He went for a weekend in the country and returned to find he didn’t have a country to have a weekend in.”
Today, it’s easy to apply Reagan’s line around the world. Grenada is a nation that has a government; Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is a government that has a nation. Those are the easy ones... As for the European Constitution, I can understand why after Fascism, Nazism and Communism, Europeanism seems comparatively benign – not a Blitzkrieg, just a Bitzkrieg, an accumulation of fluffy trivialities that nevertheless takes for granted that the natural order is a world in which every itsy- bitsy activity is licensed and regulated and constitutionally defined by government.
By contrast, Ronald Reagan took afternoon naps and ended the Cold War. “They say hard work never killed anyone,” he said, “but I figure why take the risk?” There speaks a man who understands the virtues of limited government. I slept easier in my bed knowing he was sleeping easier in his.
The Daily Telegraph, June 8th 2004
Not everyone saw him that way, of course, and, even in death, proponents of the "amiable dunce" thesis found it hard to let go:
When Mrs Thatcher stood before President Reagan’s coffin, she curtseyed – which you’re supposed to do only for kings and queens. In America, the King and Prime Minister are combined in one person, and the politer school of Reagan detractors these past two decades is happy to concede that, putting aside the ghastly policies of his Administration, he did a swell job as King Ronnie – the nation’s affable figurehead, the “amiable dunce” (in Clark Clifford’s phrase) who woke up one day to find he’d inherited the throne.
If anything is laid to rest with him at the end of this remarkable week, it ought to be the lazy condescension of the elites. That’s all but indestructible, alas. Last Monday, The Washington Post and many other papers carried an Associated Press story by Adam Geller on Reagan’s economic legacy which began, “He had almost no schooling in economics…” Actually, that’s one of the few things he did have schooling in: In 1932, he earned a bachelor’s degree in social science and economics from Eureka College. I guess a certificate from Eureka just doesn’t impress these reporters the way Bush’s Harvard Business School diploma impresses them.
What is an “intelligent” person? As defined by the media, it seems to mean someone who takes the media seriously. Someone wonkish on the nuts and bolts of particular topics of interest to media types, and able to sit around yakking about them till three in the morning. Ronald Reagan had a much rarer intelligence – a strategic intelligence. In 1977, he told Richard Allen, “My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose.”
Cute. So few politicians talked like that a quarter-century ago that I’d have been content if it was just a neat line. But Reagan figured out a way to make it come true. Within ten years. That’s strategic thinking.
Those who disparage him say it would have happened anyway. It was obvious to all that the Soviet Union was on the verge of total collapse. After all, as big-time Ivy League history prof Arthur Schlesinger wrote in 1982, “those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse” are “wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves”.
No, hang on, I must be thinking of Professor J K Galbraith, who in 1984 was marveling at “the great material progress” of the USSR. In fairness to Galbraith, as the Associated Press would say, he has almost no schooling in economics, aside from being a Harvard economics professor for several decades.
On CNN the other night, there was a featurette on all the changes in Ronald Reagan’s long life: he was born in 1911, when Buffalo Bill was still alive, etc, etc. Big deal. If you were born in 1980, that world has vanished, too. The arrogance of every age is the assumption of permanence. It’s unusual to find a leader who thinks beyond that: “smart” in media politics means someone who can recite by heart every sub-clause of his plan on prescription-drug re-importation from Canada, not someone who looks a decade or two down the road and figures out the lie of the land. I want a leader who’s giving some thought to big questions like, say, the increasing Islamification of Europe, and I don’t care if he’s from Eureka College or dropped out in Dixon High.
Ronald Reagan is beyond the Clark Cliffords and Arthur Schlesingers now... Back in the real world, the people waiting hours to get in to the Rotunda were there not just because Ronald Reagan was amiable but because they grasped that he was a significant figure in the life of this country and the world. One day even the network anchors and Ivy League professors will get it.
The Chicago Sun-Times, June 13th 2004
Ellie
Steynonline
My Telegraph column this week prompted many readers to enquire more about the comparative prospects of the Middle East and Europe. A propos the bombings in Amman, here's what I wrote about Jordan two years ago , at the time President Bush was unveiling his Palestinian "road map":
As it happens, a couple of weeks back, round about the time everyone started going on about the road map, I was in the West Bank and actually had a road map, not knowing my way around too well and being somewhat wary of wrong turns in that corner of the world.
The useful thing about following the geographic road map as opposed to the diplomatic "road map" is you realise how small the place is. I was running late by the time I got to the Jordanian end of the Allenby Bridge, Eastern Gateway to Arafatistan. Twenty minutes later, I was at the Marriott Dead Sea Resort for a meeting with a local bigshot out by the kidney-shaped pool as wealthy Arabs and pudgy Americans floated by. We tucked into a big brunch of pancakes and maple syrup, my enthusiasm for native culture having been temporarily dampened by Arafat's toxic dump. Ten miles away, Palestinian schools were in the midst of a national letter-writing competition. Among the education ministry's first-prize winners was 12-year-old Mahmoud Naji Chalilah for his effortless mastery of West Bank death-cultism:
My heart has turned into a sad block of pain. One day I will buy a weapon and I will blow away the fetters. I will propel my living-dead body into your arms…
Hmm. Prize-winning it may be, but I don't think that's the kind of talk they want to hear at the Marriott. Jordan has an economy and a tourism business, and therefore at least as much interest as Israel in ensuring that the peculiar psychosis of Arafat's squat is contained within its present borders.
That applies equally to the death squads of the depraved Zarqawi. More distant Arab strongmen can afford to indulge the death cultists of both the West Bank and the Sunni Triangle. But, without oil or a coast line, the Hashemites have turned Jordan into a viable state and, indeed, the least worst in Araby. They're not about to kiss off the Marriott and the Grand Hyatt and the rest for any phony solidarity with the head-hackers. As for what I said about Europe in that symposium, it was for the December 2002 edition of The American Enterprise, and three years on it stands up pretty well, I'd say:
I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark. What's wrong with the Islamic world is relatively straightforward. With Europe, it's harder to foresee any happy endings. The good news is we won't have to worry about another Hitler or Mussolini because, on present reproductive trends, the Italians and Germans are going to be out of business in a couple of generations. Few people have ever been in less need of lebensraum. Instead, the European Union figures it will require another 50 million immigrants in the next few years just to maintain a big enough working population to fund the lavish social programs its vast retired army of baby boomers expects to enjoy.
The main source of European immigration is Muslim youth from North Africa and the Middle East. Whether these are the chaps to keep Hans and Pierre in the style to which they've become accustomed is a moot point: According to some Scandinavian statistics, 40 percent of those on welfare are immigrants. And, while it's not true that every immigrant on welfare is an Islamic terrorist, it's a good rule of thumb that every Islamic terrorist in Europe has been on welfare, living in radicalized ghetto cultures with nothing to do but sit around the flat plotting the jihad all day. Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammed, who recently held a pro-Osama rally in London, has demanded the imposition of Islamic law in Britain, and at one time called for the assassination of then Prime Minister John Major. Given that it's Mr. Major's ministry, and now Tony Blair's, that has financially supported Sheikh Omar ever since he arrived 15 years ago, that seems a tad ungrateful.
In defiance of traditional immigration patterns, Europe's young Muslims are less assimilated than their parents and grandparents. Instead of becoming more European, they're becoming more Islamist. If the "root cause" of September 11 is Islam's difficulty with modernity, we shouldn't be surprised that this manifests itself less in Indonesia than in Holland, the epitome of the boundlessly tolerant post-nationalist state, a liberal utopia of cannabis cafés and gay marriage--for now. Sheikh Omar's demand for the imposition of sharia doesn't seem so absurd when you consider that in 20 years the majority of the Dutch under 18 will be Muslim.
A multiculturalist society has a hard time even discussing these things. In the advanced technocratic Euro-state, almost any issue worth talking about has been ruled taboo. Continental voters, faced with a choice between Eurodee and Eurodum, have been turning elsewhere. The electoral beneficiaries of this tune-out, in Italy, Belgium, Denmark, and elsewhere, don't have much in common--some are maverick magnates, some fascist nostalgists, others gay hedonists. What unites them is what they're against: the traditional European cultural consensus that's now sleepwalking its way to suicide. In Holland, a militant vegan killed the flamboyant homosexual nativist Pim Fortuyn during the election campaign - the first time in political history that a fruitarian had killed a fruit Aryan. This murder is an apt summation of what Marx would call the "internal contradictions" of the rainbow coalition.
Populist politicians who survive their campaigns shouldn't expect a congratulatory telegram from the grandees at the European Union. In February, the Belgian foreign minister, speaking on behalf of the E.U., threatened sanctions against Italy if its citizens voted for Umberto Bossi's Northern League. Those Continentals who attacked President Bush for presuming "to tell people who they can vote for" when he gave an anti-Yasser Arafat speech forget that in Europe they do it all the time.
Before it too offended the E.U., the perfect emblem of the post-war European state was Austria, where regardless of how you voted you wound up with the same center-left-right coalition government. That was the whole point. Europe's post-war political structures were specifically designed to stifle the populace's baser urges. Indeed, Europe has been so focused on what went wrong in the past it's been blind to what might go wrong in the future. The future is now here. A collapsed birthrate, accelerating immigration, lavish welfare, an evasive political culture, phony transnational structures: For Europe, this is the Perfect Storm.
Sometimes even a pundit doesn't want to be vindicated. It's very depressing to have been saying these things for four years now and to find the European political establishment still sleepwalking to suicide. Angela Merkel's "new" government in Germany, for example, has just announced that it plans to "revitalise" the European "Constitution". What a tragedy. You can read what Michael Kelly, John O'Sullivan and others had to contribute to the symposium here.
THE REAGAN ERA
Twenty-five years ago - November 4th 1980 - Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. Here's some of what I've written about him, beginning with this appreciation, written on his death last June:
All weekend long across the networks, media grandees who’d voted for Carter and Mondale, just like all their friends did, tried to explain the appeal of Ronald Reagan. He was “The Great Communicator”, he had a wonderful sense of humour, he had a charming smile… self-deprecating… the tilt of his head…
All true, but not what matters. Even politics attracts its share of optimistic, likeable men, and most of them leave no trace – like Britain’s “Sunny Jim” Callaghan, a perfect example of the defeatism of western leadership in the 1970s. It was the era of “détente”, a word barely remembered now, which is just as well, as it reflects poorly on us: the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the free world had decided that the unfree world was not a prison ruled by a murderous ideology that had to be defeated but merely an alternative lifestyle that had to be accommodated. Under cover of “détente”, the Soviets gobbled up more and more real estate across the planet, from Ethiopia to Grenada. Nonetheless, it wasn’t just the usual suspects who subscribed to this feeble evasion – Helmut Schmidt, Pierre Trudeau, Francois Mitterand – but most of the so-called “conservatives”, too – Ted Heath, Giscard d’Estaing, Gerald Ford.
Unlike these men, unlike most other senior Republicans, Ronald Reagan saw Soviet Communism for what it was: a great evil. Millions of Europeans across half a continent from Poland to Bulgaria, Slovenia to Latvia live in freedom today because he acknowledged that simple truth when the rest of the political class was tying itself in knots trying to pretend otherwise. That’s what counts. He brought down the “evil empire”, and all the rest is fine print.
At the time, the charm and the smile got less credit from the intelligentsia, confirming their belief that he was a dunce who’d plunge us into Armageddon. Everything you need to know about the establishment’s view of Ronald Reagan can be found on page 624 of Dutch , Edmund Morris’ weird post-modern biography. The place is Berlin, the time June 12, 1987:
‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ declaims Dutch, trying hard to look infuriated, but succeeding only in an expression of mild petulance ... One braces for a flash of prompt lights to either side of him: APPLAUSE.
What a rhetorical opportunity missed. He could have read Robert Frost’s poem on the subject, ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’ to simple and shattering effect. Or even Edna St. Vincent Millay’s lines, which he surely holds in memory…
Only now for the first time I see
This wall is actually a wall, a thing
Come up between us, shutting me away
From you ... I do not know you any more.
Poor old Morris, the plodding, conventional, scholarly writer driven mad by 14 years spent trying to get a grip on Ronald Reagan. Most world leaders would have taken his advice: You’re at the Berlin Wall, so you have to say something about it, something profound but oblique, maybe there’s a poem on the subject ... Who cares if Frost’s is over-quoted, and a tad hard to follow for a crowd of foreigners? Who cares that it is, in fact, pro-wall?
Edmund Morris has described his subject as an “airhead” and concluded that it’s “like dropping a pebble in a well and hearing no splash.” Morris may not have heard the splash, but he’s still all wet: The elites were stupid about Reagan in a way that only clever people can be. Take that cheap crack: If you drop a pebble in a well and you don’t hear a splash, it may be because the well is dry but it’s just as likely it’s because the well is of surprising depth. I went out to my own well and dropped a pebble: I heard no splash, yet the well supplies exquisite translucent water to my home.
But then I suspect it’s a long while since Morris dropped an actual pebble in an actual well: As with walls, his taste runs instinctively to the metaphorical. Reagan looked at the Berlin Wall and saw not a poem-quoting opportunity but prison bars.
I once discussed Irving Berlin, composer of “God Bless America”, with his friend and fellow songwriter Jule Styne, and Jule put it best: “It’s easy to be clever. But the really clever thing is to be simple.” At the Berlin Wall that day, it would have been easy to be clever, as all those ’70s detente sophisticates would have been. And who would have remembered a word they said? Like Irving Berlin with “God Bless America”, only Reagan could have stood there and declared without embarrassment:
Tear down this wall!
- and two years later the wall was, indeed, torn down. Ronald Reagan was straightforward and true and said it for everybody - which is why his “rhetorical opportunity missed” is remembered by millions of grateful Eastern Europeans. The really clever thing is to have the confidence to say it in four monosyllables.
Ronald Reagan was an American archetype, and just the bare bones of his curriculum vitae capture the possibilities of his country: in the Twenties, a lifeguard at a local swimming hole who saved over 70 lives; in the Thirties, a radio sports announcer; in the Forties, a Warner Brothers leading man ...and finally one of the two most significant presidents of the American century. Unusually for the commander in chief, Reagan’s was a full, varied American life, of which the presidency was the mere culmination.
“The Great Communicator” was effective because what he was communicating was self-evident to all but our decayed elites: “We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around,” he said in his inaugural address. And at the end of a grim, grey decade - Vietnam, Watergate, energy crises, Iranian hostages – Americans decided they wanted a President who looked like the nation, not like its failed government. Thanks to his clarity, around the world, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments. Most of the Warsaw Pact countries are now members of Nato, with free markets and freely elected parliaments.
One man who understood was Yakob Ravin, a Ukrainian émigré who in the summer of 1997 happened to be strolling with his grandson in Armand Hammer Park near Reagan’s California home. They happened to see the former President, out taking a walk. Mr Ravin went over and asked if he could take a picture of the boy and the President. When they got back home to Ohio, it appeared in the local newspaper, The Toledo Blade .
Ronald Reagan was three years into the decade-long twilight of his illness, and unable to recognize most of his colleagues from the Washington days. But Mr Ravin wanted to express his appreciation. “Mr President,” he said, “thank you for everything you did for the Jewish people, for Soviet people, to destroy the Communist empire.”
And somewhere deep within there was a flicker of recognition. “Yes,” said the old man, “that is my job.”
Yes, that was his job.
The Irish Times, June 7th 2004
One thing I miss about Reagan is his rhetorical clarity. Whatever one feels about George W Bush, he's a more consequential president than either Clinton or his own father. Nevertheless, I miss the rhetorical brio Reagan what have brought to the great conflicts of this century. Here's one of those bon mots that trips off the tongue so easily you don't always notice the great wisdom in it:
We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around.
Of all the marvelous Ronald Reagan lines retailed over the weekend, that’s my favourite. He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and it encapsulates his legacy at home and abroad. I like it because too often we “small government” conservatives can sound small ourselves - pinched and crabbed and reductive. Reagan made small government a big idea. I always think of him in those broad-shouldered suits, arms outstretched, an inch of cuff: he was awfully expansive about shrinking government.
In the speech, he meant it domestically: It was an age when every government cure for inflation only doubled it. He slew that double-digit dragon so comprehensively that today the word “inflation” is all but obsolescent, at least as a political issue. But, in the broader sense, Reagan’s line about nations that have governments is a good way to weigh up the world. Across Central and Eastern Europe, from Slovenia to Lithuania to Bulgaria, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments – serving at the people’s pleasure.
The intelligentsia persist in believing this had nothing to do with Reagan or Thatcher: they maintain that the Soviet empire would have collapsed anyway, their belated belief in the inevitable failure of Communism being in no ways inconsistent with their previous long-held belief in the inevitable triumph of Communism. And anyway, they continue, if anyone was responsible, it was Mikhail Gorbachev.
In fact, it was Reagan who was responsible for Gorbachev. The Politburo would have gone on rotating the same old 1950s waxworks – Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov – for another decade or three had not Washington’s military build-up so exposed the old guard’s inability to keep up that in 1985 they turned in desperation to someone new. Gorbachev was doomed from the beginning. He couldn’t turn the Soviet Union into a nation that has a government because at heart it was only a government, not a nation: its purpose was to facilitate Communist rule, and nothing else. Or, as David Frost put it after Gorbachev was detained at his dacha during the abortive 1991 coup, “He went for a weekend in the country and returned to find he didn’t have a country to have a weekend in.”
Today, it’s easy to apply Reagan’s line around the world. Grenada is a nation that has a government; Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is a government that has a nation. Those are the easy ones... As for the European Constitution, I can understand why after Fascism, Nazism and Communism, Europeanism seems comparatively benign – not a Blitzkrieg, just a Bitzkrieg, an accumulation of fluffy trivialities that nevertheless takes for granted that the natural order is a world in which every itsy- bitsy activity is licensed and regulated and constitutionally defined by government.
By contrast, Ronald Reagan took afternoon naps and ended the Cold War. “They say hard work never killed anyone,” he said, “but I figure why take the risk?” There speaks a man who understands the virtues of limited government. I slept easier in my bed knowing he was sleeping easier in his.
The Daily Telegraph, June 8th 2004
Not everyone saw him that way, of course, and, even in death, proponents of the "amiable dunce" thesis found it hard to let go:
When Mrs Thatcher stood before President Reagan’s coffin, she curtseyed – which you’re supposed to do only for kings and queens. In America, the King and Prime Minister are combined in one person, and the politer school of Reagan detractors these past two decades is happy to concede that, putting aside the ghastly policies of his Administration, he did a swell job as King Ronnie – the nation’s affable figurehead, the “amiable dunce” (in Clark Clifford’s phrase) who woke up one day to find he’d inherited the throne.
If anything is laid to rest with him at the end of this remarkable week, it ought to be the lazy condescension of the elites. That’s all but indestructible, alas. Last Monday, The Washington Post and many other papers carried an Associated Press story by Adam Geller on Reagan’s economic legacy which began, “He had almost no schooling in economics…” Actually, that’s one of the few things he did have schooling in: In 1932, he earned a bachelor’s degree in social science and economics from Eureka College. I guess a certificate from Eureka just doesn’t impress these reporters the way Bush’s Harvard Business School diploma impresses them.
What is an “intelligent” person? As defined by the media, it seems to mean someone who takes the media seriously. Someone wonkish on the nuts and bolts of particular topics of interest to media types, and able to sit around yakking about them till three in the morning. Ronald Reagan had a much rarer intelligence – a strategic intelligence. In 1977, he told Richard Allen, “My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose.”
Cute. So few politicians talked like that a quarter-century ago that I’d have been content if it was just a neat line. But Reagan figured out a way to make it come true. Within ten years. That’s strategic thinking.
Those who disparage him say it would have happened anyway. It was obvious to all that the Soviet Union was on the verge of total collapse. After all, as big-time Ivy League history prof Arthur Schlesinger wrote in 1982, “those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse” are “wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves”.
No, hang on, I must be thinking of Professor J K Galbraith, who in 1984 was marveling at “the great material progress” of the USSR. In fairness to Galbraith, as the Associated Press would say, he has almost no schooling in economics, aside from being a Harvard economics professor for several decades.
On CNN the other night, there was a featurette on all the changes in Ronald Reagan’s long life: he was born in 1911, when Buffalo Bill was still alive, etc, etc. Big deal. If you were born in 1980, that world has vanished, too. The arrogance of every age is the assumption of permanence. It’s unusual to find a leader who thinks beyond that: “smart” in media politics means someone who can recite by heart every sub-clause of his plan on prescription-drug re-importation from Canada, not someone who looks a decade or two down the road and figures out the lie of the land. I want a leader who’s giving some thought to big questions like, say, the increasing Islamification of Europe, and I don’t care if he’s from Eureka College or dropped out in Dixon High.
Ronald Reagan is beyond the Clark Cliffords and Arthur Schlesingers now... Back in the real world, the people waiting hours to get in to the Rotunda were there not just because Ronald Reagan was amiable but because they grasped that he was a significant figure in the life of this country and the world. One day even the network anchors and Ivy League professors will get it.
The Chicago Sun-Times, June 13th 2004
Ellie