THE LEGACY OF RONALD REAGAN (1)

There have been a number of attempts to come to grips with the
legacy of Ronald Reagan who passed away on June 5 aged 93 on various
leftist lists none of them satisfactory in my opinion. There was a
spate of vitriolic name calling on MARXMAIL which while
understandable is hardly helpful to understanding the man or his
legacy. It is unquestionable that his legact is a profound one
particularly for the left although of course in a profoundly
negative way. I think the most accurate description of his legacy
came from someone who said "after Reagan what was right wing became
mainstream what was centre became left wing and what was left wing
ceased to exist", this is particularly true of the Anglophone
democracies The United States, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and of
course here in Australia.

Ronald Reagan was six years old at the
time of the Russian Revolution and he died well over a decade after
the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent disintegration of the
Soviet Union and the collapse of Marxist ideology. Reagan is widely
credited with bringing about these events, my opinion is that the
Soviet System was already in considerable trouble when Reagan came
to power in 1981 and that his aggressive arms build up gave it the
final push.

What was Reagan about? In a nutshell he sought to rollback all the
social achievements made by working people in the United States
since the time of Roosevelt to demolish the legacy of the New Deal
the idea that the government has an obligation to intervene in the
economy to help the poor and the weak. He sought to divert federal
funding from social programmes into an aggressive arms build up
which was aimed at a final push of winning the Cold War and pushing
the Soviet Union to the brink of social and economic collapse. And
that is what in fact happened, although not a shot was fired Russia
today is essentially a defeated power its social and economic
condition today are most analogous to the defeated Germany following
World War One. The parlous condition of the former Soviet Union as a
group of authoritarian kleptocracies is part of the Reagan legacy.

It is easily forgotten now but when Reagan became President in
1981 U.S. influence in the world appeared to be on the wane, she had
suffered a series of international humiliations including military
defeat in Vietnam and the Islamic Revolution in Iran which saw the
ousting of a U.S. ally in the shah. Some even thought that the
United States was in danger of losing the Cold War.

Another legacy of Ronald Reagan was the capturing of the
Republican Party by it’s conservative wing. It is often forgotten
now but there used to be an influential liberal wing within the
Republican Party. Up until 1960 most blacks in the South voted
Republican. As recently as 1970 the racist democrat governor Orville
Faubus was defeated by the liberal republican Rockefeller in
Arkansa. Many of the most ardent Reaganites came out of the remnants
of the old southern Democratic Party including most notably Strom
Thurmond who first broke with the Democrats to run as a "Dixiecrat"
in 1948 and formally switched allegiance to the Republican Party in
1964. Reagan helped capture the former Democrat "Solid South" for
the Republican Party. The formerly Democrat "Solid South" first
voted Republican in 1964 after experimenting with various breakaway
movements in 1948 and 1960. In 1968 it voted for George C. Wallace
and the American Independent Party who was later re-admitted to the
Democratic Party. In 1972 it voted for Nixon and in 1976 returned to
it’s previous status of "Solid South" for southerner Jimmy Carter.

When Barrie Goldwater won the nomination as Republican candidate
for President in 1964 it was the first time that the conservative
wing had won control of the Republican Party. Goldwater was crushed
winning just 38.5% of the popular vote and just 52 electoral votes
the old "Solid South" and his home state of Arizona. Running on
essentially the same platform Ronald Reagan won two of the greatest
landslides in U.S. electoral history, in 1984 he won 59% of the
vote, 49 states and a record 525 electoral votes surpassing the
previous record of 520 set by Richard Nixon in 1972. It must be
remembered that Nixon was a firm believer in detente and his
domestic agenda would be regarded today as left of centre
particularly by American standards. Ironically the idea of a
guaranteed minimum income for all which got a bit of a run on
MARXMAIL a few weeks back was actually seriously considered by the
Nixon administration.

It is often forgotten now but Reagan came within an ace of winning
the Republican nomination for President in 1976. That year he
challenged incumbent president Gerald Ford through a series of
primaries and demonstrated his strength particularly in the south.
Ironically Gerald Ford would lose the 1976 Presidential election in
the south. One is forced to conclude that had Reagan been the
Republicans candidate in 1976 he would have won that election
considering that he would have been able to win at least some
southern states from Jimmy Carter. The 1976 Presidential election
was the last manifestation of the Democratic "Solid South". Reagan
came within just 17 votes of winning the Republican nomination in
1976. Ford prevailed with 1, 087 votes to Reagan’s 1, 070 from
memory.

Reagan effected an historical re-allignment in American politics
which culminated in the Republicans winning the House of
Representatives in 1994 for the first time in forty years. When
Reagan won the presidency for the first time in 1980 the Republicans
also picked up over 30 seats in the house although failing to win a
majority and won control of the senate for the first time since
1954.

As I have said the broad thrust of Reagan’s programme was to
rollback all the social achievements made by American working people
since the time of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Reagan diverted
federal funding from social programmes aimed at helping the poor
into a massive arms build up. Reagan oversaw one of the greatest
deliberate shift of income from the poor to the wealthy in the
nation’s history. In some ways Reagan can be described as a
fascist. He oversaw a massive arms build up, direct and naked
assaults on the conditions of the Working Class, pandered to flag
waving patriotism and effectively used race to drive a wedge through
his political opponents. Many of the ideas he advocated would have
been considered loopy twenty years, ten years, five years and even a
couple of years before he became president and yet they came to
represent the mainstream and influence politics on a worldwide
basis. Ronald Reagan had a profound but essentially negative impact
on world history.

Reagan’s influence was less considerable in Australia. The sort of
ideologically driven deep cuts to government expenditure that he
advocated never proved popular in Australia. The two governments in
Australia which were ideologically closest to Reagan were the
Greiner Government in N.S.W. and the Kennett Government in Victoria
1992-99. Both governments eventually came to grief on the
unpopularity of their ideologically driven Economic Rationalist
policies. The Greiner Government even had difficulty being re-
elected.