A little politics-meets-history-meets-pet-peeve blogging. A couple of days ago, I was engaging in a little political banter with some co-workers. I mentioned that I'm a budding Fred-head. A friend of mine said, "but he's an ACTOR." I answered back, just a little throwaway line to be cute, not the opening of an argument or anything, "well, the last time we tried that, it turned out alright." She quickly fired back, "Well, I don't know about that...."
PLEASE! First of all, this very nice Democrat lady doesn't know hardly any history, and would admit it. Secondly, she would have been about 4 when Reagan took office, and 12 when he left. So all she's doing is parroting some line some bad teacher must have fed her back in college. I'm not particularly mad at her personally for swallowing it down, and I didn't feel at the time like going into debate mode. But come on. What part of the 1970s would you like to go back to? The double-digit inflation? The interest rates? Stagflation? The Iran hostage crisis? Or maybe you liked those thousands of Soviet Nukes pointing our direction? Hogwash, poppycock, and nonsense on stilts. Reagan has been dead for years, and history now looks at 19 million new jobs, the beginning of the low-tax policy that has powered almost 30 years of economic growth, the end of the cold war, two landslide elections, and the re-making of one of our two major parties in his image, and says, "You know what? This guy was pretty good." Sure, there were fears that he would end social security (which he didn't). There were people of very good intent who supported the nuclear freeze movement (now long-discredited). But IT'S OVER. There's not some rule out there that no Republican can ever be right about anything!
Oh, and the reverse is also true. I've got a cousin who's an adjunct history professor who's very conservative. No matter how hard I try, I can't get him to admit, even grudgingly, that Franklin Roosevelt was a great president. His view is, "FDR birthed modern liberalism, which is the enemy, therefore he must be bad, and any good he accomplished must be overrated." Again, nonsense on stilts! I'll type slowly for any of my readers who don't read so fast... HE WON WORLD WAR TWO. Again, come on! Was he perfect? Of course not! But he is (like Reagan) one of the most significant presidents of this century. If anything, his 4 landslides trump Reagan's two, winning WWII trumps winning the cold war, and the Great Depression was worse than the 70's malaise!
Put it another way. I'm a Larry Bird and Boston Celtics fan. Have been forever. So I spent a long, long time disliking the Lakers and Magic Johnson. But never, ever, have I implied that Magic Johnson was "really not so great." He's one of the greatest players to ever live. He played for my team's rival. I could pull against him (and did, with glee) without sacrificing my integrity as a student (and genuine fan) of basketball.
Partisanship like that is one reason why this country is such a mess right now. How about we agree to fight fair, to admit that the other guy might just have a point? We can disagree on principle and still respect the other side's opinions. Of course I think my opinion is correct. If I didn't, it wouldn't be my opinion anymore. But we don't have to fudge objective truths, be disingenuous, and always attribute ill intentions to the other guy. Case in point--one can be firmly against Obama becoming president without being a racist. or very anti-Romney without being a religious bigot. Or anti-John Edwards without being bigoted toward phony, preening, metrosexuals with great hair (sorry... just kidding).
I propose a return to the status quo ante, the way things used to be, circa 1983. The story goes that a staffer of Democrat House Speaker Tip O'Neill met Reagan for the first time, in the evening, in the speaker's office. Trying clumsily to break the ice, he said "Well, Mr. President, this is the place we plot against you." And Reagan answered, "Not after 6 PM. We're all friends at quitting time."
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10 comments:
"nonsense on stilts" lol :)
AMEN BROTHER!!!
I was anti Reagan when i was 10... because my teachers were anti-Reagan. Then I was Anti Bush because everyone was Anti Bush in school...
truth of the matter is, I didn't know what policies were nor what difference they made. Now, I would consider myself very pro-reagan... especially after going thru Alan Greenspan's book. As Mike said, he also makes Clinton seem very economically adept.
My uncle, on the other hand, said something that was rather alarming (especially for a good ole conservative CofC-er)... Basically he implied that character could be removed from the person serving in office. I found it odd that I (30 years his minor) pointed out how that had been tried before... But at that time, it was King Saul.
Blessed is the nation whose G_d is the Lord. Character only barely exists outside the absence of knowing and being in relationship with the Father.
well, my politics leans hard to a Benevolent Dictatorship... but that won't happen 'til it's all over.
Bekster you beat me to it. I have never heard that saying. I assumed it was a southern thing ( I am from New York) but I guess not. Lori told Sean last night that he was "Actin a fool". once again I've never heard that one before and needed some explanation. I thought I had been down here long enough to have learned everything I needed to but I guess I was wrong.
I think FDR did the best he could given all the obstacles he faced. I do wonder if he truly understood what Social Security would turn into. (I despise most of what it has turned into.)
I cannot put "FDR won WW II" in my mouth, though. I think Churchill had at least as much to do with that as anyone. I give FDR credit, but the government took over A LOT of the economy in the process, too much of which has (regrettably) never been undone. I also think that FDR enabled LBJ. Ugh.
So I was reading about Reagan the other day in my history textbook, The American Pageant. I was checking him out b/c I know virtually nothing about him, and I'd heard such widely divergent viewpoints. The book praised Reagan's amazing effectiveness in accomplishing his goals, yet ultimately had some harsher words: "But a balanced budget remained grotesquely out of reach. Supply-side economic theory had promised that lower taxes would actually increase government revenue b/c they would so stimulate the economy as a whole. But in fact the combination of tax reduction and huge increases in military spending opened a vast "revenue hole" of $200 billion annual deficits. In his eight years in office, Reagan added well over a trillion dollars to the national debt--more than all his predecessors combined...The staggering deficits of the Reagan years assuredly constituted a great economic failure...
the deficits virtually guaranteed that future generations of Americans would either have to work harder than their parents, lower their standard of living, or both, to pay their foreign creditors when the bills came due."
So was this written by a bunch of lefties or what?:)
--Kim Kirby
Hi, Kim. If you have "Pageant," that means you must have taken AP! Sad, what they pass off as history--that should be on an editorial page. They neglect to mention that (1) Revenue really did rise, (2) much of that spending was forced by the Democrat-controlled congress; (3) that the deficits of the Reagan years and associated military spending contributed to the end of the USSR--if you had offered exactly that deal in 1947 to Truman or 1961 to JFK, they would have said, "where do I sign up for a deficit?" and (4) The old line that Reagan ran the "biggest debt of all time" is disingenuous, at best. That's like the guys who tell you that George W. Bush got the most votes of any president. Of course he did... and also the most votes against him, because the country was BIGGER in 2000 than ever before. Today's debt is even worse, and the one under Obama or whoever is next will be even worse, because it keeps going up and inflation is constant. Anyway, the idea that "Reaganomics" was a "failure" is nuts.
And Mike, although certainly social security is broke and needs an overhaul, it was in the 1930s and remains an important part of our social safety-net. I would argue that it's in a far different category than LBJ's Great Society welfare programs, which is why most of the New Deal is part of what I, as a conservative, don't mind conserving. As for WWII, I'm a huge Churchill fan, and there's no doubt that he is THE MAN. But FDR was far more than "the other guy," and the war wouldn't have been won without us Yanks. I think there's more than enough credit to go around. Similarly, I've heard folks who don't like Reagan try to give credit for the end of the cold war to Gorbachev, Maggie Thatcher, and Pope JP II... anybody but Ron, in any combination. I'm glad to share the credit, but the leader of the free world has to get some, in both cases.
I did take AP, in fact. Is "Pageant" really that universal of an AP text? Regardless, I love that book. It made me love US History. Which definitely helped on the exam, along with the practice of starting all essays with the word "although." Do you teach AP? If so, you should pass that little tip along to your students. My teacher was a big believer in it, and it works!:)
For as long as I've been teaching, I think "Pageant" has been the standard, at least in public schools in SC. I teach middle school history (modern USA, 1865 to the present).
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