Ronald Reagan Dies, His Contradictions Live

Published on June 5, 2004 By blogic In Politics

Ronald Reagan, president 1981-1989, has died at the age of 93. He succumbed to Alzheimer's disease after a ten year battle.

Let me start with some good memories of Ronald Reagan:

- He said one of my favorite presidential lines: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Really, it's a great line, and he said it against the advice of his aides, who were concerned it was too belligerent.

- He once joked at a press conference that the bombs were going to start dropping in five minutes. Lots of people thought this demonstrates his weak grasp on reality, but I've always thought it was brilliant and hilarious black humor. He was willing to make fun of himself.

It's a tradition to celebrate our dead notables, which reached its ironic peak last year with the death of Strom Thurmond. Time and again, we had to hear about his life of accomplishment in the Senate. Time and again we ignored that his great achievement was running for president on a racist platform: defending segregation and the Jim Crow laws.

Thankfully, Ronald Reagan was no Strom Thurmond, but he was also no saint.

- He claimed to represent ordinary Americans, but as Nixon aide Kevin Phillips has extensively documented, the middle and lower classes were made poorer by Reagan, and the rich, richer.

- He said he was against big government, but he inflated the most socialist part of government -- the military -- like a balloon, and created the worst deficits this country has endured.

- Ronald Reagan represented himself as a defender of democracy, but his administration's money and weapons made Saddam Hussein into a major military power, and he is directly responsible for the mess in which we now find ourselves in Iraq.

- Finally, and most ironically, Reagan initiated the culture war that has hamstrung the fight against Reagan's own eventual killer. He was the first president of the Christian Right: his supporters and recruits would go on to build a movement that now controls the White House and the Congress. While Nancy Reagan begged the government to fund stem cell research that could cure Alzheimer's: a disease that demeans the final years of so many of our elderly; it was Reagan who's most responsible for creating a political culture that has demonized science, and gutted funding to medical and environmental research.

Ronald Reagan has died, and for better or worse, he best represents the hopes and fears that we all felt in the 1980s.

For better and for worse.

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