Reagan Un-Will-ing To Say “No”?
by Donald Devine

The worst thing to say about a democratic politician is that he cannot say “No” to things people should not have. Over 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Aristotle said this is why democracies fail. Since the leaders are dependent on popular votes, the easiest thing is to say “yes” to every desire.

That is the charge George Will in his mass-circulation column, echoing historian John Patrick Diggins’ new book “Ronald Reagan,” makes against America’s most popular recent president--who Will says told “people comforting and flattering things they want to hear,” that all of their desires should be met, and that this pandering inevitably leads to big and bad government.

Forgive another article on the Gipper but this claim has circulated so widely it requires a response. Only a brilliant left wing academic could pull it off. In his book, Professor Diggins of CUNY makes the argument that the 1980s were America’s “Emersonian moment” because Reagan sometimes quoted optimistic phrases from the radical individualist Ralph Waldo Emerson. But it was Reagan’s mother who supposedly was the real culprit, her faith influencing him to write in a 1951 letter that “God couldn’t create evil so the desires he planted in us are good.”  This proves to the good professor and the columnist that Reagan adopted the “Emersonian faith” that “we please God by pleasing ourselves”—we act on our own passions only and they are all good so leaders can say yes to them—a faith ascribed to Reagan based on a few speech phrases and a private letter.

The proof to Diggins is that Reagan’s “theory of government has little reference to the principles of the American founding” to which Will adds “especially to the wisest of them, James Madison” who taught that “Government’s principal function was to resist, moderate or even frustrate the public’s unruly passions.”  The founders created a separation of powers government “to check the demands of the people” whereas Reagan simply blamed government for what was “inherent in democracy itself,” giving in to the peoples’ desires.

Diggins is not a typical leftist but he has the same rationalistic belief that the Enlightenment made all traditional thinking obsolete. The Founders, being serious people, their principles must be Enlightenment rationalist, not silly Emersonian optimism misled by religion. Diggins describes himself as being somewhere "to the right of the Left and to the left of the Right" but he is an expert on the Left and has the leftist assumption that anyone who believes in individualism and optimism is an Emersonian. To the wise men of the left (as opposed to Leninists) it is either Emerson or Rousseau--or Marx (properly understood), the pure free, optimistic individualist or the pure rational, communal socialist. They miss everything between--including actual capitalism, which is not pure individualism but also corporatism, private beneficence, local government and other intermediate institutions as Adam Smith clearly taught. Diggins mentions that Reagan was very influenced by the free market economist Frederic Bastiat but he just cannot help himself by adding that Marx called Bastiat the “modern bagman of free trade,” as if it is obvious that a rationalist bon mot is enough to dismiss a thinker. 

To univocal rationalist scholars like Diggins, tradition may simply be dismissed for serious thinkers and the only rational alternative is selfish individualism (see C.B. Macpherson’s “The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism”) as with Emerson. He means a compliment to Reagan. But Reagan had a traditional side that made him less successful than he could have been. He was so optimistic about man’s nature because of his mother’s religion he rejected the possibility of evil. But the Christian belief in Reagan’s letter that God created man good ignores that Genesis also depicts evil as being brought to mankind by the Devil after the creation. Reagan’s was not a belief all is good but represented the theological tradition of the Bible, which is hardly simple optimism. There is plenty of evil recognized by this tradition although, as with Reagan’s mother, it does teach that God will make it right at the end—but in a kingdom not of this world. But even such limited optimism must be dismissed by pure rationalists as irrational.

To try to make the charge that Reagan was a simplistic theological optimist and the Founders were not—and Will does not mention this--Diggins must exclude the Declaration of Independence as an American founding document. Think of that! “Fundamentalists may jump for joy when they see the word ‘God’ in the Declaration and other documents,” says the not very dispassionate professor, but “the founding is not the Declaration but the Constitution,” which does not mention God or tradition. This is the opposite extreme from the Declaration “creedalists” who almost exclude the Constitution. Obviously, both documents are essential to understand the founding principles.

A man who honors Edmund Burke, as does Will, should certainly recognize there is a middle way, a synthesis of the Declaration and Constitution, of tradition and reason, of freedom and order, of optimism and realism. No one recognized this more than Ronald Reagan. In an early speech as president, he summarized his philosophy at some length to his closest ideological kin at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (to be held this year March 1-3). After listing “intellectual leaders like Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Ludwig von Mises” as the ones who “shaped so much of our thoughts,” he discussed only one of these influences at length.

It's especially hard to believe that it was only a decade ago, on a cold April day on a small hill in upstate New York, that another of these great thinkers, Frank Meyer, was buried. He'd made the awful journey that so many others had: He pulled himself from the clutches of ``The [communist] God That Failed,'' and then in his writing fashioned a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought -- a synthesis that is today recognized by many as modern conservatism.

It was Frank Meyer who reminded us that the robust individualism of the American experience was part of the deeper current of Western learning and culture. He pointed out that a respect for law, an appreciation for tradition, and regard for the social consensus that gives stability to our public and private institutions, these civilized ideas must still motivate us even as we seek a new economic prosperity based on reducing government interference in the marketplace.

Our goals complement each other. We're not cutting the budget simply for the sake of sounder financial management. This is only a first step toward returning power to the States and communities, only a first step toward reordering the relationship between citizen and government. We can make government again responsive to the people by cutting its size and scope and thereby ensuring that its legitimate functions are performed efficiently and justly.

In other words, the Reagan patrimony actually came from the synthesis of Western thought Frank Meyer identified as modern conservatism, including Burke’s important contributions. Contrary to the charge, it promised cutting governmental functions but as a means to putting local citizens in control rather than bureaucracies. It was individualism and freedom but it was also culture, tradition and law. It was neither pure individualism nor pure communalism. Both were part of the deeper synthesis of Western civilization that especially expressed itself in the American experience.

Reagan specifically referred to the founders in another key speech that also escaped Diggins’ scholarship—all he had to do was type the name in the Reagan Library search engine—and here he specifically referred to the man Reagan supposedly forgot, James Madison, and the limitations on democracy he supposedly did not understand.

Madison knew and we should always remember that no government is perfect, not even a democracy. Rights given to government were taken from the people, and so he believed that government's touch in our lives should be light, that powers entrusted to it be administered by temporary guardians. He wrote that "government was the greatest of all reflections on human nature.'' He wrote that "if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government,'' he said, "which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and next oblige it to control itself.''

Led by Madison and Jefferson and others, the authors of the Constitution established a fragile balance between the branches and levels of government. That concept was their genius and the secret of our success -- that idea of federalism. The balance of power intended in the Constitution is the guarantor of the greatest measure of individual freedom any people have ever known. Our task today, this year, this decade, must be to reaffirm those ideas. Our Founding Fathers designed a system of government that was unique in all the world—a federation of sovereign states with as much law and decision-making authority as possible kept at the local level. They knew that man's very need for government meant no government should function unchecked.

We the people—and that is still the most powerful phrase— created government for our own convenience. It can have no power except that voluntarily granted to it by the people. We founded our society on the belief that the rights of men were ours by grace of God. That vision of our Founding Fathers revolutionized the world. Those principles must be reaffirmed by every generation of Americans, for freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.

Is this a starry-eyed optimist who did not reference the founding principles? He specifically emphasized their belief men were not angels and the necessary controls on the people. Is this a man who believed in unchecked satisfaction of the desires of the governed? It is precisely the reverse. President Reagan is the only recent president to say no to popular spending, actually limiting the size of government, by reducing federal non-defense discretionary spending over his term absolutely by ten percent and even reducing total non-defense spending including entitlements as a share of national wealth from 17.9 to 16.4 percent of gross domestic product.

In a few lucid words Ronald Reagan answered every one of the charges by Diggins and Will, in words easily accessible to them. How can these two be so far off? Was the man who called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” oblivious to evil in the world? Who are these people writing about?

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.