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I've tried taking them seriously. I got down a moderate plate of Leo Strauss, the formative years---a tough exercise in controlling the gag reflex. Heinous stuff. I am glad only enemies have to read it. And Leo was as close to `thought' as any US conservative has ever been.
As for this article on Reagan, well it was written by Brits and sorry to say they don't have a clue about Reagan. Reagan didn't know reformation from restoration and didn't care. All rights reserved. Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental and do not reflect the views of Reagan's producer or his studio. Thank you and good night.
Reagan was entirely a product of his time and place. The peculiarities of his political mind were formed in a very particular post-war Los Angeles circa 1945-60, a time and place that I am intimately familiar with. For those who don't know, the primary features of this period were a cinema noire reaction to World War II (ie. the rest of the world and all its history), the McCarthy hearings in Hollywood (traitors of the American Dream), the post-war LA suburban real estate boom to get out of the city (America the Good), the rise of tv and mass media pop culture of the 50s (source of all knowledge worth knowing), and the Hearst v. Chandler newspaper wars (how to speak to the masses).
Rather than try to depict this milieu in any detail, let's just say it had an organic unity of its own and Reagan inhabited that, was that, in mind, body and soul. For each of the economic, social, psycho-social and aesthetic currents of the period there corresponds some feature of Reagan's sensibility, and its somewhat garbled expressions in policy. The only fuzziness about Reagan's `conservatism' is in the writer or reader's mind simply because they do not know much about this particular time and place.
For example Reagan's stark partitioning of the world between light and dark, good and bad was typical of the period's movies. While that can be easily seen in westerns with white and black hats, these melodramas had rather direct and concrete equivalents in the social, economic, and cultural life of Los Angeles itself. Everybody with white hats lived in the suburbs, brushed their teeth, were bashful with women, did honest plain work during the week, and went to church on Sunday. Meanwhile everybody with black hats lived in the dark, dirty, nightmares of city life, its industrial and social sewers, and performed only criminal activities and called that work. Of course the former were all nice looking, well behaved, white people, and the latter were not white, not nice looking and not well behaved.
The above local partitioning had its larger view which was the same only writ large, with America and everything about white hat America part of the universal and metaphysical Good, and fill in the rest as an exercise...
Reagan's first acts as governor were a series of attacks on the state's education system, with UCB center stage. We (I include myself, since I was there) his `children' were a spurious product of something dark, probably spoiled by motherly over indulgence and turned into Bad Seeds. He as the John Wayne of Dads was going to settle these little bastards down with a firm belting, laundry soap mouth wash, and plenty of hard work chores. No more kiss night-night, no more between meal treats, and by God none of that fooling around with fancy ideas or sneaking out at night to go run with the bad kids on the other side of town.
The way to make sense of Reagan is to re-write his political policies as if they were Hollywood scripts, because they were. His notorious anti-intellectualism (and consequent attack on education) was simply a translation of the western homily that too much book learning turned boys into sissies and gave girls too many big ideas about running things. Not by co-incidence, that is exactly what was wrong with his own kids.
Reagan's foreign policies were little different although they needed a bit more scope than a western sound stage. For example a Reagan moment of historical depth might have been an observation that the 20thC would have been a lot nicer place if Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud had never written a thing. But since they had, well, too bad a lot people read them and got all confused about what's right and wrong. The problem now was how to set them straight. Reagan himself naturally didn't understand exactly how this happened, but he knew others did, and that was their job---go figure out how to fix it. Dad said fix it, and we fixed it. That's the end. Period. Cast and credits to follow...
He would have much rather taken a bad fall from a horse and died quickly from something noble with his boots on before the sickness set in. But unfortunately life doesn't always compose the best scripts, so we all had to look the other way until it was over. We did. Now we can pretend he was a great guy, did the right thing, and died happy.
The sole reason Reagan was popular was exactly because he enacted familiar scripts, `classics' from the American western storybook of history. Since those scripts are still running around in the US public mind....
Well we have a new sheriff in White Hat America now days and he promised to kick ass on all those sand n-words (kinda like Injuns or Gypsies only meaner) out there in squatter camps, raising hell on the open range... Sure enough, there's smoke on the horizon. The new sheriff and his boys must be clearing them out right now...
The deputy says, ``Move it along. There is nothing to see here folks, so get back to work and quit your belly aching.''
CG