On Sat, 12 Jun 2004 13:02:54 -0500 Jacob Conrad <jakub at att.net> writes:
> Why was Reagan so popular, and was he really all that popular? Some
> groping thoughts:
>
> First, don't forget the decisive effect of sheer historical
> contingency. All kinds of things could have happened that would
> have
> made Reagan's popularity a non-issue. The rescue mission to free
> the
> Tehran hostages might have succeeded, for example, and Carter might
> then
> have been re-elected.
Maybe, maybe not. Carter also suffered from the fact that he was running for reelection when the economy was tanking, so I think he would have been in dire need for an "October surprise" if he was to be reelected. Actually, the Iranian hostages crisis was probably responsible for keeping up his poll numbers in 1980 much higher than they would have been otherwise through most of the campaign. Through much of the campaign, Carter's "Rose Garden" strategy seemed to be working well for him.
> Reagan would have faded into relative
> obscurity,
> another William McAdoo or Theodore Bilbo. There would have been no
> opportunity for the right to cement its political and cultural
> power,
> and we would be speculating about something else, let's say the
> cultural
> roots of Jimmy Carter's undying popularity with the American public.
>
> The different versions of the "Americans are stupid and/or vicious"
> thesis (to the extent they're seriously meant) can be dismissed as
> lacking surface plausibility. There's no reason to think that such
> a
> large sample of the earth's population, 290 million or so, is any
> more
> or less stupid and/or vicious than any other sizeable
> group--Norwegians,
> Tibetans, Trobriand Islanders, take your pick.
>
> One should also keep a sense of proportion. The press has
> temporarily
> promoted him in death to god-hero status, but that will quickly
> fade.
> Sure, propaganda, or marketing--"ideology"-- is also a big factor:
> anything loudly and confidently and frequently asserted will come to
> be
> widely believed. Many people adored him, but many others despised or
>
> ridiculed him, and still others were more or less indifferent to his
>
> appeal.
>
> Nevertheless, something remains to be explained. Reagan _was_
> popular
> with a large number of people who should have had every reason to
> oppose
> him. His reputation also survived a battering that would have sunk
> other politicians. I don't dismiss the role of propaganda and the
> acquiescence of the press here either, but when all that is
> accounted
> for, he still had a distinctive personal appeal that played a large
> role
> in his political success.
>
> I think that gender is central to all this. Many people--men in
> particular--saw in him an idealized version of themselves made
> flesh.
> Reagan often reminded me of a certain type of middle-American man
> born
> before, oh, WW II or so, not just in his style and
> manner--patronizing,
> sentimental, at times weirdly childish, with a nastily authoritarian
>
> quality never far from the surface--but also in his seeming lack of
> an
> individuated inner life and apparent lack of self-doubt. His very
> shallowness represented an ideal of sorts. He seemed to so
> thoroughly
> inhabit a gender-defined social role that it became contiguous with,
> or
> even identical to, individual personality. This is perhaps the
> source
> of the phoniness that a lot of people perceived in Reagan, which is
> so
> often attributed to his profession as a movie actor. Reagan's
> acting
> ability and experience contributed to his ability to project such an
>
> image on the public stage, but I think its roots go deeper. What
> some
> saw as his phoniness, others, especially men raised in traditional
> environments who internalized the male character formation
> characteristic of those milieux, saw as a sign of his having
> achieved an
> ideal self. He was to that extent a representative man. An attack
> on
> him was an attack on a deeply held ideal, and in defending Reagan
> they
> were defending a certain self-image, already seen as under threat
> from
> the gradual long-term erosion of patriarchy. Reagan did express a
> certain "egalitarianism," but it was a narrow and exclusive
> egalitarianism that drew its solidarity from despising or at best
> patronizing outsiders.
>
> He was able to conjoin this personal image to a powerful and
> resonant
> body of historical mythology. Reagan is sometimes associated with
> the
> Depression and WWII generations, but he was born in 1911, and grew
> to
> adulthood through the teens and the roaring twenties. His core
> political ideals would have been those bequeathed by the progressive
>
> era. The progressive legacy is a complicated one, and includes much
>
> that the US left of today can endorse, but has other aspects that we
>
> find archaic, or abhorrent, or at least problematic. Michael
> McGerr's
> recent book, _A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the
> Progressive
> Movement in America, 1870 - 1920_ does a good job of bringing out
> the
> different strands that went into progressivism. In the broadest
> terms,
> progressivism can be seen as an effort to reconcile the pre-Civil
> War
> American ideals of "independence" (see Eric Foner on the meaning of
> "independence") and "liberty" with large-scale industrial capitalism
> and
> the class structure associated with it. A big part of this was
> asserting a unifying national mythology in order to tamp down social
> and
> political conflict, and to fit a fractious and divided population to
> the
> imperialist impulse then taking shape. It is this mythology that
> Reagan
> brought up to date and expressed to such great political effect.
It should be kept in mind that Reagan as a young man was a leftist. He wasn't just a supporter of FDR and the New Deal, he was very much a supporter of Popular Front politics and he even attempted to join the CPUSA but they turned down his membership application as Edmund Morris pointed out in his Reagan biography. In later years, when he had moved to the right, Reagan was very adept at adapting leftist sounding rhetoric to advance right-wing causes.
>
> Reagan and Reaganism, seen from the left, were the perfect
> historical
> storm that wrecked a lot of ships. His emotional appeal in the US
> worked on several different levels. During his interminable
> obsequies,
> we had NPR on at the office, playing in the background while my
> colleague and I rolled our eyes and cracked jokes. Much of the
> program
> was really quite ironic. They sang, of course, "The Battle Hymn of
> the
> Republic." According to one version of history, Julia Ward Howe
> first
> thought of the words upon hearing, as she drifted off to sleep in
> her
> hotel room, the abolition regiments from Massachusetts singing "John
>
> Brown's Body" (the source of the melody) as they marched into
> Lincoln's
> Washington to garrison the city against what the men of those
> regiments
> would have called the "slave power." We hear in it the martial tone
>
> (they were after all at war) and the sickly Christianity ("In the
> beauty
> of the lilies etc."), but the people of the time would have
> experienced
> it quite differently. It's an attempt at a Yankee abolitionist
> "Internationale," spoiled for many of us by its appropriation for
> other,
> later, oft-times imperial purposes (How would a survivor of
> Stalin's
> camps hear the real "Internationale"?) Also on the funeral program
> were
> the familiar Quaker hymn "Amazing Grace," composed in remorse by a
> reformed slave trader, and John Winthrop's much-abused Arabella
> speech,
> the "City on a Hill" discourse. Not many years after it was spoken,
> the
> compatriots of Winthrop and his friends back in the old country--the
>
> place Winthrop had in mind when he delivered it--sent Charles I to
> the
> chopping block. The Quakers and Puritans, in a world so very
> different
> from ours, _were_ the "left" of their time, by something more than
> analogy, with whom the American left of today ought to feel at least
>
> some affinity across the centuries. (This admittedly takes a
> certain
> amount of informed archaeological imagination). There is, in any
> case,
> no reason in the world to allow the vicious, but unfortunately not
> stupid right, to appropriate and control national memory by
> asserting
> their "ownership" of the national past.
>
> Jacob Conrad
>
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>
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