Adrian Wooldridge: Reagan wasn't the conservative he's made out to be

For those of us of a certain age and sensibility, Ronald Reagan is the quintessential American conservative. He not only vanquished the Evil Empire and restored business’s animal spirits. He rode a horse, wore a cowboy hat and, when his wife came to visit him in hospital after he survived a 1981 assassination attempt, quipped “honey, I forgot to duck.” By comparison, President Donald Trump is an interloper as well as a Yahoo.

But does this view survive forensic analysis? In a recent column on Sam Tanenhaus’ new biography of William Buckley, my colleague, Toby Harshaw, makes it clear that Trumpism is deeply rooted in the American conservative tradition. And, as I made my own journey through Tanenhaus’ thousand pages, I was struck by a heretical thought: The real interloper in the conservative tradition was not Trump but Ronald Reagan (and, by implication, his great imitator, George W. Bush).

Reagan was the ultimate double agent: Beneath his cowboy hat, he smuggled two ideas that were anathema to movement conservatives, neoliberalism and neoconservativism, into the heart of Republican policymaking.

Reagan certainly campaigned as a movement conservative. He first became a conservative hero when he delivered a powerful televised speech on October 27, 1964, explaining why he endorsed the presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. During the 1980 campaign, he told a meeting of religious conservatives that, even though they couldn’t endorse him, he endorsed them. At the 1981 Gridiron Dinner in Washington (two days before the assassination attempt), he quipped that “sometimes in our administration, the right hand doesn’t know what the far right-hand is doing.”

Yet in office he disappointed his most dedicated followers on the things that mattered to them most, from banning abortion to cutting spending, and instead put in place the foundations of both neoliberalism and neoconservatism. He appointed a rising generation of neoconservatives such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz to his administration. James Baker, his chief of staff and then treasury secretary, and Paul Volcker, his chairman of the Federal Reserve until 1987, and Volcker’s successor, Alan Greenspan, were regarded as heroes by the sort of people who are invited to Bilderberg and Davos.

Reagan took the traditional conservative beliefs in anti-Communism and deregulation and transformed them into faith in globalization. He believed in the assertion of both American power and American values abroad — a belief that owed more to Woodrow Wilson than to Calvin Coolidge.

In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he even enthused about “a standing UN force — an army of conscience — that is fully equipped and prepared to carve out humanitarian sanctuaries through force if necessary.” He adopted a laissez-faire attitude to immigration, a motor of the economy of his native California, and eventually signed the 1986 immigration act offering amnesty to three million workers. He concluded the last remarks he delivered as president with a paean to immigrants as the most important source of American greatness.

In 2008 Lou Cannon, Reagan’s best biographer, teamed up with his son, Carl, to publish a book on George W. Bush’s presidency, Reagan’s Disciple. Bush followed the Reagan script to the letter in campaigning as a movement conservative and then governing as a neoliberal-neoconservative. His presidential campaign included speaking at Bob Jones University, a Baptist institution that banned same-sex dating. His campaign manager, Karl Rove, repeatedly invoked (and later wrote a book about) President William McKinley, a protectionist. He promised a “humble but strong” foreign policy that would eschew foreign entanglements.

But in office he relied heavily on a group of neoconservatives and market fundamentalists who had got their start under Reagan and who were now ripe with experience: Wolfowitz was number two in the Pentagon, Perle was a ubiquitous wire puller, and Bill Kristol, the son of the man who gave neoconservatism its name, edited the administration’s favorite magazine, The Weekly Standard.

He pursued a policy of cutting taxes and deregulating the economy unrestrained by either spending cuts or government discipline, with Vice President Dick Cheney declaring that “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” He floated the idea of a comprehensive guest worker program early in his presidency and later proposed giving legal status to 8-10 million illegal immigrants, half of them from Mexico. After Sept. 11, he pursued an ambitious policy of spreading democracy to the Middle East, through a mixture of regime change and evangelization for liberal values.

Bush’s overreach put an end to the GOP’s flirtation with both neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The debacle of the Iraq War, triggered by the pursuit of Saddam Hussein’s illusory weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda, infuriated young conservatives such as JD Vance (who served for six months in Iraq in 2005 as a military journalist). Bush’s irresponsible financial management led to the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.

But even before these twin disasters, the relationship between Beltway conservatives and what John Micklethwait and I once called The Right Nation were under strain. Globalization — and particularly China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001 — devastated the hometowns of the blue-collar workers who had turned to Reagan in 1980. Regular workers found that their wages were stagnating even as a tiny elite reaped the fruits of the global economy. Many movement conservatives, particularly on the religious right, worried that they had been “played” by a Washington establishment that had a very different view of conservatism from them.

The collapse of the House that Reagan built has inevitably led to the reassertion of an older type of conservatism: a conservatism that had flourished in its purest form in the 1920s, that emphasized protectionism and immigration control, that had only reluctantly made its peace with an active foreign policy because of the threat of Communism, and that was rooted in Alexander Hamilton’s enthusiasm for tariffs and George Washington’s suspicion of foreign entanglements.

This tradition was preserved by Patrick Buchanan who made a surprisingly strong run against George Bush senior for the presidency in 1992 and promised, in his address to the Republican National Convention, to take back American culture block by block, just as “our boys” in the National Guard had taken back Los Angeles “block by block” after the Rodney King riots. It was gilded by dissident intellectuals such as Sam Francis, who argued that American conservatism was fueled by “Middle American Radicals” who wanted protection from disorder not free trade, and Samuel Huntington, who insisted that the most important question in politics was not an economic one but a cultural one, Who Are We?.

Trump’s presidency may lead to political disaster for the Republicans, given his propensity for piling up debt, shifting the rules of trade and picking fights. But anybody who thinks that a post-Trump Republican Party will revert back to Ronald Reagan’s policies will be disappointed — much as those of us of a certain age and temperament might hope to the contrary.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”