Sarah Pale-ing

Post-Reaganomics Republicans: Pale, Paler, Palin

One of the drawbacks of working in the political arena is that you have to read regularly the hard-cover scribbling of 'people with vision' - even when it's far short of 20/20 - or of opinion leaders that are notoriously quoted by underlings on the corridors of political power all over the world. While in no danger of being quoted - simply for the lack of any quotable and memorable passages within the pages of Sarah Palin's awkward book - the former Alaska governor is even more strangely ushered in by US conservatives as something of a messiah of true Reaganomics, a term too loosely used anyway: as if former President Ronald Reagan was a champion of authentic supply-side neoconservativism.

So, while on the train ride to and fro the latest Tory Party conference last weekend, I battled my way through Sarah Palin’s book, Going Rogue, and began to wonder how American conservatism had come to this orgy of redundancy. Ms Palin’s book is smug, lightweight, nationalistic and entirely free of original ideas. How has this woman become the darling of the American right? How has she become so popular that some bookmakers make her the favourite to win the Republican party nomination in 2012?

And then I realised – the rot set in with Ronald Reagan. It might seem an odd conclusion, since President Reagan is a conservative hero who won two presidential elections. But the ideas that are now known as “Reaganism” are, in fact, profoundly subversive of some of the most important conservative values. Traditional conservatives disdain populism and respect knowledge. They believe in balancing the government’s books. And they are pragmatists who are suspicious of ideology. Reagan debased all these ideas – and modern American conservatism is still suffering of the consequences.

The most damaging idea propagated by the Reagan myth is the cult of the idiot-savant (the wise fool). You can see it in the very first line of Dinesh D’Souza’s admiring biography of Reagan, which proclaims: “Sometimes it really helps to be a dummy.” Mr D’Souza recounts numerous stories in which intellectuals – even conservative intellectuals – disdained Reagan. A conservative vanguard of supreme intellect was the late William F Buckley - one of my true mentors I had the privilege to know. He scorned Reagan's tendency to spend cabinet meetings sorting jelly beans into different colours, and his taste for flaky anecdotes. But, Mr D’Souza concludes, the “dummy” was right and the pointy-heads were wrong. I can see the attraction of putting colours into drab Alaskan days for Sarah Palin, and the success of avoiding unnecessary stress on her brain.

However, a dangerous chain of reasoning flows from this popular version of history. Reagan was apparently stupid and often startlingly ignorant – but he was vindicated by history. Therefore, goes the theory, ignorance and stupidity are good signs. They show that a politician is in tune with the deeper wisdom of the people. Once you start thinking like that, it is but a short step to Sarah Palin.

If it is ignorance you are after, then Ms Palin is definitely your woman. Game Change, a recent book on the 2008 presidential election campaign with a title's connotation of Palin's knack for hunting like-minded creatures such as caribou, recounts how desperate advisers to the McCain-Palin campaign decided that they had to give her a crash-course in modern history, before the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden.

“They sat Palin down at a table in the suite, spread out a map of the world, and proceeded to give her a potted history of foreign policy. They started with the Spanish civil war, then moved on to world war one, world war two, the cold war. When the teachers suggested breaking for lunch or dinner, the student resisted. ‘No, no, no, let’s keep going,’ Ms Palin said. ‘This is awesome’.” The history of the 20th century? I suppose it is pretty awesome.

In fact, Ms Palin is much, much less qualified to be president than Reagan ever was. She is Ronald Reagan lite – and Reagan was pretty lite to begin with. But he had, at least, been governor of California, not Alaska, and had read widely. He also had a glorious ability to surround himself with advisers much smarter than himself without feeling inferior. That enabled him to delegate power to high calibre intellectuals like David Stockman and James Baker without actually yielding any of the executive powers invested in the US Presidency.

The damage Reaganism did to conservatism extends well beyond the Palin in-effect. The late president also became associated with a couple of bad ideas that helped make the administration of George W. Bush such a disaster. The first was fiscal incontinence; the second is the view that the key to a successful foreign policy is a rigid distinction between good and evil, and a strong military. It was a fateful fluke of luck that crowned Reagan's naïveté with success: the emergence of Mikhael Gorbachev as transitionally leader of the Soviet Union who heralded in the new Russia.

The Republican party – with Ms Palin to the fore – is currently decrying the huge deficits being run by the Obama administration. But this is a recent conversion. Ever since the Reagan years, the Republicans have been the party of outlandish deficit spending.

Conservatives once believed both in lower taxes and in balancing the budget. Under Reagan, they simply became the party of tax cuts, without any commitment to fiscal responsibility. Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s vice-president, admitted as much when he told a cabinet colleague: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” A mystical belief took hold that if you just cut taxes, the economy would grow fast enough to cover the shortfall – or government would shrink, almost by magic. Somehow it would all come right. This drift in Republican thinking was actually profoundly anti-conservative – because it elevated ideology (cut taxes at any cost) over a pragmatic commitment to good governance.

It is the same with foreign policy. Reagan’s insistence that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” caused many liberals to wince – but it was basically accurate. However, when George W. Bush attempted to emulate Reagan’s “moral clarity”, he came up with the “Axis of Evil” – a silly concept that led America into a costly and unnecessary war in Iraq. President Bush also missed the fact that while Reagan had built up the US military, he had avoided any big wars. Invading Grenada under Reagan was one thing; invading Iraq under Mr Bush turned out to be quite another.

The real Reagan was, in fact, rather more pragmatic than the “Reagan myth” that sprang up after he left office. Real Reagan was willing to raise taxes in extremis, and became a firm believer in arms-reduction talks. Today’s American conservatives, who claim the mantle of Reagan, would regard these ideas as treachery and weakness. Reagan was ultimately a successful president. But he left behind a poisonous legacy for the conservative movement.

Sarah Palin will not have to worry about leaving behind any legacy. Republicans might be idiotic enough to choose her as their presidential candidate in 2012, but the American electorate will exercise enough wisdom to rather elect a monkey than the over-animated tramp on a permanent sugar high.


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