Reconsidering Reagan

Ronald Reagan’s death has provided a new opportunity to assess his legacy. This is a particularly important time to reconsider Reagan; I believe his decade-long bout with Alzheimer’s disease had a chilling effect on critical analysis of his presidency. The effect of this chill has allowed Reagan supporters to create a mythology about Reagan and his presidency that is not supported by the facts. Now is the best time to deal with the mythology and offer an assessment that helps balances the perspective of his presidency.

Reagan is credited with lifting the nation out of the malaise that began with the Nixon presidency following the demoralizing pull out of Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. My colleague, James Pfiffner, in his book The Character Factor: How We Judge America’s Presidents, points out that Ronald Reagan’s character was closely related to his strengths and weaknesses as a politician and his successes and failures as president. Part of his popularity with the American public was due to his frequent appeals to traditional American values. His American values included a suspicion of government, the national government in particular, but also a conviction that America was still destined for greatness. Optimism was one of his major strengths; he believed that there was a solution to every problem. Part of Reagan’s appeal was that he was confident in himself and projected his optimism about the United States, if it could only be brought back to its traditional values. Importantly, he did not feel the same insecurity and resentment that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon did.

Pfiffner argues that Reagan’s rhetorical abilities were impressive, in part because of the professional skills he had honed as an actor and in part because he personally believed what he was preaching. That the vision of the country he projected was simple was a strength; he was easily understood and it corresponded with his own values and vision.

There is another side to the Reagan legacy as well. He is well known for his ambitious call to make America the shining city on the hill. The call provided an injection of sorely needed optimism, but may have obscured the reality of Reagan’s policy results. Indeed, America as the shining house on the hill to which he eloquently referred, had more than a few undesirable neighborhoods when he left office in January 1989. Two of those neighborhoods were known as budget deficit and racial polarization.

A Legacy of Budget Deficits

Reagan’s legacy is clear in the budget deficit neighborhood. He entered the White House in January 1981–after winning the presidency by campaigning that tax cuts and massive increases in defense spending could co-exists with a balanced budget. The budget deficit was $74 billion when he entered the White House; it grew to $231 billion in Reagan’s final year. The trade deficit was even worse, nearing $200 billion per year when Reagan left office. The national debt rose to $2 trillion.

A major contributor to the budget deficit was the impact of the tax cuts during the first five years of Reagan’s presidency. He gave $750 billion in tax relief to individuals and corporations. Thirty-five percent of all the individual tax relief went to the top five percent income earners of the country. The average person making $15,000 a year ended up paying $100 more in federal taxes than before the first Reagan cuts went into effect; however, those with $200,000 in annual earnings received an additional $20,000 in tax relief.

While creating significant revenue reductions, Reagan also increased military spending by $123 billion in his first budget, and aggregate military total of $2.3 trillion in military spending for his first five years in office.

Reagan campaigned against the federal bureaucracy, vowing to reduce the size of the federal government. However, after Reagan's two terms, spending by the federal government was one-quarter higher, factoring out inflation, than when he got there; the federal civilian workforce had increased from 2.8 million to 3 million; and federal spending, as a share of Gross Domestic Product, had decreased by one percentage point to 21.2 percent.

A Legacy of Racial Polarization

The racial polarization neighborhood is especially large in Reagan’s shining city on the hill. It was here that he adroitly used racial symbolism for political gain.

His first act as the 1980 Republican party nominee was to kick off his general election campaign at a state fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi. It’s unlikely he was there for the electoral votes, which were already likely to fall in the Republican column. The more likely explanation for his appearance there was that he was interested in sending a message to racial conservatives that he embodied their resistence to racial fairness and race-based public policy intended to equalize opportunity for minorities. Philadelphia, Mississippi was a particularly important symbol in America’s racial history. It was where three civil rights workers–James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman–were killed. Reagan’s appearance there, coupled with his support of states’ rights, sent an implicit message to southern conservatives.

There were other examples of political symbolism including–

• An additional symbol in this regard was Reagan’s appearance at Bob Jones University, an institution which, at that time, outlawed interracial dating. Reagan also supported tax exempt status for the university, despite its racial policies. • Also noteworthy was Reagan’s position on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday bill. Reagan opposed the bill but, in the face of overwhelming congressional support, signed it into law.

• The racial polarization neighborhood also housed “welfare queens,” a euphemism for Black women that was used to help justify deep cuts in social policy. The linking of Blacks and welfare made it easier to indirectly criticize Black America by actually criticizing welfare.

• Reagan initially refused to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). This was during his efforts to create an alternative Black leadership in America, so meeting with the CBC would them with a level of legitimacy than would complicate his efforts to marginalize traditional Black leadership. He ultimately had one meeting with the CBC during his eight-year presidency.

Reagan’s legacy of racial polarization also included a number of important policy stances and decisions that conflict with the conservative-preferred ideal of Reagan as a great uniter.

Reagan’s policy of “constructive engagement” with the Apartheid government of South Africa was particularly useless and embarrassing to lovers of freedom and equality. Congress, led by the Congressional Black Caucus, saw Reagan’s policy as insufficient, and passed legislation over his veto to impose sanctions on the South African government, a major factor in the ending of Apartheid. Moreover, the Reagan administration chose to support Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a prominent critic of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. This move further convinced many that Reagan was not interested in freedom for Black South Africans as Buthelezi was viewed with suspicion among many anti-Apartheid groups.

Reagan gutted the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, rendering it a shell of its former self and unable to carry out its historic role as investigator of and advisor on America’s civil rights issues. First, he changed the leadership and direction of the commission, moving it away investigating racial and sexual discrimination and studying and issuing reports on the same. Second, Reagan gutted its financing. The Commissions FY 1987 budget was cut to $8 million which represented a 33% reduction from FY 1986. By fiscal year 1988, there budget was down to $5.8 million. The cuts had a demoralizing effect on staff, resulting in a mass exodus of the commission’s most experienced staffers. The Commission lost half of its overall staff during the Reagan years, beginning a descent into irrelevance that continues today. I worked as a policy analyst there during the mid-1990s and saw first hand how hard the Reagan cuts undermined the Commission.

Reagan’s efforts to destabilize the civil rights commission was part of a larger strategy to undermine civil rights enforcement throughout the federal government. Budgets were slashed and the attendant personnel and other cuts rendered impotent the ability of federal agencies to investigate and enforce civil rights regulations. The largest drops came in EEOC, Education, and Health and Human Services; Transportation also suffered a drop. The major losses of full-time civil rights personnel were in programs focused on the private sector, including fair housing, and other civil and constitutional rights.

A Mixed Legacy–At Best

Ultimately, the Reagan legacy is mixed–at best. On one hand, unemployment, interest rates, and inflation decreased; and the stock market more than doubled. The end of the Cold War was accelerated. Conversely, the budget deficit, trade deficit, national debt exploded; and not only did Reagan fail to reign in the size and scope of government, it actually grew during his presidency. Socially and culturally, the leading indicators during the 1980s argue against Reagan as a great force for moral leadership. Up: teen-suicides, births to unmarried teenagers (way up), divorce rates, number of single-parent families (as a percentage of nuclear families), children born to unmarried parents. Down: marriage rates, percentage of children living with both biological parents. Analysts are now free to explore both sides of Reagan’s record; let’s hope that now we can get a 360 degree view of it.

© Michael K. Fauntroy

June 9, 2004