Republicans Have Overlooked Reagan’s Origin Story

As somebody who makes a living, in part, by writing history, I have a confession against interest: I am not a big fan of biographies. My main problem is the constant interruption of narrative flow. Real life moves along multiple tracks simultaneously, but a biographer can only discuss one item at a time, so, for instance, a discussion of Alexander Hamilton’s constitutional theory has to be interrupted by personal news.

In contrast, I much prefer thematic books, particularly those that delineate the political philosophies that animated the great historical personages. Johns Hopkins University Press had a great series in this vein, detailing the thinking of James Madison, George Washington, Thomas Paine, and others.

This series, dormant since 2012, came to mind when reading The Working Class Republican, Henry Olsen’s new book on the political thought of Ronald Reagan.

For the longest time, Reagan was dismissed as an intellectual lightweight—in part because he was a conservative and thus did not have the “proper” views. But Reagan also had a disarmingly folksy way of communicating ideas, which gave the false impression that he had not put a lot of thought into politics. This notion was dealt a heavy blow in 2001, with the publication of Reagan, In His Own Hand, an edited volume of Reagan’s writings that demonstrated the depth of his political views.

Olsen, a leading political analyst and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington think tank, has taken the next step in this progression, working through the voluminous and scattered historical record on Reagan to encapsulate and characterize what, exactly, his views amounted to. The Working Class Republican is the fruit of these fine labors.

Olsen discovers a Reagan who eschewed typical left-right categories. He obviously didn’t fit in with the programmatic New Dealers like Henry Wallace and postwar liberals like Lyndon Johnson. But he also didn’t fit in with conservative ideologues, be they libertarians like Barry Goldwater or supply-siders like Jack Kemp.

Instead, Olsen argues, Reagan saw politics as a debate over whether government would push people down or lift them up. The former view, which Olsen primarily attributes to Henry Wallace (Franklin Roosevelt’s second vice president), offers a Faustian bargain that begins by breeding dependence on welfare, transitions to statist control of society, and ends with totalitarianism. The latter view—Reagan’s own—endeavored to help people make the most of themselves. That implies assistance for the truly needy, as well as public spending on things like infrastructure and education. Contrary to the strict constitutionalism of Gold-water, this vision of government was vigorous, nationalistic, and bold.

Olsen argues that these beliefs animated much of Reagan’s political career. They made possible his lifelong anticommunism, enabling him to perceive a threat that many of his old Hollywood friends and many New Dealers could not fully appreciate. As for domestic politics, his agenda did not amount to a redefinition of what government should and should not do. Instead, it focused on cutting waste from government, reducing the influence of bureaucrats over everyday life, and maintaining a social safety net. Moreover, Reagan endeavored to use government to unlock human potential, which is how he saw his tax cuts when he was president as well as his expansion of the state university system when he was governor of California.

Olsen offers us a new understanding of Reagan as a politician and thinker anchored in the real problems of everyday Americans. This is a welcome “third way” to understand Reagan, correcting what Olsen persuasively argues are the limitations of both conservative and liberal views. Conservatives, per Olsen, are too inclined to see Reagan as Goldwater’s heir, dogmatically hewing to conservative principles above all else. Liberals, on the other hand, are still prone to see him as a lightweight or some sort of elitist. Olsen makes a compelling case that Reagan was at heart a kind of populist whose belief in using government to lift people up meant, in the particular conditions of postwar America, unburdening them from the demands of the state. In this way, Reagan comes across as a sort of modern-day Jeffersonian, a pragmatist who appreciated the virtues of government but was also deeply cognizant of its dangers.

Olsen is at his sharpest when examining Reagan, but when he turns his attention to other 20th-century political figures, he tends to lose focus. This is particularly true of Franklin Roosevelt, who in this narrative is Reagan’s political idol. Olsen’s effort to situate Reagan within FDR’s New Deal tradition could have used more precision. Olsen argues that Reagan’s views fit within what Olsen calls the “public New Deal,” but this concept is hard to define, other than as the things about the New Deal that Reagan liked. And Olsen makes no mention of such New Deal legislation as the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act—exactly the sort of systematic endeavors to control society that Olsen says Reagan always opposed. Far from being an “undertone” (Olsen’s term) of the New Deal, they were in fact the first major parts of the program, implemented during FDR’s famous first 100 days.

Moreover, Olsen endeavors to make a distinction between Harry Truman’s interpretation of the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, arguing that the former was consistent with Reagan’s views but the latter was not. Yet Truman’s Fair Deal in fact served as the blueprint for postwar liberalism, including the Great Society itself. And it included the very sorts of sweeping social welfare programs that Reagan would later argue bred dependence.

Finally, Olsen brushes past the fact that Reagan was clearly a New Deal apostate. Most New Dealers, after all, continued to back the Democratic party through the 1960s. Indeed, many of them, including Eleanor Roosevelt, were deeply disappointed by the Kennedy-Johnson ticket of 1960. The cultural revolution of the New Left, which seemed to culminate with the George McGovern candidacy of 1972, turned off many New Dealers. But Reagan had long since been out of the fold. Olsen does not explain how or why Reagan was remaining true to FDR’s principles while the likes of Adlai Stevenson, JFK, LBJ, and Hubert Humphrey were not.

If anything, the Reagan that Olsen discovers seems less like a New Dealer and more like an earnest Gilded Age Republican, the sort who supported protective tariffs to boost wages for industrial workers as well as a generous pension program for the widows, orphans, and wounded veterans of the Civil War. A William McKinley rather than a Franklin Roosevelt.

If Olsen is imprecise on the intellectual tradition from which Reagan comes, he is as sharp as a tack on what Reagan’s legacy means for conservatives today. His last chapter serves as a sweeping rebuke of the successors of Reagan within the Republican party. He argues that the GOP has failed to follow through on Reagan’s dream of building a new majority coalition because it has misunderstood its hero’s priorities.

Instead of looking for ways to lift up the broad middle of the country, Republicans have fallen into three traps. First, their emphasis on tax cuts for the wealthy, combined with cuts to entitlement programs, gives the impression that they value money over people. Second, prioritizing abstractions like the budget deficit or constitutional limitations to government makes it seem like Republican leaders are out of touch with ordinary Americans. Third, their occasional interest in extreme poverty (such as George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda and Paul Ryan’s efforts after 2012) makes them seem uninterested in the sorts of working-class Americans who flocked to Reagan’s banner.

Republicans have won elections, of course, but Olsen reckons that this is not because Republican candidates and policies have been especially attractive but because the Democratic obsession with Wallace-style central planning has been especially unattractive. Voters rejected Hillarycare in 1994 and Obamacare in 2010, but that does not mean they were endorsing Medicare cuts or the constitutional purity of the Tea Party.

I do not find this account fully persuasive. For instance, Olsen says that Republicans have rarely won a majority of the popular vote for president since 1984. True—but too many analysts have made too much of this. After all, most presidential elections in the postwar era can be explained by unrelated factors like the rate of economic growth and the job approval of the incumbent. The most notable divergence from this trend, in 2000, led to the election of George W. Bush, a Republican, despite the popularity of President Bill Clinton and robust economic growth that should have helped Democratic nominee Al Gore.

Still, there is more than a little food for thought here. I was particularly persuaded by Olsen’s claim that Republicans have lost Reagan’s connection to average Americans—and not just because they can’t imitate his superlative use of political rhetoric. Reagan’s agenda had a grounding in the real problems of everyday Americans that, Olsen rightly notes, the Paul Ryan plan does not. That was also a problem with the recent failed efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare: Neither the House nor the Senate version offered a positive vision of how people would be able reliably to afford medical care in the future. (I had not thought of the issue from this perspective until I read Olsen’s closing chapter.)

All told, The Working Class Republican is a superb book. Like all works of such ambitious scope, it sometimes misses the mark, but that does not diminish the overall excellence of the effort. I highly recommend it. Not only is it a good delineation of the political philosophy of Ronald Reagan, it can also help reground conservatives in the age of Donald Trump.

Jay Cost is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

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