Years ago some forgotten columnist called Ronald Reagan's success as president a triumph of style over substance. This assessment has hung around like cheap cologne for twenty years, covering up the stench of Reagan's duplicitous dealings. Ronald Reagan's great achievement was the discovery that Americans were tired of politics and would rather talk about soap operas than debate the complications of government policy and human affairs. Americans were fed up with feeling defeated: Nixon's disgrace, the smoky pall of Vietnam, disturbing social upheaval, OPEC jerking our economy around like a dog on a leash, and to top it off, the Iranian embassy disaster. Ronald Reagan found a way to reach out to the American public and calm their fears and revitalize their enthusiasm for the American way. He did it the old fashioned way. He did it with demagoguery.
Demagogue - a political leader who gains power by appealing to people's emotions and prejudices rather than their rationality.
While Reagan's buoyant popularity may have been a personal triumph for the man, it was nothing less than a tragedy for the country. Reagan made people smile and feel good while he gave away hundreds of billions of dollars of their money to bankers turned thieves, murdered uncounted Latin American men, women, and children in the name of democracy, cynically misrepresented his economic policies, and undermined the entire foundation of civic enterprise and government. And while he trampled the central principles of good governance, the president found that no one held him accountable to those principles as long as he mouthed optimistic platitudes about American virtue.
One of Reagan's best-remembered inanities was the "Morning in America" speech made during the 1984 presidential campaign. Who but the most pessimistic doom-mongering liberal would not be moved by the graceful and appealing simplicity of that vision? We emerge from darkness into the fresh dewy light of morning, all nightmares and demons purged, all that is past is left behind, we begin here, anew. President Reagan gave us permission to forget history and celebrate our innocence. We should just feel good about ourselves and our country. No thought, nor sacrifice required.
Sadly, what President Reagan drew as a sketch, President Bush has now crafted into his magnum opus. While Reagan complained about the folly of government, President Bush makes certain it is so. While Reagan flirted with deficit spending, Bush is married to it. Reagan mocked environmental laws; Bush bulldozes them. Reagan showed how having a dangerous foreign adversary makes the president popular, so Bush turned a small group of disorganized luddite Muslims into a global military threat, and started a war to prove it. Reagan tinkered with the limits of the law, Bush breaks them without batting an eye.
Morning in America has become dusk and we may be in for a very long night indeed.