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REMEMBERING RONALD REAGAN
by
Rod D. Martin, 17 September 2002
It was fashionable for a time to consider Ronald Reagan a warmonger and a
fool. Perhaps this is the best indicator of his Churchillian stature; for
like Reagan, Churchill was so maligned, and like Churchill, Reagan saved the
world.
The left, of course, credited Gorbachev for this, which resembled nothing so
much as crediting Hitler's suicide for the end of World War II. Reagan's
victory -- and the fact that we are not now speaking Russian or buried ala
Khrushchev under a smoldering ruin -- was produced of a vision shared by no
president before him, and a fortitude possessed by few.
He refused to accept the left's received wisdom of "moral equivalence"
between the Communist East and the democratic West: he called Russia the
"evil empire" it was, and revived the moral courage essential for victory.
His opponents, lesser men from Michael Dukakis to Michael Foot, hurled their
epithets: "dangerous," "destabilizing," "cowboy." But Reagan understood the
real danger was in a nuclear superpower bent on world conquest and in the
throes of both economic and ethnic collapses its Western apologists refused
to see.
He repaired a nuclear "deterrent" so badly eroded as to lack credibility and
invite blackmail. Side by side with Margaret Thatcher, he stood down the
left's greatest-ever attempted appeasement -- the nuclear freeze movement --
and not only rearmed America but re-established the deterrent in Europe.
The Soviets, playing off the terror of the times, threatened to walk out of
stalled arms talks if he did so. In a move that stunned everyone, he wished
them fond farewell. He would not be bullied; and when they realized it,
they returned.
His certainty that people everywhere yearned for freedom and that free
markets could always out-produce centrally-planned slavery drove his
strategies where realpolitik could never go. He replaced both containment
and détente with his "Reagan Doctrine," proclaiming America would actively
roll back its foe by helping freedom fighters behind the Iron Curtain. From
World War II until Reagan, not one square inch of ground had been recovered
once lost to communism. Now all things changed, as Moscow was made to play
defense, first in Grenada and Afghanistan, and ultimately from the Berlin
Wall to the USSR itself.
Unwilling to play for less than total victory, he went for the Russian
jugular. Realizing that over half of all Soviet hard currency came from the
export of oil he cut a deal with Saudi Arabia: weapons and other benefits
previously unavailable, in exchange for an oil glut which would buoy the
West and skewer the common foe. Combining this with an arms race, the
keystone of which was the high-tech Strategic Defense Initiative, he pushed
Moscow over a cliff his opponents said could not be there. Gorbachev, coming
in much too late after a string of dead General Secretaries, was left first
to "restructure," then to dismantle his empire, and finally just to "wither
away."
This is Reagan's greatest legacy, but it is hardly his only one. His
supply-side faith in Laffer's lower marginal tax rates ignited a twenty-year
boom in an America used to every-three-year recessions. His vision for
tax-deferred retirement accounts transferred the "means of production" to
the "proletariat" and destroyed the basis for class warfare: shareholders,
a tiny fraction of the population in 1980, today are a large majority. The
wealth his ideas created drove a technological boom unlike any the world had
ever seen, and convinced billions previously susceptible to socialism that
freedom really works.
It is there that Reagan's greatness really lies. To a bleak Orwellian
world, he restored hope; and the chance not only that there would be a next
century, but that it would be a good one.
Vanguard of the Revolution
http://www.theVanguard.org
Copyright: Rod D. Martin, 17 September 2002.
-- Rod D. Martin, Founder and Chairman of Vanguard PAC
(http://www.theVanguard.org),
is an attorney and writer from
Little Rock, Arkansas. A former policy director to Arkansas Gov.
Mike Huckabee, he is the Center for Cultural Leadership's Senior
Fellow in Public Policy and Political Affairs.
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