Ronald Reagan's passing was expected, if not unduly delayed. Yet it seems such a shock all the same. It seems as though the curtain has finally rung down on an era, separating the 20th Century from the 21st.
I first saw Reagan when I was 15, when Governor Reagan came to my high school in 1969, in what would be called a "town hall" meeting today -- a speech followed by carefully selected questions. At the time, he seemed out of touch with the times -- an unreconstructed conservative at a time of rampant change. I came to understand, much later, that what he showed was conviction and principle -- he was not willing to bend in the wind when everyone else was buying weathervanes.
There are some that deride Reagan for his stubbornness, or his supposed lack of brains, but what I've come to value most highly in a politician is integrity, and he had that in spades. Most rare of late -- consider Nixon or Clinton. Brilliance is overrated.
I was too young to vote for him either time he ran for Governor, and considering my youth and the times probably wouldn't have -- but I voted for him 5 times for President (3 primaries and 2 general elections), and I have never regretted those votes. Why? Because he's the only person I ever voted for who was up front about what he was going to do, and then went and did it.
Reagan ran in 1980 on 3 issues: end the worldwide economic chaos that had inflation pushing 20% in the US, with negative growth; oppose the Soviet Union's growing hegemony around the world; and stand firm for capitalism and individualism in a world that was increasingly collectivist and unfree. Many politicians run for office professing grand schemes and abandon them once they get into power. Not Reagan. He not only proscecuted his goals with fervor, but he succeeded beyond all belief.
In his First Inaugural Address, Reagan laid out his economic program -- the one his critics later derided as "Reaganomics":
The business of our nation goes forward. These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions. We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people....What followed was 20 years of nearly uninterrupted boom. The economic "free" world before Reagan was one of 70% income taxes, bureaucratic micromanagers, and high tariffs choking global trade. The world today is unrecognizably changed. If Reaganomics was folly, bring on more folly.
Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, causing human misery and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity...
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.
From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price...
It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We are not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing. So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope.
Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness - pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.While many took Reagan's firm stand against Soviet tyranny to be the deluded ramblings of a madman who would plunge the world into catastrophic war, rather than accept the obvious "Realpolitik" of coexistance with the Stalinists, that was not his plan. He intended to shame and embarrass them, to break them economically, to allow their system to be destroyed, not by missles, but by its inherant flaws. And the flaws he chose to strike were all present in Berlin:
It was C.S. Lewis who, in his unforgettable Screwtape Letters, wrote: "The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid ’dens of rime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do no need to raise their voice."
Well, because these "quiet men" do not "raise their voices," because they sometimes speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace, because, like other dictators before them, they’re always making "their final territorial demand," some would have us accept them as their word and accommodate ourselves to their aggressive impulses. But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simpleminded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.
So, I urge you to speak our against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority. You know, I’ve always believed that old Screwtape reserved his best efforts for those of you in the church. So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride - the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same -- still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state. Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly -- here, cutting across your city, where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world. Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.I am a child of the Cold War. I remember, when I was 8, my parents taking my brother and me on a sudden trip to Mexico in October 1962. I remember the Soviet-American proxy wars in Viet-Nam and Afghanistan, and crises beyond number. Like most of my generation, I expected that someday, without warning, the world would end. I remember Berlin, and the Wall, which I walked the length of in 1989, not knowing that 3 months later it would be gone. Soon thereafter the Evil Empire itself was on "the ash heap of history", just as Reagan had said.
In the 1950’s, Khrushchev predicted: "We will bury you." But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind -- too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.
And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control. Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.
There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!