The Guardian
Ronald Reagan and the joy of myth-making
Many people credit Reagan with restoring American optimism and 'winning' the cold war but forget that he also racked up huge deficits that mortgaged his country's economic future
I stayed the course with the Reagan posse after the unveiling of his statue in Grosvenor Square yesterday. That meant attending the gala dinner in the City of London's gorgeous Guildhall and being teased by colleagues in the hack pack for joining assorted toasts to the 40th president, the Queen and others deemed (by the hacks) to be Guardian class enemies.
Never mind, it was a fascinating tribal occasion, as tribal occasions often are for non-tribalists. Apart from my own report on the unveiling today's Guardian contains at least two more reports taking prods at Reagan and his legacy, in contrast to more Tory papers, which were content with anodyne picture captions.
So tribalism cuts both ways. I'll come back to that in a moment.
All the same, I was mightily impressed by the power of high-gloss myth-making during both sets of speeches I heard from the Tory and Republican dignitaries who assembled in Mayfair and later regrouped at the Guildhall to do it all again, this time as an expensive fund-raiser.
As I noted yesterday, Reagan had an easy charm and crafty political skills. Thus during my sojourn in the Washington of his second term I quickly realised that when the Prez (personally liberal in his instincts, he'd lived in Hollywood for years) attacked abortion it probably meant he was about to let down the pro-lifers. He had a chameleon-like quality, which Medhi Hassan notes in his comment page article.
No point here in spending more time picking holes in the claims made by William Hague, Condoleezza Rice and other cheerleaders keen to promote Reagan as a major world statesman of the end of the 20th century because he "won" the cold war – defence secretary Liam Fox's verb of choice.
My interest here is his impact on his own country, not the wider world where he is revered in eastern Europe – as is Margaret Thatcher – for helping bring down the Berlin Wall and let east Europeans win both major Wimbledon titles last weekend, but not revered in regions where US policy was less benign.
It can be said of Thatcher that she did indeed change the political weather and direction in Britain during her 11-year rule after 1979. In ending the postwar quasi-social democratic economic settlement in favour of a more marketised economy she did good things and bad. We all benefited, even those who lost their jobs, though currently we are also feeling the costs of the financial train crash of 2007-9 which she set in motion.
Can such a claim be made for Ronnie – as Nancy Reagan called him in last night's video message – in the US, already a far more marketised economy than any in western Europe when he became president in 1981? I think not.
Speakers yesterday made much of his restoration of American confidence and optimism – "Morning in America again" was the slogan – and there is much to be said for infectious optimism.
But Reagan is open to the same charges that the same well-to-do people in the Guildhall lay against Gordon Brown; namely that he racked up unsustainable deficits and mortgaged the country's economic future.
At the same time post-Mao China under Deng Xiaoping quietly embraced capitalist modes of production and raced towards its current global status and growing domestic prosperity. Deng was paramount leader from 1978-92, Reagan president from 1981-89. Who was the greater man? I fear we all know the answer and it does not please me to say Deng.
So Reagan's Star Wars defence programme may have bust the old USSR, but it helped bust the US too in all sorts of ways. It now owes China squillions. Yet among yesterday's speakers only Condi Rice gave any inkling of the complexity of what is at stake as she reviewed the cold war – success was not always inevitable – and spoke movingly of human freedom and dignity.
It could hardly be otherwise from a black intellectual. Rice reminded her well-heeled audience that when America's revered founding fathers declared in 1776: "'We the People' they did not mean me. My ancestors were deemed to be three-fifths of a man."
It took the civil rights movement of the 60s (she did not say how much it was resisted by Republicans) to change the life of a "little girl like me in Birmingham Alabama". But she had the grace to say enough and to quote Martin Luther King as well as Reagan. Good for her.
The overall effect was one of time warp, as if the 22 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall had never happened, that Russia had stayed beaten, that China and the other emerging Bric economies – India and even Brazil, for heaven's sake – were not rapidly reducing the brief US hegemony, political and economic, to more manageable proportions.
In a pretty boilerplate speech, William Hague chided Burma, North Korea and Belarus for human rights abuses, but did not include mighty China.
That said it all, and Ronald Reagan would have edited in the same selective way too. Unless I missed it, I did not hear China mentioned once all day – the vast elephant in America's living room whose omission made this event little more than an exercise in nostalgic escapism.
But all sides need their myths and heroes, as we were reminded only last week when new figures were reported that some 4,000 Britons volunteered to fight for the Spanish Republic, more than was thought, after General Francisco Franco unleashed the civil war of 1936-39.
Because the republic was "anti-fascist" (the one label its disparate components could all agree on) and the war was later deemed a dry run for the second world war unleashed by Hitler, the republican side has usually won the underdog prize, though it was less clear at the time when Stalin's cynical involvement frightened many people too.
In Homage to Catalonia, Private George Orwell, innocently involved with the Trots and thus at risk, skewered the communists' savage conduct as early as 1938. But Franco's subsequent brutality — and long career (in Nato) – clinched the verdict of history in favour of the republic's tragedy: the libertarian anarchists overwhelmed by the authoritarian communists.
But nowhere last week did I read any attempt to ask how many foreigners volunteered to fight for Franco. It's complicated by the fact that – because of the ineffectual non-intervention pact engineered by Britain and France many "volunteers" on the German, Russian and – by far the largest contingent – Italian sides were not all "volunteers" who had actually volunteered.
Wikipedia touches base on the wider pattern of foreign involvement here, though the still-emerging figures are all disputed by scholars. But apart from the major players, there were the 500-strong Jeanne d'Arc company from France; Eoin O'Duffy's 700 members of the "Blueshirt" Irish Brigade (the only army to come home from war with more men that it started out with, quipped Brendan Behan); 8,000 Portuguese Viriatos; and assorted others – the Romanian Iron Guard, exiled White Russians, Catholic intellectuals.
Quite a lot in fact, though no one talks about them much any more, such is the stuff of myth-making. Interestingly, it is claimed there were NO Americans in Franco's ranks as distinct from the Hemmingway crowd and the Abraham Lincoln brigade with the republic.
A shame that, because, being the sort of easygoing chap he was with the facts, Ronald Reagan might otherwise have claimed to have fought for both sides before going on to liberate Germany (which he did claim).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2011/jul/05/ronald-reagan-joy-myth-making
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