REAGANITES, we called ourselves — and though we came in many different guises and had many different obsessions, we shared one pre-dominant quality throughout the 1980s: We were proudly unyielding, immune to compromise. We considered ourselves at war — against the Soviets on the march around the world and the America-haters on the march inside our own institutions and culture. And given such conditions, the word “compromise” was about as popular with us as the word “Munich.”
“Compromise” was the seduction offered by the serpents in the Rose Garden. Th eir names were legion to us — Baker and Deaver, Darman and Gergen. Their skept icism about the supply-side tax cuts, their willingness to sacrifice the defens e buildup, their obvious unease with the Strategic Defense Initiative, their qu iet hostility to the pro-life cause, their lack of interest in the contras, the ir pas sion for summitry with the Soviets — in short, their overall dedication to procedure over substance and image over principle — made them our nemeses. Indeed, we came to dislike these senior offcers in our own camp more than our enemies on the left. So the Democrats and liberals were bad news; so what? After all, what could you expect from such people? They had been trying to destroy the country for years. The true villains were those who (we believed) were sacrificing the principles of Reaganism because they thirsted for Establishment respectability. For a Reaganite, there could be no worse accusation than that some Bakerite was behaving as he was because he sought favorable treatment by the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the $ INew York Times.
Though we called ourselves Reaganites, we were not the usual members of the cult of personality that surrounds all presidents. We were not campaign workers; we weren’t all that interested in the profession of politics altogether. We were idea warriors. Since many of us had come to political life not through partisan associations but through intellection (magazines, universities) or interest groups (the New Right), our fidelity was first and foremost to the ideas we believed in — ideas that had been given practical political life by Ronald Reagan.
Reagan threw our disparate obsessions into a blender and came up with a new political melange that oozed over old boundaries and eventually hardened into new ones. He was the binding glue for people who actually had little in common culturally or politically- anti-Communists, pro-lifers, anti-Keynesian economists, libertarian government-haters. What we came, in 1980, to admire most about Ronald Reagan (someone few of us would have voted for in 1976) was precisely the quality that horrified the established political order in Washington — his supposed “extremism,” his ornery commitment to a set of unfashionable ideas.
So we formed a new political alliance, this alliance against compromise, and one of the things that bound us together was our disappointment with the Reagan administration. We believed that Reagan believed as we believed, but that he was, for various reasons, incapable of fighting the lonely battle for the sanctity of these ideas in the upper reaches of his government (and, indeed, in his own bedroom). “Place not your trust in princes,” we counseled one another whenever we found ourselves done in by another Reagan compromise. The supply-siders had their Kronstadt with the 1982 TEFRA tax increase. The pro-lifers saw their cause slighted, year after year, by a president who would not even appear in person at their annual rally but rather talked to the crowd by phone. The libertarians were heartbroken by the administration’s half- hearted efforts to cut down on regulation. The foreign-policy hardliners were horrified that the president who said he would never negotiate with terrorists began doing just that with Iran, and then cut loose the selfless patriots inside his government who found themselves subjected to the worst kind of political persecution for the crime of attempting to fulfill their president’s policy.
Throughout the Reagan years, we sought policies tougher than those the administration could bring itself to support. We wanted cabinet departments abolished; one was added. We wanted summits with the Soviets canceled; they increased in number. And we wanted the government shut down. Let it close! we said. Sequester! Time and again the Democrats sent the president foolish and spendthrift budgets for which Reagan mysteriously got the blame. So, we yelled, show the public you don’t want to spend the money! Go to the mattresses! we cried (a phrase we learned from our favorite movie, The Godfather). Reagan never did, not really.
If this was what we suffered with Reagan, the most ideological president of the century, what would we get with Bush? We were prepared for what Bush might do, the compromises he might strike — and with the still-amazing exception of the Gulf war, he lived down to our expectations. It seemed there would be no appropriate outlet for our passion.
And then came the election of 1994, and the emergence of the energized House leadership and the 73 Republican freshmen who seemed to find the very idea of c ompromise as abhorrent as we did. The freshmen had come to town as revolutionar ies, as harbingers of sweeping change, and they were going to make it happen. T hey were remarkably cohesive both as a team and as an ideological force from th e moment of their election. And with a Republican leadership shorn of the squis hy, self-defeating moderate types who had dominated it for so long, we saw a re markable phenomenon: At last, Reaganites were in charge of the legislative process. Finally, Reaganites had the reins of power on Capitol Hill. They c ared about principle, an uncommon thing in politics. And they, too, understood that the lesson of the Reag an years was that compromise was a bad thing. Vital political arguments must be fought to the finish.
Of course, this portrait of the Reaganites both past and present is drawn in broad strokes, but its essence is accurate. Washington had a hard time understanding the ethos of the Reaganites in Reagan’s day, the same trouble it is having with the Republican freshmen right now, because both have a remarkably selfless approach to politics. They are committed more to ideas than to people; animated more by conviction than by a desire for personal glory; committed to battle because they believe that, unchecked, the country and the world are headed for disaster.
Be careful what you wish for, says the proverb, for you may get it. The conduct of the budget negotiations with Bill Clinton these past few months has been a Reaganite’s dream. They played hardball. They passed appropriations bills that are, by Washington’s standards, models of ideological rectitude, and devised a balanced-budget plan that is, again by Washington standards, remarkably honest. They preserved the proposed tax cuts. And they took it, really took it, right to Clinton. For a second time, in December, they told him: Do what we say or we’ll shut the government down.
And Clinton, mindful of the fact that the first government shutdown worked to his political advantage, said, fine.
No, really, they said. We will.
And Clinton said, fine.
And they knew him to be a compromiser, knew him to be a wimp, knew him to be a man of government, and they said, Here we go.
And Clinton said, fine. And they shut down the government, something Reaganites had been arguing for year after year during the Reagan presidency. And, to the horror of most of us, this proved a gigantic tactical error. Though the Reaganites knew they were right, and Clinton was wrong; though they knew they were honest, and he deceitful; though they knew they had the political wind at their back and Clinton was fighting to preserve a dead coalition; nonetheless the public blamed them, blamed the Reaganites, for the trouble.
This crucible requires a reevaluation. When your most cherished ideas about how politics works undergo the rigors of reality, you can no longer hide behind theory. You have to examine them in full blossom to see whether they are beautiful or weedlike, whether they smell wonderful or lousy. The shutdown was a tactic I, for one, had longed to see in use because it seemed to me it would make the case for conservatism better than anything else. People would realize that the federal government did little for them, and they would see Clinton as the defender of bureaucrats and fiefdoms.
But I was wrong, in large measure because the attitudes of ideological people like us bear little relation to the attitudes of ordinary people. We live in a world where we can see how ideas transmute into policies that either help or hurt people. These are life-and- death issues to us. You can’t compromise with the future of the United States simply because you don’t have the votes to override a presidential veto.
This attitude only proves how divorced we can be, all we Reaganite populists, from the American public, whose foremost interpreter we profess to be. The American people apparently don’t think the world is going to hell in a handbasket. They may think it’s on the wrong track, but then, they also tell pollsters they’re pretty happy as a rule. And they don’t see what all the hysteria is about in Washington. Where they work and live, they don’t get to spend their lives in principled fights over first principles. They make deals. They pay their bills. They hate their bosses and swallow their anger so they don’t get fired. They may dislike their neighbors, but they achieve a chilly modus vivendi.
And so the Reaganite passion for purity meets its match in the sensible worldliness of the electorate. The federal budget has been out of balance for 26 years, and the sky didn’t fall in. All things considered, the public wants it in balance. But they don’t think all of Washington should grind to a halt before a consensus about it is achieved.
Of course, an educated Reaganitc had already learned some lessons about the u ncompromising approach from discovering how Reagan conducted the Cold War. As d etailed in Don Oberdorfer’s vitally important book The Turn, by 1983 Reagan had already begun his brilliant strategy of trying to edge the Soviets into ref orms that would unravel their system while simultaneously taking a hard line an d spending money on defense like crazy. It was Reagan’s perception not his hand lers’, as his handwritten letters to Soviet leaders 2 demonstrate — that the i nternal contradictions of Communism could not long survive exposure to the West in full economic and social throttle. The dicovery of Reagan’s two-tiered appro ach put to shame those of us who spent the 1980s worried that the sentimental p resident would somehow lose his nerve toward the Soviets as his predecessors had. He was after bigger fish, the end of a corrupted and dying system, a system we did not quite believe would collapse.
Now it is time to learn some of the same lessons domestically. The Republican party won its colossal election in 1994, and is poised to advance that victory in 1996, because it burst into life as a tough-minded party of ideas and conviction. It stopped being the Stupid Party of legend, the exhausted and fearful party of the permanent minority, and became true heir to the Reagan legacy. That legacy belongs not to the Bakers and Deavers, but to the Reaganites, to those who believed in the ideas that carried the day against the Soviets and, eventually, against the welfare state. Now conservatives need to learn from Reagan’s other side, the side that did know how to use the Bakers and Darmans for their competence — the one-time union boss, the negotiator, the conciliator.
They need to learn how to compromise as Reagan compromised. If they were, say, to accept Clinton’s seven- year balanced budget as the best deal possible at the moment, they would still achieve a major political victory — and one that could be built on. They could sign it and insist that they would improve on it. They could say, rightly, that the government is still too large and still takes too much of the people’s money, and that Clinton is at fault for that. They could spend the next few years trying to cut programs in order to find money for tax cuts. They could thus draw the appropriate distinction between the Republican party as the party of the taxpayer and the Democratic party as the party of government. They could spend time building the necessary public support for specific spending cuts. They could begin to address the moral questions raised by an intrusive and wasteful federal government.
Most of all, conservatives should learn from Ronald Reagan that they must never act as though the country is in a dire crisis requiring immediate rectification. They should understand that America is a big, lurebering, complicated place, and that if the body politic moves one step, the reverberations are enormous. A few big things a year not everything, all at once. And not open warfare.
In the long run, then, just as Reagan caused the Soviet Union to collapse under the weight of its own wrongs and ills, so too could the Republicans cause Democratic liberalism’s ultimate collapse by facing it problem by problem, calmly and consistently, and over a long period of time. And by making deals with the devil every now and then.
By John Podhoretz
