The Reagan Template

Everything fades into mist
The past is erased
The erasure forgotten
The lie becomes truth
And then a lie again.
-Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984

When Ronald Reagan died in March 2004, it was a publicity coup for the Bush administration and the republican party. They arranged to have his coffin paraded across the country before a final procession down Washington Avenue, complete with formal cortège including a riderless horse carrying empty boots backwards in the stirrups; symbol of a great fallen warrior. To many who railed under the Reagan administrations, the numbers that turned out to view these processions were perplexing, evidence of the triumph of an ahistorical myth over a brutal reality. I choose to imagine they were in no small part made up not of those who came to honor him, but of political refugees from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, who came out to make sure that the man responsible for the murders of tens of thousands in the homelands they fled was really and truly dead.

As Governor of California from 1966 to 1974, Reagan had a dismal record on civil liberties and free speech; those who were not there during the protests against the Vietnam War would find it difficult to believe the level of repression he instituted. Later, in the 1980 presidential election, on the day after the republican candidates Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush defeated the democratic incumbents Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, the stock market shot up on record volume as savvy traders leapt at the chance to get in on what was clearly going to be an orgy of deregulation. What was not so clear that day were the terrible blows to humanity that the policies of the Reagan/Bush administration were going to inflict. Over the next eight years, they stamped out a far-right conservative template so audacious and manipulative, so successful in bamboozling the American public, that most of its techniques have been adopted and refined by the present “neo- conservatives” now in place. The Bush/Cheney Administration is a more arrogant and bald-faced version of Reagan’s political cabal, but there's nothing "neo" about it; its modus operandi was perfected two decades ago. In the rest of this article, I will revisit some of the Reagan policies that continue today.

Manipulating Intelligence - Reagan had an exaggerated fear of communist influence in Central America and a compelling need to defend the interests of his corporate backers, but the international outcry starting in 1977 over human rights violations in Guatemala forced him to work covertly. His vice-president GHW Bush thus initiated a technique of raising fearful responses to false facts as a means of dictating policy. As the prior Director of the CIA, Bush was charged with exploiting his connections with that organization to turn it into a conveyor belt of propaganda against the Latin American market and labor reforms then underway. For his part, the President went public with bogus evidence of escalating Soviet designs on the “soft underbelly” of Central America, and dire warnings of “Russian tanks across the Rio Grande.” In the run-up to war on Iraq we saw these exact techniques replayed with the cherry picking of intelligence regarding WMD by VP Dick Cheney and Secretary Of State Colin Powell, all of which later proved false, and the threats of imminent attack from Iraq by George W. Bush.

Perception Management – As a means of deceiving the public into supporting illegitimate policies, the Reagan administration employed sympathetic pundits to reinforce their lies and flooded the airwaves with “think tanks.” In their own pronouncements they used propagandist techniques of blatant misrepresentation, the most famous, because it was so ridiculous, being when ketchup was reclassified as a vegetable to justify cutting school lunch budgets. Today, propaganda has reached the level of a dark Orwellian masterpiece and deluded millions of otherwise rational Americans, such as women, workers, and Christians into supporting policies against their own interests. The AM radio airwaves and TV news stations are saturated with religious and right-wing talk shows, much of the mainstream media has been bought by corporations who are in the administration's pocket and actively stifle dissent for the sake of the bottom line, and the Patriot Act is being used to muzzle what remains of a free press.

Corporate Centrality – When Reagan assumed the presidency, he selected his key cabinet members from the private sector; specifically, the military/industrial sector. George Schultz left his job as president of Bechtel Corporation to assume the position of Secretary of State, and Casper Weinberger left his job as Senior Counsel, also for Bechtel, to become Secretary of Defense. Bechtel is now profiting handsomely in Iraq, along with The Halliburton Corporation where Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense under GHW Bush, was CEO before being tapped for the Vice Presidency by GW Bush. Both Bechtel and Halliburton were awarded no-bid contracts in Iraq even before the invasion and are under investigation for price gouging.

Congressional Legislative Evasion – Instead of adhering to a constitutional balance of power, Reagan manipulated the Legislature into endorsing what little it knew about the covert actions in Central America as long as he could, until those activities grew so outrageous that even the most cowed senators and representatives were stirred to challenge his policies. In 1987 the minority report of the congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair accused the Reagan administration of “secrecy, deception and disdain for law,” despite the foot-dragging of Senator Dick Cheney and other republican dissenters who criticized rising congressional control of executive policy. Cheney, a passionate supporter of the same discredited communist-domino theory that led to the Vietnam War, was informed by the 1981-1984 US Ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte, now the US Ambassador to Iraq, who was responsible for funneling money and arms to the Contras in neighboring Nicaragua after the US Congress had banned further military aid, and under who’s ambassadorship human rights violations in Honduras became systematic. The present Bush Administration, before invading Iraq, used a majority republican House and Senate to railroad legislation that authorized an executive decision to initiate war in advance of a formal Congressional declaration, a premeditated reversal of the constitutional process that precluded real debate, democratic dissent, and civilian control of the military. Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution states that Congress and Congress alone may formally declare war, whereas Article 2, Section 2 designates the president as commander in chief of the army, navy and state militias, so as to give the executive office sufficient power only to repel foreign attacks. George Washington Bush lied to Congress to create a false threat of imminent attack from Iraq to circumvent the Constitution and continues to subvert The War Powers Act of 1973 to wage an illegitimate and unnecessary war.

Divisive Partisanship – Ronald Reagan’s 1988 attacks on liberals during the campaign for his protégé George Herbert Walker Bush set a new low standard for dirty politics. That year, the GOP had an advantage with their massive corporate backing since Reagan had overturned the Fairness In Media Law that guaranteed equal time for candidates. Last year, VP Cheney and other republican party members branded democratic legislators who questioned executive plans to invade Iraq as “traitors”. This year, the RNC spent over 300 million dollars to re-elect George W Bush and sanctioned vicious “attack ads” against democratic candidate John Kerry that have, once again, set a new low standard.

Natavistic Chauvinism – Simplistic and insular, Reagan, the vaunted "Cold Warrior," was fixated on Russia as “The Evil Empire” rather than as an outdated economic system that was collapsing under its own weight. There is evidence that his posturing and meddling may have actually prolonged the cold war by hardening defensive positions against the détente strategies of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. In Central America, the covert wars he enabled that resulted in the murders of tens of thousands of innocents was based on his subjective assumption that micro-market villagers who were organizing collectives were a threat to the form of capitalism represented by gigantic deregulated corporations such as the United Fruit Company. GW Bush, who had never traveled ouside North America prior to his election as president, described Iraq as part of an “axis of evil” against which he would wage a “crusade,” and lost the war of ideas before the ground battle even began. Reactionaries and ideologues like Reagan/Bush and Bush/Cheney are likely to overreach in international strategy, and it can lead to shocking miscalculations such as enabling brutal dictators in Central America, or assuming that invading American troops would be welcomed with flowers in the streets of Baghdad, or that Jeffersonian Democracy is the best thing for the Arab Middle East.

Environmental Degradation – Many Americans would be surprised tp learn that republicans used to be known as conservationists, but it’s true. We can thank early twentieth century republicans for Yellowstone and our National Park system. Even the soon to be disgraced Richard Nixon was at least mindful of our land and air, and introduced and signed the original, and real, Clean Air Act, a sincere attempt to protect the environment. It was only when Reagan and James Watt, his reckless Secretary of the Interior, began to reverse that course that republicans became associated with environmental degradation.. In one of many precursors to the present administration’s Orwellian techniques, Reagan once, in a self-penned speech, asserted, “trees cause pollution,” a claim he later tried to back up with a convoluted and pataphysical argument involving “oxides of nitrogen production.” Today, the Bush-sponsored, and cynically named, "Clean Air Bill” is one of many that have decimated decades of hard-won environmental protection legislation in the pursuit of corporate profits. More critically, their continued refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and their statements that global warming is a myth, despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary, is a slap in the face to a deeply-concerned world community by a nation that is the largest emitter of green-house gases.

Deficit Spending – The Reagan administration’s massive military build-up left American taxpayers with an additional $1.734 trillion dollar debt, running deficits every year that averaged $176 billion or 4.5% of GDP over two terms in office. The Clinton administration and a GOP Congress not only balanced the budget, but also had three surpluses in a row and left the American taxpayers with a $250 billion surplus in year 2000, 2.4% of GDP. The present Bush administration is running a budget deficit of over $500 billion for 2004, 4.3% of GDP and counting…