Changing Course?

Barack Obama has an ambitious agenda in reforming the health care system, instituting a comprehensive energy policy, and giving more people an even break - and possibly changing the culture and the direction of the country in the process. If he succeeds, it's because he took advantage of a time in the country when such fundamental change was possible to bring about. But it will also be because he's a better student of history than most people give him credit for.

When Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination thirty years ago, Americans had come to take many social programs and government regulations for granted at a time when the economy was stagnant and enemies like the Iranians were embarrassing us by kidnapping our embassy staff. Reagan's policy proposals - cutting taxes for the rich to generate wealth and private investment, cutting social programs to instill moral character among their recipients, deregulating industry, less government involvement in everything except military contracting, more of just that to win the Cold War - were considered reckless, but President Carter failed to provide much in the way of alternative answers to the problems besetting America. Carter had actually hoped Reagan would be the Republican nominee, because a retired B-movie actor was the one Republican he thought he could defeat, but the desire for change was too great. Reagan won a landslide in what was supposed to be a close election.

Reagan then did everything he said he was going to do, except balance the budget, which he blamed on a Democratic Congress for ignoring his budget proposals (though the fact that he never submitted a balanced budget in the first place, due to all that military spending, never factored into his analysis). He'd taken advantage of a desperate time in American history in a bid to alter the country's course. When Reagan prepared to step down after two terms, Democrats were pleased that the old rogue charmer was on his way out and that the GOP had no inspiring candidates to pick up the Reagan mantle. They expected an easy victory in 1988 against Vice President George Bush, even with the competent but boring Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis as their standard bearer. After all, Reagan was personally popular but his policies were too controversial to continue; surely America was ready to go back to the agenda in place in 1980.

What took Democrats like Obama twenty years to understand, though, from 1988 to 2008, was just how much Reagan had changed the trajectory of the country. His pro-business tax policy and deregulation practices unleashed an amalgamation of wealth among the upper classes and created a new economy based on investments and entrepreneurialism and less so on manufacturing and production. Wall Street became more important than Main Street. Social programs remained scaled back, while others were eliminated altogether. The changes, however flawed, were so fundamental that the culture followed suit. Christian evangelism, espousing personal responsibility, enjoyed a revival at a time of domestic policy shifts away from social welfare systems. MTV and yuppie culture were as jive as Reagan's simplistic sociopolitical homilies. People worked more for less, straining community bonds and families. American attitudes shifted to a more self-centered, Darwinistic world view - ironically, at a time when Darwinistic theories about evolution were challenged by a resurgent religious streak. Campaigning for office as a Democrat as if these changes were not fundamental and entrenched was no way to fight these changes.

The Democratic Party mostly failed to get that, which is how they managed to lose elections to guys named Bush. Unable to accept the idea that the country had been changed fundamentally, they tried to campaign and govern as if the old rules still applied and new rules didn't have to be challenged. Bill Clinton - the only Democratic President between 1981 and 2009 - certainly didn't get that when he tried to reform health care in his first term and enabled the Republicans to gain control of both houses of Congress, tabling the issue indefinitely. But Clinton (who won the Presidency in 1992 only because the older Bush was dealing with an recession mild enough to leave supply-side economics in place but severe enough to doom his chances for a second term) was never much of a liberal anyway. Though Clinton campaigned on the issue of putting people first, he normally put business first, deregulating the communications industry and appointing Wall Street executives to key Treasury posts. His Presidency was a success because it acknowledged the new order of things, but as a President who hoped to change things, he was a flop. His place in history is as the President between George Bush the Elder and George Bush the Younger.

Barack Obama shouldn't have been surprised by the backlash he got from other Democrats when he said that Reagan changed the trajectory of America, and he wasn't. Their reaction, though, suggested how clueless they were about how supply-side economics had been ingrained. They couldn't see how labor, civil rights groups, environmentalists, and public institutions like schools and transit systems were in 2008 in losing positions far more so than they had been in back in 1980. My grandmother got a letter from her labor union in 1980 urging her to vote against Ronald Reagan and explaining how he would return us to a pre-New Deal America. "You know what life was like before [Franklin] Roosevelt," the letter began.

After thirty years of Reagan and Reaganism, so do I. President Obama gets it. Hopefully, many Democrats in Congress do, too.