Legacy of Ronald Reagan
A year after his death, Americans still argue about the impact the actor-president had on the country and the turbulent decade that he helped define

By GIL TROY, Montreal Gazette, June 4, 2005

The Ronald Reagan mourning rites last June continue to mystify a year later. In the 1980s, who would have predicted such a send-off for such a controversial president?

In fact, the week-long eulogies showed two competing stereotypes shape public discussion of the 1980s. When politicians and pop-culture impresarios refer to "the '80s," they usually mean the vapid, hedonistic, amoral years of America's new gilded age, when yuppies reigned and greed was good.

Perpetuated today in 1980s parties and in movies such as Adam Sandler's The Wedding Singer, the 1980s stereotype recalls Wall St. excess and political selfishness, an era when junk bonds and trashy values created deficits "as far as the eye could see" and triggered the multi-billion-dollar savings and loan crisis.

Rogues who defined the times include jailed moguls such as Ivan Boesky and Leona Helmsley; disgraced ministers such as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. In 1992, Bill Clinton ran for president against this version of the 1980s. "The Reagan-Bush years have exalted private gain over public obligations, special interests over common good, wealth and fame over work and family," Clinton charged when launching his campaign. "The 1980s ushered in a gilded age of greed, selfishness, irresponsibility, excess and neglect."

Yet when Ronald Reagan died one year ago tomorrow, most of the press and public defined the same era as one of renewal and idealism, of national unity and glory. A collective act of U.S. national amnesia ignored how reporters mocked Reagan, how Democrats like Senator Edward Kennedy blasted his "unilateral," militaristic, reckless and divisive foreign policy, how hundreds of thousands of Europeans protested against the president repeatedly.

Instead, two decades later, one letter the New York Times printed recalled "a simpler time... when all things seemed possible and Americans felt good about their country."

In eulogizing Reagan, President George W. Bush endorsed the "great man" theory of history, calling the Reaganized 1980s "one of the decisive decades of the century as the convictions that shaped the president began to shape the times."

Even Bill Clinton, now an ex-president, said Reagan "personified the indomitable optimism of the American people," and kept "America at the forefront of the fight for freedom for people everywhere."

It is time to go beyond the clashing oversimplifications of both the "1980s decadence" and "Reagan renewal" stereotypes. In fact, America would have to wait a decade - and silence the Democratic opposition by electing a Democratic president -- for this 1980s-style cultural revolution to proceed unchecked. In many ways, Clinton's rollicking, hedonistic 1990s became what many social critics feared Ronald Reagan's 1980s would be.

To the extent that Reaganism helped paved the way for Clintonism, Reagan succeeded by being trendy rather than counter-cultural. Despite Reagan's traditionalism, his faith in individualism and his passive nature mostly furthered the various social and cultural revolutions he disliked. Even while believing they were choosing the old-fashioned way, Americans ratified many social changes by incorporating them into their lives. It was often an unhappy fit, sending indices of social pathology and individual misery soaring, yet Americans were acclimating to many of these problems. Increasingly "the underclass," the "teen-suicide epidemic," and "family breakdown," were becoming familiar, static phenomena rather than crises to be solved.

Overall, Reagan's 1980s accelerated the social solvents he blamed on the 1960s and 1970s. Going from the "Me Decade" to the "Mine All Mine Decade," citizens in Reagan's America felt less engaged, less constrained, less interdependent than ever. In the individualism he worshipped, the hypocrisy he embodied and the politicization of moral discourse he facilitated, Reagan further undermined the traditional collective mores he so proudly hailed.

And as more of a compromiser than a revolutionary on social issues, he continued to institutionalize some of the changes. Most liberals were too busy demonizing Reaganite "greed" and blindly defending the 1960s, big government, and anything Reagan opposed to notice, while most conservatives were simply too busy defending their hero just as blindly.

The process of communal fragmentation had been developing throughout the 20th century, from the hedonism of the 1920s' flappers to the atomism of the 1950s' corporate drone. And this process was not limited to the United States. Yet in 1980s' America it seemed to have reached the tipping point. After the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, the process of decitizenization, if you will, seemed more ubiquitous, more blatant, less reversible. That this untrammelled individualism and resulting anomie came wrapped in a red-white-and-blue package, delivered by an old-fashioned gentleman distinguished by his Midwestern courtliness and all-American idealism, accompanied by America's great Cold War victory and the world's turn from flirting with socialism to appreciating capitalism, fed the clashing stereotypes and interpretive confusion.

Looking back, then, the 1980s emerge as a watershed decade, a time when the Great Reconciliation between Reaganite conservatism and 1960s liberalism occurred. For all the talk about repudiating the New Deal, dismantling the Great Society, and undoing the 1960s' social and cultural revolutions, many innovations became routinized and institutionalized.

The tone changed, Americans overall felt less mopey and less gloomy, less idealistic and more materialistic, but the melodies lingered on, from environmentalism to feminism, from the rights revolution to the continuing revolt against authority. Reagan, at heart, was not a revolutionary. He was more a conciliator than a reformer, to the frustration of ideologues like David Stockman and to the relief of many others.

Surprisingly, Reagan's moderate traditionalism provided cover both for the decadence of the age and for the vitality of many 1960s-style revolutions. Progressives mourned the death of the 1960s even as the 1980s consolidated many of the most dramatic lifestyle transformations. Yes, the civil rights movement seemed to falter, but Jesse Jackson ran for president, Michael Jackson dominated the music world, Bill Cosby revived the TV sitcom, Oprah Winfrey became an American icon, and, most important, millions of African-Americans entered the professions, moved into good neighbourhoods, received better educations, and progressed.

The 2004 election - and the prolonged red vs. blue hangover - proved the debates of the 1980s - and about the 1980s' legacy - continue. As with the 1960s, false nostalgia and reductionist stereotypes will help boost records sales and television ratings. True understanding of the decade's historical legacy, and Reagan's, however, will only come from careful consideration of the mixed messages, the complex compote that shaped this decade - like all others.

Gil Troy teaches history at McGill University and is author of Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan invented the 1980s.
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2005