As writer Michael O’Donnell tells it, Ronald Reagan is like a highly effective used-car salesman that O’Donnell once dealt with. That’s meant as praise of a sort not only for the salesman but also for Reagan, whom O’Donnell gives considerable credit for helping to end the Cold War. That said, O’Donnell is eager to push back against the belief that Reagan ranks with Franklin Roosevelt as a great 20th-century president.
In his review of H.W. Brands’ Reagan: The Life in the Washington Monthly’s June/July/August issue, O’Donnell, who’s also a lawyer at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office For Civil Rights, wrote that “Roosevelt saved the nation from an existential threat (the Great Depression), while Reagan merely steered it out of a funk (the 1970s). Roosevelt enacted structural reforms to protect the most vulnerable members of society, [whereas] Reagan systematically set about dismantling those reforms.”
Moreover, argued O’Donnell, Reagan influenced today’s politics for the worse. O’Donnell calls him “the author of many of our current predicaments as a nation and a society…The government-is-the-enemy mind-set that pervades the right today comes to us from Barry Goldwater via Ronald Reagan. As our roads, bridges, and schools fall apart around us, we have them to thank.”
From O’Donnell’s review (bolding added):
When I think of Ronald Reagan, I am reminded of a car salesman named Mo who once put me in a used Nissan. The car I wanted had a sticker price that seemed a little steep…I made an offer. Mo—who I should mention was irrepressibly pleasant and impossible to dislike—proved unwilling to budge at all…We continued this dance by phone and in person for several days, with Mo sticking hard to his terms…He took a nominal amount off the sticker to cushion my ego and threw in some floor mats, but when I bought the car it was more or less on Mo’s terms…
…Mo confounded me by having a simple goal and holding to it…I can imagine how Mikhail Gorbachev must have felt when he faced Reagan at Reykjavik in 1986. The president was determined to preserve his Strategic Defense Initiative…Reagan’s firmness prevented a deal…But sure enough, they held another summit the following year. And Reagan eventually got his way.
Reagan’s goals as president were as simple as Mo’s, and like Mo he stuck to them relentlessly...
…Brands’s conclusion is [that] Reagan stands alongside Franklin Roosevelt as one of the two major presidents of the twentieth century. Roosevelt oriented the country to the left and defeated fascism. Reagan reoriented the country to the right and defeated communism…
…[S]ubstantively, Reagan does not warrant mention in the same breath as Roosevelt. Not by miles. Domestically, Roosevelt saved the nation from an existential threat (the Great Depression), while Reagan merely steered it out of a funk (the 1970s). Roosevelt enacted structural reforms to protect the most vulnerable members of society, from the unemployed to the infirm to the elderly. Reagan systematically set about dismantling those reforms and deregulating the economy, leaving everyone to fend for themselves. Reagan also forged the unholy alliance between the Republican Party and the evangelical right: a marriage that continues to infect the United States with intolerance and anti-science thinking. The government-is-the-enemy mind-set that pervades the right today comes to us from Barry Goldwater via Ronald Reagan. As our roads, bridges, and schools fall apart around us, we have them to thank…
…Reagan…was not a great president. And the more the conventional wisdom holds otherwise, the more forcefully this must be said. Reagan’s contribution to the end of the Cold War is without question his major achievement, and it was no small feat…But Reagan was also the author of many of our current predicaments as a nation and a society. His anti-government worldview created the no-tax-raised-ever mentality of today’s right. Our store of compassion for the less fortunate dwindled and withered under his smiling influence. Our willingness to undertake cynical and blatantly illegal acts abroad reached its crescendo with Reagan’s machinations in El Salvador and Grenada. We are a more polarized country because of the way Reagan brought right-wing politics into the mainstream.
