Reagan, Reagan, Reagan. Ain't that Fucker Dead?

Why is it that so many politicians on the left and right seem to revere Reagan and make every attempt to cast themselves in his image, to carry his mantle? I don't understand this one bit. Those who revere him call him the Great Communicator, tell us he changed the country, and that he ended the Cold War. I won't disagree with the first point. He may have had some wack ideas but at least he got them out there and his voice doesn't make me want to puke like Bush's so that's good. And, honestly, I can't really disagree with the second either. But I do take issue with simply saying he changed the country and having that automatically mean it was a good thing. And as for the Cold War, well, as I tell all my intro students, that's plain rubbish.

Reagan definitely left an imprint on this country but it's more like a stinking pile of shit piled high in the American political discourse. Reagan changed the way many saw politics and how many politicians thought about government and society. So, yes, he had an impact. But was it good? Reagan's legacy in this area is most clearly felt in how we approach welfare and those on it. During his first campaign for president he coined the term 'welfare queens' who were wasting precious tax dollars, driving around in Cadillacs, and just pumping out babies so they could get even more of those precious dollars. Reagan began a long process where Americans started to look at welfare and those on it as undeserving humans and most likely liars out to cheat the system. Yet no study has ever shown that welfare fraud has EVER been so large to lead one to denigrate the entire system. Yet by the time Clinton came around even Democrats were talking about changing welfare 'as we know it' and doing whatever they could to get people off it.

Now there is nothing wrong with wanting to get people off welfare but if it's premised on the idea that those on it are lazy frauds then policies reflect that. When we began cutting welfare rolls the policies that came out were meant to restrict who could get welfare and how long they could be on it. They never (and still don't) address what caused people to get on welfare in the first place. Most welfare recipients are in and out of the system. Meaning they work, get laid off, go back on it, find another job, and so on. People end up on welfare because of a critical lack of skills, jobs, and education. But policies stemming from the idea that welfare itself is simply evil don't address these causes. They don't put sufficient money into job training, better access to education from the early years on into college, and they don't recognise that larger social factors are at work that create cycles of poverty. And those Cadillac driving welfare queens with loads of babies in tow?: Well, they don't exist. It may come as a shock to some but the average family size of those on welfare is identical to the national average- around 2 kids. Reagan so fucked up the national discourse that instead of looking at welfare much as Roosevelt had intended it- as society lending a helping hand-, we now see it as a personal problem stemming from personal failures. You're just lazy...

Now for the Cold War. I don't know of any, ANY, study in the discipline (that discipline being mine, International Relations) that has found much of any link between Reagan and the end of the Cold War other than timing. The idea that he somehow outspent the Soviets and caused the Soviet to collapse as they tried to catch up just doesn't add up. The Soviets did increase spending but that didn't cripple them. The Soviets knew they couldn't outspend us, which is probably why Gorbachev was so adamant about diplomacy and detente- a far worthier legacy, if you ask me. What killed it off was a disastrous- and expensive- war in Afghanistan and the unintended consequences of Gorbachev's policies aimed at loosening the Soviet reins on society. Gorbachev basically tried to give a little bit of freedom (freedom of press, freedom to form small parties and contest small, local elections, and a greater ability to challenge and question the Soviet state) but it backfired. Gorbachev was trying to save a system by opening it up to some criticism and hoping that some novel ideas might come out of it that would keep the state going. It failed. People wanted more change and greater freedom. Reagan's role in this was non-existent. He basically gave us a bloated military budget, fuelled the military industrial complex, and left us with some serious fucking debt.

In the one area he might have had a major impact, nuclear arms reduction, he found a willing partner in Gorbachev and the two came seriously close to a nuclear free world. But for all the talk of eliminating nuclear weapons- and Reagan truly abhorred them- the end result was modest reductions in Europe due to his intransigence on the 'star wars' programme. Reagan's desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons is most certainly not part of his legacy and you sure as shit won't hear any politician talking about it.

I think when we think of Reagan we need to remind ourselves that while he changed this country, he changed it for the worse. And let's not forget Iran-Contra, his disastrous silence and complicity in human rights abuse throughout Latin America, his mining of the harbour in Nicaragua, his half assed attempt to bomb Libya and kill Qaddafi (which only managed to kill his adopted child, mind you), and numerous other attempts to use military might and clandestine killing squads instead of diplomacy.

So the next time someone, particularly Republicans, talk about Reagan's legacy, let's remember what that is.