Ronald Reagan, Political Romantic & Father of Big-Government Conservativism

There are some days when I love George F. Will. And today is one of them. In a piece reviewing John Patrick Diggins’ new book, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, Will looks briefly at Reagan’s intellectual influences — particularly Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Paine — and Reagan’s faith (a shared one with the neoconservatives) the people we have it the our power “to begin the world over again.” This is hardly a recipe for anything remotely resembling limited, constitutional government.

Will writes:

Diggins thinks that Reagan’s religion “enables us to forget religion” because it banishes the idea of “a God of judgment and punishment.” Reagan’s popularity was largely the result of “his blaming government for problems that are inherent in democracy itself.” To Reagan, the idea of problems inherent in democracy was unintelligible because it implied that there were inherent problems with the demos — the people.

And this:

“An unmentionable irony,” writes Diggins, is that big-government conservatism is an inevitable result of Reaganism. “Under Reagan, Americans could live off government and hate it at the same time. Americans blamed government for their dependence upon it.” Unless people have a bad conscience about demanding big government — a dispenser of unending entitlements — they will get ever larger government. But how can people have a bad conscience after being told (in Reagan’s First Inaugural) that they are all heroes? And after being assured that all their desires, which inevitably include desires for government-supplied entitlements, are good?

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9:38 am on February 11, 2007