[Mb-civic] The Rights to Reagan

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-heilbrunn29aug29.story

The Rights to Reagan

Two Factions Claim GOP Icon's Mantle
 By Jacob Heilbrunn
 Jacob Heilbrunn is a Los Angeles Times editorial writer.

 August 29, 2004

 WASHINGTON ‹ The Republican convention this week is certain to look like a
lovefest of party unity. Republican moderates such as Rudolph W. Giuliani
will be trotted out alongside social conservatives such as Rick Santorum.
They'll stand solidly united behind President Bush. And they'll also stand
united in their reverence for another Republican president: Ronald Reagan.

 What won't be on display is the pitched battle underway behind the scenes
over which strain of contemporary Republicanism can most legitimately claim
the Reagan mantle. 

 Depending on whom you listen to, Reagan was either the original
neoconservative, with a bold vision to forge democracies around the world,
or a cautious pragmatist, leery of involvements abroad, a man who would
never have embarked upon Bush's ambitious crusade against terrorism.

 The first camp, neoconservatives who champion active American involvement
in democratizing the Middle East, cites the Reagan legacy of confronting
communism and promoting democracy in Eastern Europe. In their view, Reagan
would have applauded U.S. engagement in Iraq.

 Indeed, in the the latest issue of Commentary magazine, neoconservative
grandee Norman Podhoretz issues a 37-page blast titled "World War IV: How It
Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win." In it, he notes approvingly
that, again and again, Bush has demonstrated that he is "a fiery follower of
Ronald Reagan."

 In another move by neocons to claim the Reagan mantle, Arizona Republican
Sen. Jon Kyl (along with Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, who is the closest
thing Democrats have to offer the neocon movement) has recently revived the
Committee on Present Danger, which spearheaded the anti-Soviet drive in the
1950s and again in the 1970s, to warn about what it sees as the peril posed
by Islamic totalitarianism to the West.

 No less than Nazism or communism, Kyl and Lieberman argued in a recent
Washington Post article, the U.S. and its Western allies face a global
challenge that must be confronted whenever and wherever possible: "Too many
people are insufficiently aware of our enemy's evil worldwide designs, which
include waging jihad against all Americans and reestablishing a totalitarian
religious empire in the Middle East."

 But to traditional conservatives, with their more isolationist worldview,
the neocon appropriation of the Reagan legacy is appalling. This camp holds
that Reagan was always reluctant to use force and that he was a pragmatist
who shunned ideology.

 In their new book "America Alone," Stefan Halper, who served in the
administrations of presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and Jonathan Clarke, a
fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, argue that "the neoconservative
assertion of a line of descent from Reagan's foreign policy is far-fetched."
They maintain that Reagan did not conduct an open-ended campaign for
democracy, and that he sought to avoid the direct use of U.S. force in any
conflict, from Central America to Afghanistan.

 Similarly, Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, an influential member of
the Foreign Relations Committee, sets out an agenda in the July/August issue
of Foreign Affairs magazine that emphasizes Reagan's optimism and sense of
limits of U.S. foreign policy: "This purpose reflects neither the hubris
that comes with great power nor the conviction that our power and resources
are without end."

 But perhaps the most urgent (and dangerous) call to arms against
neoconservatism comes in paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan's new book "Where
the Right Went Wrong."

 Buchanan essentially calls for a return to isolationism ("We must give up
the empire, bring troops home, let lapse the old treaty commitments");
likens, in a blatantly anti-Semitic reference, former Bush advisor Richard
Perle to Charles Dickens' Fagin instructing young Oliver Twist; and insists
that the party must return to the true Reagan: "President Bush's men may
describe their call for world democratic revolution 'Reaganite,' but this is
not what Ronald Reagan preached or practiced."

 Buchanan urges conservatives to eschew what he sees as a new kind of
globalist nonsense that is nothing less than traditional Democratic Party
Wilsonianism infiltrating the GOP via the neoconservatives. Small wonder
that Francis Fukuyama worries in the latest issue of National Interest
magazine that the bungled Iraq occupation has opened the door to the
Buchananite hordes.

 Who's got it right? The truth is that both sides do.

 In his first term, Reagan was everything the neoconservatives say he was ‹
truculent, bellicose and uncompromising. Whether he was calling the Soviet
Union an "evil empire" or aiding the Nicaraguan Contras in their fight
against the Sandinistas, Reagan single-handedly revived the American and
European peace movements, which called for nuclear freezes and warned that
doomsday was just around the corner.

 But in his second term, Reagan softened. The advent of Mikhail Gorbachev
allowed him to pursue nuclear arms treaties and abandon talk of an evil
empire.

 This conciliatory approach infuriated neoconservatives at the time, who
accused him of selling out his principles.

 Perhaps Bush will follow suit. In a second term, he could well retrench and
abandon talk of more preemptive wars. If he wins reelection and wants to
become the true heir to Reagan, he might follow more closely in his
footsteps than many imagine.


If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at
latimes.com/archives.

Article licensing and reprint options




 Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times