“Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave,” Obama declared at his last press conference. He was commenting on the poll revealing that more than one third of GOP voters had a favorable view of Vladimir Putin, despite CIA and FBI consensus that Russia directly sought to affect the outcome of the election.
Reagan, elected in 1980, was the last American leader whose entire term in office was defined by the bi-polar world order. The Cold War. East vs West. Us vs Them.
Supposedly, he would be rolling in his grave because he was the last president who took a tough stance against the existential enemy that was communist totalitarianism: “Tear down this Wall!” and all that.
The thing is, Reagan was also the president who set up where we are now. And I don’t mean in the way that liberals usually mean: the insistence on small government and the importance placed on communication over actual information — although those are big and fairly damaging legacies. What I would point to is that eight years of Reagan’s famous disinterest in the details of things occurred at the same time as the slow crumble of the Communist Bloc; and, as a result, in some subtle and not at first noticeable way, correlation became causation. Accidentally, he made it look as if the West won because it was our birthright, rather than because our institutions were more vital.
Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the official end of the Soviet Union two years later, there was one over-arching principle that ordered the world. It perfectly suited the Manichaean tendency in the human psyche. It was a struggle between two opposing forces who asserted their complete and utter hatred for each other. They were enemies; good, old-fashioned foes.
The Cold War was a giant PR campaign. The great European imperial powers had accumulated global empires in the previous two centuries. Then, just when those empires were crumbling and billions of people were shopping around for a new political and economic system, two diametrically opposed world views were on offer.
Never mind that the rhetoric of liberal democracy was far more clear cut than the reality. It didn’t matter so much that the West often oppressed people and constantly spied on them; supported some strong men and assassinated others. All things being equal, there was consensus that sane people would still choose to live in the West over the other option.
In fact, the gap between the promise and the reality was exactly the tension necessary to keep the West in a constant state of confident progress. “We are obviously right. But we are also always working towards a ‘more perfect union’,” sums up the zeitgeist of the era.
Crucial beliefs kept the West self-critiquing and improving during the Cold War decades, despite the expense, despite the hard graft of bipartisan cooperation needed to get things done. Neither party had the luxury of following a whim, or refusing to deal with an issue simply because it was unpopular.
Brought down to its basic components, the West had to favor certain principles that it has since abandoned. Existential dread is a great motivator. When our enemy disappeared, it was hard to find a good enough reason to keep doing all the hard stuff.
But do we really want to harken back to the Cold War era as “the good old days”? Well, it’s complicated. Was it an oppressive time when civil liberties were denied in the name of national security and sovereign nations were invaded in the name of freedom? You bet. And did we live with a baseline of dread that we’d never see old age because we’d all die in a nuclear cataclysm? Sure.
Nevertheless, the United States and the rest of the West, consistently and on a large scale, put in the effort to maintain the fundamental institutions of democracy because people in positions of power understood that there would be immediate and concrete ramifications if we didn’t. And it was an accepted truth that these crucial ingredients of Western society weren’t going to run themselves, or fund themselves. At least, this was the case until Reagan’s breezy dismissal of the tenets of the Great Society gave politicians and voters permission to coast.
First and foremost, the West in general, and the United State in particular, made high quality affordable education a priority. We had to compete against the USSR, plain and simple. A lot is made now of the decline in math and science skills amongst American children. But the entire liberal arts education was cultivated and promoted during the Cold War, not just the disciplines that NASA and the Defense Department needed. Contrasted with the authoritarian model of our enemy, the value of an educated, informed and engaged electorate was touted as the West’s most important asset.
The perception that this race was neck and neck continued almost to the very end. There was no doubt that Russian children could be as educated as American ones. And because the main enemy was still Caucasian and (sort of) European, Americans accepted that they were a worthy adversary. That’s why they managed to scare the crap out of us so effectively. But once the Eastern Bloc collapsed, it wasn’t replaced by any foe seen as scientifically or intellectually threatening.
It just so happened that a global audience in the market for new civil institutions emerged when the Cold War was heating up. As former colonies gained their independence from the 1950s to 80s, the bi-polar world order dictated that everyone had to pick a side. Some countries, particularly weaker or geographically strategic ones, got caught up in extremely destructive proxy wars orchestrated by the US and the USSR. But in many places capitalism and communism were actually forced to vie for the hearts and minds of former colonies. Investment, infrastructure development, trade deals and technology were benefits of alignment explicitly connected to the political model that sponsored them.
Now, most of the West’s current enemies are contemptuous of western education, science, and cultural expression, and so our politicians and business leaders have a perfect excuse to neglect them all. The “war of civilizations” narrative skips the part about the civil institutions that constitute a civilization. And so there’s been no check on the grotesque fetishization of Reagan’s small government, reduced spending, lower taxes mantra.
Also, because the differences between the West and its enemies are now framed far more in racial and ethnic terms than during the Cold War, we can see Americans and Europeans treating the benefits of education, technology and healthy political institutions as an inalienable right tied to cultural and racial identity rather than the results of hard work and vigilance — in other words, investment.
And the principle of inclusion. Let’s face it, even during the Cold War, America’s civil rights record didn’t really give those colonial populations around the world a very warm and fuzzy feeling about the United States. And the USSR was happy to bring that fact up with potential new allies in former European colonies whenever possible. The white and powerful in America (and elsewhere) were extremely reluctant to swallow the bitter pill of politically risky and socially disruptive civil rights legislation. But considerations on the global stage motivated successive American administrations to take the cure. They could only defend against Soviet propaganda by bringing the American reality into closer alignment with the rhetoric of democracy. Closer, mind you. Not actually aligned.
If the eyes of the world weren’t watching, it’s impossible to know when the Civil Rights advances that occurred in the 1950s, 60s and 70s would have finally been achieved. What we do know is that now, when there’s no perceived global benefit to it, the rights of people of color and women, gained at great political cost during those decades, are contracting. In some cases, this is actively happening; in other cases, it’s simply due to neglect.
If we have any doubt that there’s a direct relationship between the two, ask yourself: if the Soviet Union still existed, would Trump be an acceptable spokesperson for Western values in the face of ‘communist’ authoritarianism?
The term itself — bi-polar — suggests that each pole would become even more, well…polarized. But that, in fact, is not what happened. In order to resist and reject the critique that unbridled capitalism could be heartless and inhumane, the West was driven to ameliorate its worst tendencies. The United States wasn’t inclined to take on the full trappings of the social welfare state, as Western Europe did. Nevertheless, there was an understanding between big business and government, that global markets would be more available if emerging economies were aligned with the West. And the shared wisdom was that India, Indonesia, Algeria et al, were more likely to lean that way voluntarily if America projected an image of shared prosperity. A useful level of inequality encouraged aspiration and rewarded enterprise, the message ran, but there also needed to be an equal playing field.
In other words, there was a capitalism/democracy sweet spot. But again, without the alternative, there hasn’t been sufficient motivation since 1991 to suppress capitalist excess. The Cold War ensured the availability of quality education, housing, and other drivers of middle class opportunity. Despite the occasional hysteria about commies in unions, the reality was that business and labor generally cooperated because a well-paid workforce was seen as both economically desirable and politically useful. Unbridled capitalism was bad PR.
Countries with colonial pasts could recognize a perpetually exploited underclass when they saw one. Today, however, this seems to come as a shock to neo-liberals who assumed that with a vanquished Soviet Union, capitalism won the argument in perpetuity. Reagan’s “trickle-down economics” is only returned to again and again despite its obvious and repeated failure as an economic model because the stakes just haven’t been high enough. Ironically, America’s own population has been slow to learn this lesson precisely because the tools of critical citizenship are part of what’s been stripped away as government spending shrinks and shrinks.
Finally, in the last few weeks, with the election of a President without any historical memory of his own, and with no regard for the benefit of established wisdom, we’ve seen the greatest organizing principle of the Cold War abandoned. The ingredient that most reliably focused the mind and brought clarity to many decision-making processes prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, has just now been cast aside: the existential threat of nuclear weapons.
This is another instance where Reagan’s over-simplification of a problem set the stage for Trump’s disregard of an obvious danger and others’ acquiescence to that position. It might have seemed like “duck and cover,” bomb shelters, and Godzilla movies minimized the risks of nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War. But the public had a very strong understanding of the potential for destruction that the nuclear age brought. Particularly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, East and West took the possibility of total annihilation very seriously, both in official circles and in the Nuclear Disarmament movement. But Reagan’s “Star Wars”, or Strategic Defense Initiative, was the policy that began to minimize that threat. Soon, it was promised, we’ll be able to shoot missiles out of the sky, just like in the space westerns!
And then the fear disappeared. Sure, there was the possibility of a dirty bomb in the hands of terrorists, or of India and Pakistan blowing each other up. But really, that wasn’t an existential threat. Let the North Koreans keep lobbing sad little projectiles into the Pacific, the new reasoning went. We have more nuclear weapons than we’ll ever need. Now we can use defense spending as a way to insure re-election rather than insure our ‘way of life.’
So while Trump has, as with all things, taken it to the extreme, there had already been decades of increasingly lackadaisical policy about the continued danger of nuclear destruction. And that was just one symptom of a much larger problem. The West won the Cold War. And without any truly worthy foe rising up and taking the place of the Evil Empire, victory has proven fatal.
No one should think that what I’m calling for is a nostalgic return to the good old days of the Cold War, when we held ourselves to a higher standard because we had such a worthy foe. The civil rights violations, beginnings of mass incarceration to replace Jim Crow, manipulation of democratic processes around the world in the name of democracy, and general fear and paranoia are not things to be lauded.
I’m simply pointing out that we can trace where we are now back to the moment when, as Francis Fukuyama famously claimed, we had reached “the end of history.” Of course, what he meant was that ideologically driven conflict had now ended with liberal democracy’s supposedly obvious and crushing victory. Needless to say, his self-congratulation was premature. But the other part of his observation, that we had lost the organizing structure for our historical narrative, was quite true.We’ve spent the time since then searching for a new ideological foe because it turns out that we need one — we don’t seem to be very self-motivating. Or able to know who were are without knowing who we aren’t.
So, perhaps Reagan would roll over in his grave to see the current Republican establishment yawn at the current Russian threat. But then again, if the Cold War were still in place, Reagan would simply be one in the middle of a long line of presidents, advised by well-trained technocrats, leading an educated, stable and modern nation whose purpose was still clear: to seek a more perfect union. Instead, we have undermined the very principles of democracy; and the story may end up being that, because we couldn’t find one elsewhere, we have become our own worst enemy.
Martini Wisdom 