Matt Yglesias

transformative impact of Reagan : transformative impact of meteor :: USA : Earth

“The biggest welfare state expansion happened under GW Bush and the biggest deregulatory episodes occurred under Carter and Clinton…”

So we should vote GOP?

“The remarkable thing, to me, is that if you look at the years 1977-2008 there was a clear trajectory to policy that continued more-or-less unbroken despite changes in party control of different branches of government.”

Depends on what kind of policy you are looking at. You certainly can’t talk about progressive taxes or the minimum wage in that light.

Of course! It’s all so simple and obvious now! Not even any complexities and idiocies in how all these things happen! I guess I missed all that stuff while it was happening — what does our blogger count as “welfare state” items that expanded? And gee, how did those de-regulatory epochal screw-ups (if you are just a tiny little service worker wage slave, as opposed to a rent-collecting member of the Blessed Rich) come about?

This kind of screwbally thing happens in state politics too (at least in Wisconsin — I can’t speak to other states). Basically, Republican runs up debt doing stupid stuff –> it all starts to blow up –> people elect a rightish Democrat –> starts to get under control but at the expense of “responsibly” cutting popular and needed programs –> people elect a ninny Republican…

Only clear unbroken trajectory apparent to me is the one that describes the soaring flight of that most unguided of missiles, the military-industrial-Congressional-executive-media-al-educational-research-al complex.

The public didn’t change, the elites just decided that what the public wanted didn’t matter.

And people here wonder why Americans hate the elite.

That America has a large and very powerful national government that principally doles out benefits to its citizens is an undeniable fact that the vast majority of Americans are comfortable with…..but 1/2 the country still likes the music of anti-government rhetoric. Reagan’s popularity in America is largely because he was very good at singing the kind of song that people like, it has almost nothing to do with actual governing.

It would take a psychologist to explain this sort of thing a bit better.

Those modest public sector welfare state gains happened at a time of massive retrenchment of the private sector welfare state.

The percentage of Americans with health insurance peaked during the Carter administration at over 90%.

Reagan expanded Medicaid to certain popular groups like pregnant women because so many Americans were losing their coverage during his term.

“And yet Obama was clearly impressed by the way Reagan had transformed Americans’ attitude about government.”

I think in retrospect he may be viewed as having been very successful with that.

But I don’t think he’s been as successful at addressing the slew of emergencies that have come up: the millions of underwater mortgages, the more than a million people who have exhausted their unemployment benefits, the 200 million gallons of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico while the government mostly rubbernecked and the American people watched in amazed horror and disbelief, and so on.

Those facts are an ‘only Nixon could go to China’ kind of thing. Only democrats get to reduce social spending or de-regulate.

And traditionally, only republicans are allowed to sign disarmament treaties, or lately, to stop wars. Which is why getting that last treaty with Russia through the Senate was such an achievement for the Obama – they (the GOP) REALLY did not want him to get that one.

“Brendan Nyhan casts some doubts on whether this transformation actually happened, citing public opinion data.

I think this is probably the wrong the lens to view the changes Reagan wrought. He may not have had all that much impact on policy or greatly increased the number of people who consider themselves conservative, but consider the following:

(1) The crystallization of what it *means* to be a conservative: inflexibility on taxes, anti-government rhetoric, defense spending, aggressive foreign policy, anti-anti-racism, veneration of the military and patriotic and Christian symbols, anti-abortion politics and other commitments to the cultural right, etc. This is still, in essence, Reagan’s grab bag of grievances, and strikingly different from Nixon’s coalition or old-school New England conservativism.

In 1976, an awful lot of Southern Conservatives voted for Jimmy Carter, who emphasized a very different brand of Christian morality and Southern identity. That’s impossible to imagine today.

(2) The increased emphasis on ideological purity by the Republican base, which once lionized people like Gerald Ford and Dick Lugar, and was broad enough to include John Anderson, Jim Jeffords, and John Chafee.

(3) The mainstreaming of viewpoints that were once considered to be on the fringe. Reagan didn’t implement Goldwater’s agenda because it was (and still is) unpopular. But he made the way Goldwater spoke about the federal civilian government, and the Constitution, broadly acceptable. And now, a generation later, there are a large number of people who seem to take that rhetoric far more seriously than Goldwater ever did holding positions of actual power in the House majority.

In a nutshell, Reagan popularized a corrosive distrust of government’s ability to do anything other than blow shit up overseas, which is now almost synonymous with being conservative in a way that it wasn’t before. And while the actual governing preference of the Republican Party has been to amass power and influence for themselves while running the government ineffectively, rather than actually making unpopular cuts that might hurt them at the polls, the power and influence of extremist media figures may be starting to change that. And Reagan is, without question, the prophet of the AM radio cabal.

I guess Obama should put on his superman suit, and just make is all go away.

He has gotten quite a lot done, in a government that was set up to make obstruction easy.

One of the problems with ‘liberals’ is that we don’t have any patience. The right wing has been building their destruction machine for the last 50 years. They keep at it.

We couldn’t even get Al Gore elected after the Clinton years. You may recall that we all derided Clinton for not getting the job done. But look at the alternative! After Bush 2, Clinton looked like the second coming.

Don’t be so dismissive of the Obama. I’d like him to get more done also, but let’s take the long view shall we?

Reagan did change the Republican party’s attitude towards deficits. Oh and reality.

On social welfare spending, you would also have to replace TANF with AFDC and bring back CETA. I think you have forgotten some of the programs that used to make an important difference even though they didn’t cost much.

I suggest you look at the rate of severe poverty (income less than half the poverty line). Your story of steady progress doesn’t match that time series which shows worsening occasionally interupted during unsustainable booms.

That’s not what would happen in a country with a steadily expanding welfare state.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/historical/people.html
(look at table 5).

Oh and also foreign aid. Remember that ?

Reagan owed much of his popularity to Carter’s sound but unpopular policies – giving the Panama Canal back to Panama and not going to war with Iran – policies that Reagan ran against but once in office did nothing about. Reagan got the benefit while Carter took the heat. To say there was a continuation of policy from Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush to Obama is true only superficially. Who you appoint to run the various government agencies matters; Clinton appointed James Witt to FEMA, Bush appointed Mike Brown – Clinton appointed Bruce Babbit to Interior and Reagan appointed James Watt. The difference was striking. Clinton chose pragmatic, highly qualified people who did their jobs responsibly while Bush and Reagan (for the most part) chose incompetent crony hacks. The difference was reflected in the health of the economy under Clinton – the only period in the last forty years that the middle class grew and prospered. It’s the mundane details of day to day governing that matter, not the sales pitch.

If I’m not mistaken, the tax code has become far less progressive since Reagan took office, owing primarily to the tax-cutting agenda of Reagan and Bush II. In addition, Matt, you have left out PRWORA, i.e., “welfare reform”, which targeted the very heart of Reagan’s demonized version of the welfare state — single black women with children.

I think where Obama’s perception for Reagan may be a bit off is that it wasn’t so much Reagan that transformed Americans’ attitudes about government. It was the changing social and economic dynamics from the late 60s into the 70s, in particular the identification of social welfare programs with African-American constituencies and bracket creep in the tax code. Reagan was, in a sense, a culmination of the moment rather than an independent driver of it. That said, he was a very charistmatic and affable figurehead for that shift in political attitudes.

Very well said.

How do you repeal Obama?

“if you look at the years 1977-2008 there was a clear trajectory to policy that continued more-or-less unbroken despite changes in party control of different branches of government”

Sure. But how were these things accomplished? How could policy have been better done? That should be the real test — not “was there a pattern of policy helping people?”

I think partisanship will endure: market-solutions like HCR will supposedly be socialist; the Medicare drug bill will supposedly be evil. In the coming years, it’ll be vouchers for Medicare by Dems, or something. In the face of that, it’s the actual policy that matters.

The problem is that there’s only a choice between a good-government corporatist party with a corrupt, obsessively-ideological one. So yes, each party’s big policy solutions will probably solve some policy problems, but they will also predictably enrich powerful interests at the same time. If you want better policy — which should be the focus, not the “size of government” — we gotta reform the Senate and make policy more possible and less controlled by special interests. The pattern I see in those years isn’t “wow, we did lots of good stuff!” it’s “man, we could’ve done a whole lot better if we had a system that was both responsive to addressing things *and* addressing things right”

“Reagan did change the Republican party’s attitude towards deficits.”

Bartlett had a good post about that. http://capitalgainsandgames.com/blog/bruce-bartlett/1168/supply-side-economics-rip

Ask Michele Bachmann.

The destruction of the labor movement can largely be traced to Reagan’s union busting. That is a massive change to the right.

Reagan always had a cardboard cutout look to me. It doesn’t seem to matter if his representation is a photo or drawing. Perhaps he was like that in real life too. He always seemed static and two-dimensional. Maybe that’s the transformative change Obama seeks – how to become one-dimension-less.

Absolutely. The transformative aspect of Reagan was ideological, and what that highlighted quote tells you, in essence, is that Obama was in his twenties during the Reagan years.

Nyhan’s a generation younger: it’s very easy to tell that his political coming of age maps to the era of Newt Gingrich and the Hunting of Clinton’s Cock. Perhaps he might benefit from a Family Ties marathon.

The transformative part of Reagan was that he transformed politics, not necessarily policy.

After Goldwater, and prior to Reagan, being known as a conservative was thought to be the kiss of death at the ballot box, especially if you were runnning for POTUS. Politicians that actually were conservative, (unlike Nixon say), would react to being called conservative with ‘I am not a conservative, I am a moderate, non ideologically crafting common sense solutions to the problems of our great but could be better country.’ Reagan, obviously did not act like that, when called a conservative he said something like ‘you bet I am’, then wins two landslides, and politics is transformed in that lots of politicians who aren’t conservative do their level best to get called conservative, i.e. the Bushes, as in both of them, since the conservative label, all in, is a winner at the ballot box.

Obama didn’t even try to be ‘transformative’ like Reagan was though. Maybe compared to whoever is the prime minister of Denmark he isn’t, but compared to anyone who was POTUS, Obama is a pretty radical, ideologically driven, government knows best, statist liberal, but how does he describe himself? ‘I am just a common sense moderate, non ideologically trying to solve the problems of our nation.’, just like a conservative of 1973 vintage. I am not sure anyone believes him when he talks like that, but that’s what he says. If he was transformative in the way Reagan was, lots of non liberal politicians would be doing their best to become known as liberals, but I don’t think that’s going to be happening anytime soon, since being called liberal is a big loser at the ballot box. I also saw a poll that the word ‘progressive’ is now equated with ‘liberal’ in the public mind, so ‘progressives’ are going to have to come up with a new euphimism for what they think. Maybe that’s a transformation.

The logical conclusion to Matt’s reasoning in this post seems to be that Party rule doesn’t matter, that history’s trends are inescapable : “…continued more-or-less unbroken despite changes in party control or different branches of government.”

That conclusion is entirely contrary to many of the things I have read and learned. I’m thinking chiefly of Larry Bartels’s Unequal Democracy. Parties matter! From 80-92 and 2000-2008 we had largely conservative control. And the country went in a specific direction, a direction that changed (in other words, not “unbroken) when Clinton was in power. If analysts are surprised that things like Environmental Regulation continued to tighten under conservative rule, perhaps it is because our stereotypes and generalizations of conservatives are incorrect, not because there are inexorable historic policy trends in play.

“…if you look at the years 1977-2008 there was a clear trajectory to policy that continued more-or-less unbroken despite changes in party control of different branches of government. Environmental regulations got stricter, the welfare state expanded, and other forms of business regulation declined. The biggest welfare state expansion happened under GW Bush and the biggest deregulatory episodes occurred under Carter and Clinton.”

WTF? Just stop, Matt. Aside from selling arms to a known terrorist state, Iran, and using only 1/10 of the proceeds to fund an illegal mercenary army in Nicaragua, (http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/29/reviews/iran-pardon.html) domestic policy under Reagan was a frickin’ nightmare. The DOJ, EPA and HUD to name but a few agencies were nearly destroyed during the Reagan era, this is a stunning post.

DOJ under Reagan, led by Ed Meese, was a precursor to DOJ under Alberto Gonzalez, a national joke. “A former president of the Wedtech Corporation testified yesterday that he believed a $200,000 bribe promised to the personal lawyer of Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d had put Mr. Meese in Wedtech’s ”corner” during a Justice Department investigation of the South Bronx military contractor. … Mr. Guariglia said the encounter with Mr. Meese reinforced his belief that Mr. Wallach was ”as close to Ed Meese as he could get,” and would be able to ”fix this case” in exchange for a $200,000 bribe…. Mr. Wallach had added, ”I spoke to Ed Meese and we’re doing what we can” to get an investigation into Wedtech stopped.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/04/nyregion/meese-s-lawyer-is-linked-to-a-bribe-from-wedtech.html

William Weld’s resignation detailed Meese’s problems at “Justice”. “William F. Weld, who resigned Tuesday as Assistant Attorney General, had become so concerned about the legal troubles of Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d over the last few months that, if he had been prosecuting the case, ”he would have to seriously consider indicting Meese,” according to a close aide.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/31/us/ex-justice-aide-deeply-troubled-by-meese-role.html

HUD under Reagan, led by Sam Pierce, was a fiasco and a national disgrace. “How did Sam Pierce’s H.U.D. become what his successor, Jack Kemp, has called a ”swamp” of mismanagement? How did the Section 8 Moderate Rehabilitation Program become a milk bowl at which Republican fat cats fed? How did aides like Lance Wilson, who also invoked the Fifth Amendment before the same panel yesterday, and Deborah Gore Dean acquire the power they wielded in the department? Why did no one follow up on audits warning of influence-peddling, embezzlement and other problems?”
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/28/opinion/sam-pierce-takes-the-fifth.html

EPA under Reagan, led by Anna Gorsuch Burford, was a national catastrophe. “Republicans and Democrats alike accused Ms. Burford of dismantling her agency rather than directing it to aggressively protect the environment. They pointed to budgets cuts for research and enforcement, to steep declines in the number of cases filed against polluters, to efforts to relax portions of the Clean Air Act, to an acceleration of federal approvals for the spraying of restricted pesticides and more. Her agency tried to set aside a 30-by-40-mile rectangle of ocean due east of the Delaware-Maryland coast where incinerator ships would burn toxic wastes at 1,200 degrees centigrade.

Ms. Burford was forced to resign after she was cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over Superfund records, arguing that they were protected by executive privilege. Ms. Burford acted under President Ronald Reagan’s orders, with the advice of the Justice Department and against her own recommendation, her colleagues told the press at the time.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3418-2004Jul21.html

James Watt joked that everything he tried to do in Reagan’s term at EPA ended up being implemented under George W. Bush. This is truly not one of your better posts, Matt. Here’s a brief rundown of those convicted during the Reagan years.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/10/17/194133/16

Ah. Thanks.

Of course, Reagan was captured by the neo-cons immediately. The neo-cons, were conservative, pro-Israel “progressives”, and Reagan changed nothing. He made things worse.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard60.html

OMG, you people are dumber than shit.

Just so Little Matty and his cement-head minions don’t miss this:

Many recent memoirs have filled out the details of what some of us have long suspected: that Reagan is basically a cretin who, as a long-time actor, is skilled in reading his assigned lines and performing his assigned tasks. Donald Regan and others have commented on Ronald Reagan’s strange passivity, his never asking questions or offering any ideas of his own, his willingness to wait until others place matters before him. Regan has also remarked that Reagan is happiest when following the set schedule that others have placed before him. The actor, having achieved at last the stardom that had eluded him in Hollywood, reads the lines and performs the action that others – his script-writers, his directors – have told him to follow.

Sometimes, Reagan’s retentive memory – important for an actor – gave his handlers trouble. Evidently lacking the capacity for reasoned thought, Reagan’s mind is filled with anecdotes, most of them dead wrong, that he has soaked up over the years in the course of reading Reader’s Digest or at idle conversation.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard60.html

More Reagan fun:

The degree to which Reagan is out of touch with reality was best demonstrated in his concentration camp story. This was not simply a slip of the tongue, a Bushian confusion of December with September. When the Premier of Israel visited Reagan at the White House, the President went on and on for three quarters of an hour explaining why he was pro-Jewish: it was because, being in the Signal Corps in World War II, he visited Buchenwald shortly after the Nazi defeat and helped to take films of that camp. Reagan repeated this story the following day to an Israeli ambassador. But the truth was 180-degrees different; Reagan was not in Europe; he never saw a concentration camp; he spent the entire war in the safety of Hollywood, making films for the armed forces.

There are only two ways to interpret the concentration camp story. Perhaps Reagan engaged in a bald-faced lie. But why? What would he have to gain? Especially after the lie was found out, as it soon would be. The only other way to explain this incident, and a far more plausible one, is that Ronnie lacks the capacity to distinguish fantasy from reality. He would, at least in retrospect, have liked to be filming at Buchenwald. Certainly, it made a better story than the facts. But what are we to call a man who cannot distinguish fantasy from reality?

More Reagan fun:

The degree to which Reagan is out of touch with reality was best demonstrated in his concentration camp story. This was not simply a slip of the tongue, a Bushian confusion of December with September. When the Premier of Israel visited Reagan at the White House, the President went on and on for three quarters of an hour explaining why he was pro-Jewish: it was because, being in the Signal Corps in World War II, he visited Buchenwald shortly after the Nazi defeat and helped to take films of that camp. Reagan repeated this story the following day to an Israeli ambassador. But the truth was 180-degrees different; Reagan was not in Europe; he never saw a concentration camp; he spent the entire war in the safety of Hollywood, making films for the armed forces.

There are only two ways to interpret the concentration camp story. Perhaps Reagan engaged in a bald-faced lie. But why? What would he have to gain? Especially after the lie was found out, as it soon would be. The only other way to explain this incident, and a far more plausible one, is that Ronnie lacks the capacity to distinguish fantasy from reality. He would, at least in retrospect, have liked to be filming at Buchenwald. Certainly, it made a better story than the facts. But what are we to call a man who cannot distinguish fantasy from reality?

No you’re wrong. Obama is much less of a big government liberal than Wilson, Roosevelt,Truman, Johnson. All of them oversaw or tried to implement much bigger departures to the left for their time than Obama has tried.

Alzheimer’s.

Whatever. That doesn’t excuse the phony neo-con narrative.

Whatever. That doesn’t excuse the phony neo-con narrative.

Silence is golden, you pathetic dumb fucks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n03g8nsaBro

We understood Reagan decades ago. As Chris Matthews tells it, he and Tip O’Neil help start the drug war to “counter” Reagan, “Mr. Libertarian, you own your own body”.

That’s why you hopeless creeps spit such venom. You have no facts nor arguments.

What argument are we supposed to make? You’re trashing Reagan. Were you expecting us to disagree?

What argument are we supposed to make? You’re trashing Reagan. Were you expecting us to disagree?

Wilson? liberal? evidence please

I’ve always felt Reagan’s rise was more the result of conservative backlash than a cause. Tax revolts, union-busting, deregulation, retreats from civil rights — that all started in the late 1970s.

Reagan’s central role is really something that came about afterwards as a result of conscious conservative myth-making and which makes for a convenient narrative. He was a popular president who identified as a conservative, and since there weren’t too many other presidents who could say the same, the Republican Party consciously decided to pump him up as a mythical figure in the early ’90s. It helped that Boomer and Gen-X’er Republican pols came of age during his presidency and were happy to indulge the myth.

I’ve always felt Reagan’s rise was more the result of conservative backlash than a cause. Tax revolts, union-busting, deregulation, retreats from civil rights — that all started in the late 1970s.

Reagan’s central role is really something that came about afterwards as a result of conscious conservative myth-making and which makes for a convenient narrative. He was a popular president who identified as a conservative, and since there weren’t too many other presidents who could say the same, the Republican Party consciously decided to pump him up as a mythical figure in the early ’90s. It helped that Boomer and Gen-X’er Republican pols came of age during his presidency and were happy to indulge the myth.

Meese. Ugh. Someone decided to reclassify information that had previously been declassified. Meese was calling up librarians and telling them to take things off the shelves. Librarians—bless their souls—were hanging up on him.

Seems to me that Reagan was a radical being cast as conservative and Obama is a moderate being cast as radical liberal.

Meese. Ugh. Someone decided to reclassify information that had previously been declassified. Meese was calling up librarians and telling them to take things off the shelves. Librarians—bless their souls—were hanging up on him.

Seems to me that Reagan was a radical being cast as conservative and Obama is a moderate being cast as radical liberal.

Silence is golden

Do you mean to tell me that silence is GOOOLLLLLLLDDDDDDD??!

…can I invest in your quietude?

Discretionary, non-defense spending dropped like a rock under Reagan and stayed low during his term of office, reversing a 20-year meteoric rise. The slope of that 20-year-rise is similar to spending increases under Obama, making Bush’s spending increases look like a mere blip.

Great post — nobody pulverizes inane CW more effectively.

Ha! You stole that Reagan picture from Batman, The Dark Knight Returns!

- Dana Kincaid, Indianapolis, IN, USA

Funny thing is, it really seems like Luthor and Brainiac are running the world these days…

Description of this little shit Yglesias:

“All States are governed by a ruling class that is a minority of the population, and which subsists as a parasitic and exploitative burden upon the rest of society. Since its rule is exploitative and parasitic, the State must purchase the alliance of a group of “Court Intellectuals,” whose task is to bamboozle the public into accepting and celebrating the rule of its particular State. The Court Intellectuals have their work cut out for them. In exchange for their continuing work of apologetics and bamboozlement, the Court Intellectuals win their place as junior partners in the power, prestige, and loot extracted by the State apparatus from the deluded public.”

But can we spin straw into GGOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLDDDDDD?

“The biggest welfare state expansion happened under GW Bush and the biggest deregulatory episodes occurred under Carter and Clinton…”

- I’ve never heard this before. Can you prove it/back it up? I’m open to new history lessons.

Look, you are increasingly unhinged here. Stop posting. Take a deep breath. Hold it. In five years come back and if you are still insane we can start the process over.

Given your inability to demonstrate an understanding of a simple NPV calculation? We are going to need more than the word of a total idiot in the evidence column.

I think you nailed it.

Trends in Discretionary Spending, Congressional Research Service, 10 Sep 2010, Figure 3. Discretionary Outlays By Broad Category As a percentage of GDPAnother interesting graph is in the National Priorities Project’s 2009 Security Spending Primer, Figure 2.2. Discretionary Spending 1977–2014*. It shows big-spenders Clinton (in his last couple of years in office) and Bush cranking up non-defense spending. Obama, even discounting the 2009 stimulus, increased domestic spending. As a result, domestic spending is now at levels not seen since the bad old days of Jimmy Carter. Obama nails Reagan’s legacy:

I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.President Elect Barack Obama, 14 Jan 2008</small

It’s like he wakes up every day and thinks, this time they’ll finally see the shininess of GGOOOOOOOOLLLLD. I just have to point it out! It’s so obvious! They’ll all come around!

Then he gets mocked, just like the day before. I think he’s finally snapped.