Reagan and the Enduring Tension

He’s still the man. February 6 would have marked the 113^th birthday of Ronald Wilson Reagan, and thirty-five years have passed since Ronald Reagan left the White House, but he is still a touchstone for those of us who want to conserve America. On this Presidents’ Day, a new book by one of Reagan’s own appointees is helpful for identifying why Reagan mattered and what his example teaches us.

            The book, Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles, is a collection of rewritten essays and reviews published over the last decade by Donald J. Devine, a political scientist who was appointed and confirmed as Director of the Office of Personnel and Management during Reagan’s first term. A movement conservative who believed that American government should not only be limited in scope but also in size, he was labeled by the Washington Post as the “terrible swift sword of the civil service” for his role in reducing the two million jobs in the federal bureaucracy by approximately one hundred thousand. He claimed that title for his own (he was also labeled a “Rasputin” and “the Grinch” by other mainstream media outlets) when he published his 1991 insider account of his time as Reagan’s Terrible Swift Sword: Reforming and Controlling the Federal Bureaucracy. 

            After his time in public service, he returned to teaching political science and serving think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and, most recently, The Fund for American Studies at which, approaching 87, Devine is still a Senior Scholar. Though his heroic whacking away at our overgrown and out-of-control bureaucracy is a dramatic story, Devine’s theme as a scholar and political thinker has been about a much broader topic, namely the conservative “fusionism” that was promoted by early National Review writer Frank Meyer and defined in this book as “a synthesis of the values of the Western tradition and of the belief in individual freedom.” It was this synthesis that Devine labels Ronald Reagan’s “solution” to the problems of an America that was even in the twentieth century losing its rationality, its spirituality, and the consensus about our history that had bound the nation together.

Devine cites Reagan’s 1981 speech at CPAC in which the new President signaled his own understanding of what the country needed by looking to Meyer’s understanding that the American emphasis on the individual is itself “part of the deeper current of Western learning and culture” alongside “a respect for law, an appreciation for tradition, and regard for the social consensus that gives stability to our public and private institutions.” Liberty is primary, but it requires order and culture to truly be a blessing.

Reagan managed to lead the country in the direction of seeing the blessings of liberty more clearly after the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, when libertinism too often stood in for liberty in the personal sphere and unaccountable bureaucratic control replaced both good sense and tradition when it came to order. Reagan’s success at turning the tide had a good bit to do with his own understanding of this reality. Devine defends the leader still stereotyped by liberals as a doddering old man or just a smooth actor. “He was, in fact, one of the best read of modern presidents, with a serious philosophy of government and social order.”

Reagan benefited from the fact that there was a functioning and vibrant conservative intellectual movement in which parts representing different views of ordered liberty could come together. The so-called three-legged fusionist stool of free-market, social, and national defense conservatives were both locked together in argument and also united in part by their sense that the White House was listening to them.

The argument part is important. Though not averse to the idea that liberty and order can be synthesized, any such synthesis will only be for a time. Devine favors talking about the “enduring tension” between these concepts (a phrase he used for his last book’s title). In Devine’s telling, the Reagan synthesis began to fray almost immediately after he left office, revived briefly under Newt Gingrich’s leadership in the House, and pretty much evaporated during the era of George. W. Bush’s big government domestic approach and neoconservative foreign policy. As Devine summarizes it, the “coalition would fuse so many interests under the term ‘conservatism’ that its extreme diversity came to undermine its intellectual integrity.”