Why Reagan Matters
Henry R. Nau, National Review
Reagan’s conservatism unites Republicans and still has lessons to offer us today.
Republicans are counting on big gains in congressional elections this fall and in the presidential election in 2024. The headwinds are in their favor — high and rising inflation, slowing growth and possible recession, crushing debt, and a public increasingly unhappy with the leftist turn of Democratic leadership. But conservatives are also badly divided, especially over former president Trump. And in their internal squabbles, they ignore powerful tailwinds that have put the Republican Party in the favorable position it occupies today. Those tailwinds are, in good part, the legacy of Ronald Reagan.
Reagan revitalized American conservatism in three ways. First, he united the liberal and traditional wings of the Republican Party and made it competitive again in national politics. For the 48 years before 1981, Republicans controlled the Congress for only four years each in the House and the Senate and for only 16 years in the White House. In the 42 years after 1981, they have controlled the Senate for 22 years (Democrats 20), the House for 20 years (Democrats 22), and the White House for 24 years (Democrats 20). Republicans complain that this political change did not win the culture war, but they overlook the fact that, without this political shift — which put in place a conservative Supreme Court, multiple conservative think tanks, and Fox and other conservative broadcasting networks — they would not be on the verge today of significantly influencing that culture war, a feat unthinkable 40 years ago.
Second, Reagan formulated a limited-government, supply-side version of economic policy that put economic decisions in the hands of millions of citizens rather than central-government bureaucrats and congressional special interests. Individuals receiving tax cuts allocated resources and stimulated the economy. Their choices ignited three decades of market-led economic growth and equality at home and abroad. Until Reagan, tax increases and government spending — Keynesianism — were the only alternative. Today, conservatives offer a choice.
Third, Reagan’s policies ended the Cold War and oversaw the unparalleled spread of democracy and peace. His foreign policy was conservative not liberal. It called for a world of strong nation-states not universal global institutions, independent national defenses not collective security, competitive markets not expert-driven globalization, defense of freedom where it exists not everywhere, more equal-burden sharing by allies not free-riding, and negotiations to encourage peaceful democratic reforms not morally equivalent coexistence. He called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and challenged it to an arms race outside negotiations until it reformed domestically and accepted freedom-favoring compromises inside negotiations.
Each of these legacies matters today. The Republican Party cannot win in 2022 or 2024 if it does not have an enthusiastic base (Mitt Romney?) or tries to win with only its base (Donald Trump?). Skyrocketing inflation, stalling growth, and soaring debt will not be reversed unless government spending, regulations, and monetary excess are reined in. And new challenges posed by authoritarian governments in Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran will not be met unless America and its allies share burdens more evenly and arm their diplomacy to defend the democratic gains of the past 75 years.
Individual Freedom of Choice
Reagan’s conservative worldview started with individual freedom of choice. As Lee Edwards records in The Essential Ronald Reagan (2005), Reagan told an interviewer already in 1947: “Our highest aim should be the cultivation of freedom of the individual, for therein lies the highest dignity of man.” At William Woods College in 1952 (quoted in Reagan’s Secret War, by Martin and Annelise Anderson, 2009) he elaborated: “America is less of a place than an idea, . . . the idea of the dignity of man, the idea that deep within the heart of each one of us is something so God-like and precious that no individual or group has a right to impose his or its will upon the people.” As he entered public life in 1965, he reiterated: “I think basically that I stand for what the bulk of Americans stand for — dignity, freedom of the individual, the right to determine your own destiny” (quoted in God and Ronald Reagan, by Paul Kengor, 2004).
And, as he left public life in 1988–89, he told Moscow students: “Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer.”
In 1977, Reagan put it bluntly: “Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group.”
Why start with such abstract rhetoric? Because it defines the ageless battle between conservatism and liberalism and, within conservatism, between libertarianism and tradition. As Reagan’s comment suggests, conservatives generally identify freedom of choice at the individual level. Liberals locate it at the level of the group (class, race, villages, etc.). Within conservatism, libertarians pursue maximum individual autonomy consistent with the freedom of other individuals. Devout traditionalists pursue a higher good drawn from the ancient wisdom of the divine.
But individualism for all conservatives, and especially for Reagan, never meant lack of community or the “common good.” It meant simply that individuals, with a significant degree of freedom, choose the communities they wish to join or leave, and choose the common good they wish to pursue. Self-governing, making choices for one’s self, not governing others or making choices for others, lies at the heart of American conservatism.
Nevertheless, individuals are not islands. They make choices within, but not dictated by, communities.
Two such communities are vital — communities of education and learning and communities of tradition and faith. Through education and learning, individuals escape the procrustean beds of race, class, and sometimes even family or religion. And through faith and tradition, they hold the “human good” to a “higher good.”
Reagan combined these rationalist and religious sentiments. At the bicentennial celebration of Georgetown University in October 1988, he explained how individual freedom, learning, and faith reinforced one another: “At its full flowering, freedom is the first principle of society. . . . And yet freedom cannot exist alone. And that’s why the theme for your bicentennial is so very apt: learning, faith, and freedom.” “Learning [reason] is a good thing, but unless it’s tempered by faith and a love of freedom it can be very dangerous indeed . . . [and] also bring evil.” And “what will faith without a respect for learning and an understanding of freedom bring? We’ve seen the tragedy of untampered faith in the hellish deaths of 14-year-old boys — small hands still wrapped around machineguns, on the front lines in Iran.”
Reagan’s conservatism unites Republicans — the libertarian emphasis on individual choice and competition, the populist emphasis on faith and patriotism, and the traditionalist emphasis on knowledge and virtue.
Individual Not Government Spending
For Reagan, economic policy was about individual freedom as much as it was about collective prosperity. He told his radio audience in 1976: “Our system freed the individual genius of man . . . to fly as high and as far as his own talents and energies would take him. We allocate resources not by government decision but by the millions of decisions customers make when they go into the marketplace to buy. If something seems too high-priced, we buy something else. Thus resources are steered toward those things the people want most at the price they are willing to pay.” “It may not be a perfect system,” he conceded, “but it’s better than any other that’s ever been tried” (see Reagan in His Own Hand, 2001).
Thus, in fashioning economic policy, Reagan favored tax cuts over spending increases. Tax cuts empowered millions of citizens to decide what to buy, not a handful of government bureaucrats and special-interest groups. Economists debate the stimulative effects of tax cuts vs. spending increases, but the key difference for Reagan was who made the choice to spend.
Reagan’s economic program deftly integrated the tax cuts of supply-siders, the currency discipline of monetarists, and the bookkeeping mindset of budget balancers. He didn’t get all three at once or without a biting recession. But with the peace dividend that followed the end of the Cold War, the last element, a budget surplus for several years, fell into place. From 1980 to 2010, the U.S. and world economies grew at more than 3 percent per year. Developing countries (e.g., China) grew two and three times faster than advanced countries, dramatically reducing global inequality. Moreover, inequality declined in the U.S. as well. By 2007, fewer people in the United States lived in households with incomes between $30,000 and $100,000 per year, not because their incomes fell below $30,000 per year — that percentage stayed the same — but because their incomes rose above $100,000 per year. That percentage doubled from 12 percent to 24 percent (see Stephen J. Rose, Rebound, 2010).
Liberal economists seldom mention this legacy. They focus on the top 1 percent of earners, the financial class that exploited the opening of capital markets. Take out that 1 percent, and inequality is not the major story of the Reagan years. But there is a lesson here for conservatives. By ignoring these legacy debates, conservatives concede the field to liberals; and the Millennial and Gen Z generations grow up believing that the Reagan years were little more than “an era of greed and inequality.”
Freedom in the World
Peace through Strength became the moniker of Reagan’s foreign-policy legacy. But it was more than that. It was Peace with Individual Freedom through Strength. Reagan did not seek peace through coexistence with the evil empire. He sought an outcome that favored freedom: “We win; they lose.”
Reagan told an audience in May 1985: “Don’t let anyone tell you that we’re morally equivalent to the Soviet Union. We are morally superior, not equivalent, to any totalitarian regime, and we should be damn proud of it.” Why? Because America was the first nation to establish a republic giving ordinary, individual human beings the freedom to govern themselves. It was a “city upon a hill,” and “the eyes of all people are upon us,” not because America was looking down on everyone, but because everyone was looking up to America to see whether this country, the first republic to liberalize without a monarch, aristocracy, or state church, would succeed. And, “if we lose freedom here,” Reagan added, “there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.” Reagan was a nationalist because America was the first and potentially last home of individual freedom in the world.
This is Reagan’s most important foreign-policy legacy. America has a purpose in the world, and that purpose is to make sure “republicanism” survives, not to impose it but to make it successful and available if other countries want it.
Once in the 19th century (the Civil War) and three times in the 20th century (World Wars I and II and the Cold War), the republican standard came under siege. Each time, America not only preserved its own republic but rescued others. What does the 21st century hold?
From Reagan’s perspective, the outlook is actually quite sanguine, even in the face of Russia’s brutal aggression in Ukraine and of the Chinese stealth takeover of Hong Kong. After the Cold War, over 60 countries became more free, and most remain so. As freedom spread, violence declined.
This “democratic peace,” though imperfect, speaks to an unmistakable reality in today’s world. Imagine the war in Ukraine, or potentially a war in Taiwan, if Europe was still a hotbed of nationalism and anarchism or if Japan stalked Asia as an imperialist power. Even if democracy has stalled in recent years, America is much safer because freedom exists much more widely.
America needs to build on that progress, not take it for granted or expand it aggressively. Reagan’s legacy suggests two steps: Stick with the European and Asian democracies but insist they do more, and create with allies a division of labor that deters conflicts simultaneously in both Europe and Asia.
America’s natural home is with other free countries. That’s the sense in which Reagan supported free trade. Many conservatives today are unhappy with this legacy. And they have a point — up to a point.
Free trade was spectacularly successful among free nations during the Cold War. Without the combined strength of the United States, Japan, and a free Western Europe, the Cold War would have never been won. On the other hand, free trade with other free nations no longer requires sweetheart deals from the United States to bolster strategic aims. Reciprocity not grand strategy is the byword of future free-trade negotiations. The United States gets exactly the same treatment in the markets of democratic allies as those allies get in the U.S. market. President Trump showed the way by renegotiating earlier trade agreements with Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, and the European Union. Adjusted in this way, free trade among free countries widens freedom of individual choice and is thereby an integral part of the larger battle against tyranny.
But free trade with adversaries has failed. It was premised on the liberal idea that economic liberalization would promote political liberalization. During the Cold War, that may have been the hope of those who favored détente, but it was never Reagan’s. His objective was always to weaken the Soviet economy, let it bear the full costs of its inefficient system, and initiate freer trade only after the Soviet Union had undertaken significant domestic political reforms.
Reagan’s approach applies to Russia and China today. Free countries should tighten controls sharply on security-related trade, jawbone Western firms to scale back dependence on these countries for commodities, supply chains, and markets, and gradually reduce borrowing, especially from China. Decoupling is inevitable and already happening. The era of expanding globalization is over.
In defense matters, the priorities are Ukraine and the East and South China Seas. In both regions, America has to do less and the allies more.
The U.S. share of the free world’s resources (among OECD countries) is roughly one third; other free countries control two-thirds. Thus, a perfectly reasonable, indeed generous, metric of burden sharing between the United States and its allies over the next several decades might be 50–50. Today, in both Europe and Asia, the United States still accounts for roughly 70 percent of defense expenses. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has rallied NATO defense spending, including by longtime laggards such as Germany. But the allies have to establish permanent metrics and mechanisms to monitor and sustain this burden-sharing persistently.
Second, the allies have to set priorities, not by region — that is, putting Asia first or Europe first — but by a division of labor between the United States and its free-world allies. European nations take the lead in NATO, with America and Asian democracies backing up; America takes the lead in Asia with European and Asian democracies backing up (a good example being the U.S. –U.K.–Australian agreement, in September 2021, to deploy nuclear-powered submarines in the Pacific). Threats of terrorism and nuclear proliferation remain in other regions, such as the Middle East, but the success or failure of freedom there is not as consequential.
Restraint is in order, but it applies to adversaries as well. And so far, Russia and China have shown no signs of restraint. They benefited most from the global expansion of freedom and markets. Yet, they now trash the “U.S.-led world order.” We should not join them. Play the long game. Meet their challenge and win on the principles of Reagan’s legacy. Unite Republicans around the conservative triad of individual freedom, learning, and faith. Pursue domestic economic policies that expand individual choice. Trade with free nations only and then only on grounds of reciprocity and more-balanced burden-sharing. Prioritize defense responsibilities to defend the “new Berlins” of both Kyiv and Taipei. And find a place in the system that adversaries can eventually accept. On these terms, America’s engagement in the world is not only morally sound but materially sustainable.
