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Ronald Reagan Is Giving ‘Em Heck [1]

['Steven V. Roberts']

Date: 1970-10-25

When he opened his cam paign, Reagan listed the issues this way: “Taxes and tax re lief, the size and cost of gov ernment, the continuing effort to cut those costs, the State's role in helping to finance and provide the best education for our children, the progress we've made in getting tougher laws and tougher judges to protect the citizen, his family and property, the work being done to protect the magical environment of California, the programs to build and expand the California economy so there are jobs and job oppor tunities for our people …” Not one word about poverty, slums, disease, discrimination, job training or justice. Listen ing to Ronald Reagan, it is possible to imagine that blacks or Chicanos or Indians do not really exist in California—ex cept as welfare chiselers or threats to “family and prop erty.” He has always main tained that racial integration is a “desirable result,” but he opposes open‐housing legisla tion and the busing of school children. Last winter, in talk ing about the integration of minority groups, he said: “As we bring them up to where they have the economic means to follow the trend to the suburbs and to move and dis perse from some of these com munities, we are going to find that this problem to a large extent solves itself.”

In many ways, this is the essence of Reagan's appeal. He holds out the hope that all those troublesome problems that make the evening news so unpleasant will solve them selves. “For many years now,” he said in his inaugural address, “you and I have been shushed like children and been told there are no simple answers to the complex prob lems which are beyond our comprehension. Well, the truth is, there are simple answers.” In fact, he implies, many of those problems do not even exist. Students are unhappy not because of an insane war or distorted na tional priorities but because they are “indoctrinated.” Taxes go up not because so ciety has a responsibility to the underprivileged, but be cause people are cheating on welfare. A liberal Republican politician explained it this way:

“What the people really want is for all this turmoil to go away, and they go wild about a man who promises to do everything to dispel that turmoil. What the Great Si lent Majority wants most of all is silence. They don't want to get involved, they want things the way they used to be. As a politician, Reagan is a great psychiatrist. He puts the voter on the couch and says soothingly, ‘You're great, why don't they appreciate you?’ He's like a medicine Man with his little bottle of elixir that will make every thing go away—those fuzzy wuzzy blacks staring at you on the 11 o'clock news and those professors who keep saying how smart they are and how dumb you are. He's a boy with his finger in the dike, holding back the future.”

BUT Reagan is even more subtle than that. He gives people a reason to feel good about their lives. In a recent speech to the state Chamber of Commerce he said: “We have been picked at, sworn at, rioted against and down graded until we have a built in guilt complex, and this has been compounded by the ac cusations of our sons and daughters who pride them selves on telling it like it is. Well, I have news for them— in a thousand social‐science courses they have been in formed the way it is not'…. As for our generation, I will make no apology. No people in all history paid a higher price for freedom. And no people have done so much to advance the dignity of man. … We are called materialis tic. Maybe so…. But our materialism has made our children the biggest, tallest, most handsome and intelli gent generation of Americans yet. They will live longer with fewer illnesses, learn more, see more of the world and have more successes in real izing their personal dreams and ambitions than any other people in any other period of our history—because of our ‘materialism.’”

Reagan understands the spiritual values of his people —thrift, hard work, caution, security. He also understands that they are patriotic, that they believe their country has a mission and that through that mission they will some how transcend their limited lives. “Manifest destiny” is one of the most basic ideas in American history, and sel dom has it been stated in a purer form than when Ronald Reagan said recently:

“I think on our side is civi lization and on the other side is the law of the jungle … We all have to recognize that this country has been handed the responsibility, greater than any nation in all history, to preserve some 6,000 years of civilization against the barbarians.”

That statement was not concocted for political effect. It reflects, as much as any thing he has ever said, Rea gan's view of the world. “You know,” one of his aides once told me, “Ronnie really does believe in good and evil.” And he believes in his role as a defender of the good. “The trouble with Reagan,” said one politician, “is that he can't decide whether he was born in a log cabin or a man ger.” The Governor's finely honed sense of the apocalyptic comes bursting through in his campaign rhetoric. In talking about welfare abuses to a luncheon at the Elks Club in Napa, he said: “We should all clearly understand the stakes in this economic and social ‘Battle of Armageddon.’ What we are fighting for is the sur vival of our system.”

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/1970/10/25/archives/ronald-reagan-is-giving-em-heck-ronald-reagan-is-giving-em-heck.html?searchResultPosition=2

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