The Reagan hot gospellers
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington For a few days last week Americans were talking about Britain and things British. In part the Prince of Wales's visit was responsible: needless to say he made an excellent impression on our royalty-loving public and on all the expatriate Brits here in Washington. The events in Northern Ireland also kept the not absolutely United Kingdom in mind. For the first time in a number of years you could hear people asking, 'Why do they stay in Ireland? 'The question isn't couched in moral but in the practical terms of, 'Is the game worth the candle, isn't it costing an awful lot, won't the British get tired of this in the end?' Most Americans aren't taking sides and for once when we say neutral here, we seem to mean neutral.
Emotions are running high enough at home so that there isn't much energy left for partisanship abroad about things that don't concern us. First, Mr Reagan has earned his secret service code designation of Rawhide, if that word suggests a tough old bird. An incredulous but delighted nation saw and applauded a healthy President making a speech to a joint session of Congress. The consensus is that the only way you can bring that old buzzard down will be with a silver bullet.
The speech, devoted to getting his budget and tax cuts through Congress, is illustrative of an aspect of Reagan that seems to have gone unnoticed. He is the first President in many years who seems genuinely absorbed with domestic affairs. Jimmy Carter campaigned chiefly on domestic issues but found them so politically and technically intractable that he soon abandoned them for the imprecision of foreign affairs, where it is difficult to make judgments and where the power to order the fleet or a squadron of bombers hither or thither is often mistaken for accomplishment. Richard Nixon regarded the United States as a 3000-mile long aircraft carrier, a sine qua non for having a foreign policy, but a place of scant intrinsic interest. Lyndon Johnson, the last President prior to Reagan to have a set of coherent domestic policy ideas, dragged himself into foreign affairs so completely that by the time he left the White House there was no space in his day for anything else.
President Reagan sailed through his Congressional speech with nary a mention of foreign policy save for a few phrases about military spending. But he may end up like his predecessors, spinning the globe to find fly-speck islands to which to dispatch his generals. For the moment, though, his attention seems to be elsewhere which may explain why Alexander Haig is allowed to go about the planet speaking his bloodcurdling sillinesses.
Ever since Franklin Roosevelt's time, it has been the custom here to make an inventory of a new Administration after the completion of its third month in office. This is because tradition has it that after FDR's first three months, the Hundred Days as they are called, a peaceful revolution of sorts had been wrought. The implications seem to be that if a President hasn't brought off another revolution he is deficient. The Hundred Days' nonsense aside, there is some purpose in comparing the beginnings of the Reagan and Roosevelt administrations. FDR came to office with an enormous grant of power. Conditions in the country were such that Congress gave him what amounted todictatorial power. The message was, 'You tell us what law you want passed and we'll pass it'. He had the advantage of having both houses of Congress controlled by his party but in 1933 the Republicans were as desperate as everyone else and just as open to a good new idea. The catch was that nobody had a good new idea so that Roosevelt was never terribly sure what laws he wanted passed. He could rule by decree if he could think up the text of a decree to rule by.
Ultimately what American historians call the New Deal fumbled itself into existence. Whatever it was, the New Deal wasn't born of a coherent, internally consistent doctrine or viewpoint. By the decade's end, the New Deal of the Hundred Days would be unrecognisably changed, both because the first ideas did not work and because they did not flow from any set doctrine held by FDR and his colleagues. On the contrary Roosevelt and company experimented and tasted and tried and discarded through the first two terms.
Nothing could be further from the Reagan we behold. He arrives in office with doctrine and theory set in place. He has his monetarism, his supply-sideism and his laissez-faireism lashed together in a trinity. Behind that he has a sizeable group of writers, both theoreticians and polemicists, he has magazines and important public figures articulating and elaborating this unified view of political economy.
He is the head of a real faction in the country. It is not too terribly large but it is well organised, intelligent and energetic, so that his vision isn't a private one. It is shared with enough other like-minded people so that he has available to him a pool of persons to fill the government. He doesn't have to tell them what to do. He doesn't have to ride herd on them or police them for their orthodoxy. They know his will be cause it is their own and it is this compact unanimity which has given his Administration such a quick, early and powerful thud.
The Roosevelt administration never had anything like it. From the day it began to the day it ended it would have been heard to define New Deal orthodoxy. There was room for many contradictions and irreconcilable differences under the blanket on FDR's bed. Not so with the Reagan people who are sensitive to inconsistency and contradiction between their doctrine and their actions.
Some of the Reagan people are slightly 'touched'. It is a natural consequence of the tunnel vision of those who have a doctrine and love it and believe in it. Later on in the term, the intractability of the doctrinaire personality may do the President some real damage, but not so far. Nothing short of a polite form of glassy-eyed fanaticism could have pushed this budget-chopping process as far as it has been pushed. If ever there was a time for uncompromising intransigency it is now, especially when it is backed up and powered by a gospel that can tinge this painful business with high altruistic purpose.
Part of the winning momentum which Reagan and his Reaganauts have got whirling for them arises out of the marriage of their theories of political economy with stringent puritanism. The energy of 100,000 religious moralists is being poured into this effort as laissez-faire economics is linked with the severest forms of dirigiste social control. The same people who want to deregulate the chemical companies and let the acid rain fall are mad for ending abortion and even birth control. A few days ago the crazier Republicans in the Senate held a series of hilarious committee hearings on the general topic, during which they debated exactly the moment when a human female egg is transformed into a minuscule homonculus. Nothing has been heard like it since the decadent period in Thomistic theology with the members of the world's proudest, though hardly the wisest, legislative body sitting around trying to determine at exactly what point after the sauerkraut is eaten do the pickled cabbage leaves turn into an almighty belch.
A few days ago 20,000 or more people marched against the Administration. It was the largest protest in Washington since the anti-war days, but it was a coalition of people who had little in common with each other. Some were protesting about foreign policy, others about budget cuts of one sort or another. They were united only in antipathy to the President, but if we have much more intrusive governmental puritanism you will see a quasi-libertarian opposition grow. This is the land where one of our most famous athletes, Billie-Jean King, seated next to her husband and family, told a press conference the other day that she had had a lesbian relationship with a woman who apparently has been trying to blackmail her. love Billie-Jean. I've never stopped loving her, and that translates not into possession, but into trying to do whatever makes her the happiest,' the tennis star's husband said. There must be millions who sympathised, who believe in live-and-letlive and an understanding heart. They could become antagonised and disaffected long before Reagan is hurt by the unemployment statistics. There are a lot of such people, impressed by what they have seen so far, willing to give Reagan's ideas a chance but not at the cost of having his blue-noses poking about their bedrooms. He will need those people and their support in the decisive hundred or two hundred days ahead.
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