Dear Ronnie: Thanks for Wrecking America

By Charles P. Pierce

Esquire

08 February 12 - Turns out yesterday would have been Ronald Reagan's 101st birthday. In all the excitement over the tsunami of Santorum that engulfed the country, it plumb got right by me. So, let me say, in my own belated way, and because behind-the-times was the basis for Reagan's entire career, happy birthday, ya silly old coot.

How do you like your party now, Ronnie? A Mormon everyone hates, a world-historical balloon animal 10 years past his sell-by date, a survivalist crank from Texas, and a guy who is pretty much a dick. That's the party you and your boys created. That's the end product of the "conservative movement" of which you were the amiable and occasionally coherent figurehead, a prop in your own life. You know how you know that's the case, Ronnie? Look how hard they're trying to memorialize you in concrete and marble. They stuck your name on National Airport, and on the biggest and ugliest building in Washington, D.C., to celebrate your devotion to smaller government. What was it that Bogart said in that detective movie?

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

You taught us that "deficits don't matter." (Dick Cheney himself reminded us of that.) You sold missiles to the terrorist-sponsoring mullahs in Iran so you could sponsor our own priest-slaughtering terrorists in Central America, thereby laying the groundwork for all the secret deceptions in foreign policy that led to the Iraq war, which was designed and launched by some of your own old Iran-Contra hands, and thereby also laying the groundwork for the destructive increase in presidential power that continues (alas) to this day, under a Democratic president.

You did more than anyone else to demolish the notion of a political commonwealth, the principle that "government" is a common enterprise that must be undertaken by all citizens, and not some foreign entity to be whipped and controlled. You brought "states' rights" back from the historical ignominy where it richly deserved to have been sunk. You showed how The Other can get you elected, how elections are really simply magic shows of pretty images and soft music. You ruled for an entire second term as a symptomatic Alzheimer's patient and dared anyone to act in a patriotic manner and suggest you step down. Nobody did. You robbed the system of its confidence. You broke down important constitutional barriers that have yet to be reconstructed. You were the first among vandals.

You unleashed the stubborn archetypes that still stalk the process. The young bucks buying steaks. The welfare queen in her Cadillac. Today it's "illegals" flooding our streets, and poor people with their gout and their flatscreen TV's. And yet, at the end, when you did some genuine work with Gorbachev on defusing the Cold War, or when you raised taxes in 1983 to get us out of the recession caused by your first Crayola-sketched budget, they turned on you in a big way. Howard Phillips called you a "useful idiot," and even George Will was forced to put down his sherry, shake his head sadly, and pronounce that he found in your foreign policy "little delight." (Oh, George. You're so... rugged.) In 1987, when the Soviet Union was falling to pieces, Will wrote:

"Reagan seems to accept the core of the catechism of the anti-nuclear left - the notion that the threat is the existence of nuclear weapons, not the nature of the Soviet regime.”

That's gratitude for you right there, Ronnie. And thus was established yet another principle held dear by the political movement you championed - anything a beloved leader does of which the hardbars do not approve is simply Not Conservative. Thus did you help dig the memory hole in which is now deeply entombed the entire presidency of George W. Bush. Thus did you create the mechanism by which your younger acolytes can now turn you into a tin god to be worshipped by a party in which your actual policies might well now be considered too liberal for discussion.

You were the smiling face of unimaginable bigotry, the sunny spokesman for greed and selfishness, the friendly game-show host handing out cruelty as a lovely parting gift, the chuckling ringmaster summoning up the worse angels of our nature. You richly deserve in posterity every crazy thing that people now say they are doing in your name, in service to your legacy, and as a perfect statement of everything for which you once stood. Enjoy it, wherever you are and, like I said, happy birthday.