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=> Oh my goodness!

Oh my goodness!
Posted by Sadie (Guest) - Wednesday, October 22 2003, 16:53:17 (EDT)
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http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9074
Reagan's Legacy
tompaine.com
October 7, 2003

Walter Williams is professor emeritus at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs and author of the just-published Reaganism and the Death of Representative Democracy (Georgetown University Press).

A just-published book offers a number of Ronald Reagan's letters from among the thousands he wrote to world leaders and ordinary Americans. The personal correspondence provides a wide variety of observations by the former president that heretofore had not been made public.

While these previously undisclosed letters present a fascinating personal glimpse of the man, there is another facet of Reagan that has been available but seldom perceived. It lies at the other extreme from the highly personal side—President Reagan's political principles writ large in what can be labeled as "Reaganism."

American political institutions and the nation's view of their role changed profoundly under Ronald Reagan's antigovernment, market fundamentalist philosophy that now dominates American political thinking.

It is not hyperbole to label the political and economic changes in less than a quarter century as a radical transformation. Yet, surprisingly, pundits and the public generally have failed to recognize that the drastic changes caused by Reaganism constitute a seismic shift comparable in the size, but not the direction, of its impact to the New Deal.

In particular, the political and economic changes since 1981 have undermined the key national institutions created by the framers of the Constitution to sustain representative governance, and have brought a Second Gilded Age.

The deterioration in the nation's political institutions that had been striking in the first two decades of Reaganism gained speed under George W. Bush. Twenty years of this political philosophy afforded Bush the base for "out-Reaganing" Reagan as he inflicted more damage to the American political system than any of his predecessors during a comparable period of time.

Reaganism during its two-plus decades became the ideological driver of disastrous initiatives. These policies have weakened the nation's most important federal institutions and brought their domination by corporate America and the wealthiest 1 percent of the income distribution.

How did this all come about? We now need to consider the process over time that led from Reaganism to plutocracy.

Facing a sagging economy and double-digit inflation during the late 1970s, the nation became receptive to Reagan's unshakable ideological belief that America could flourish beyond measure through a pro-business, antigovernment approach that featured widespread deregulation and continuing tax cuts at the top.

For President Reagan, the dead hand of government stood as the nation's biggest barrier to sustained high economic growth and extended prosperity. Government was only a problem, never a solution, so he attacked it relentlessly. But once the main institutions of the federal government and their permanent bureaucrats became the president's main targets, it meant Reagan was attacking representative democracy willy-nilly.

That concept as conceived by the framers of the Constitution—particularly James Madison—required strong federal institutions to ensure that all eligible voters had full political equality. Further, elected representatives in Congress had a primary institutional obligation to be the people's agents. Their constituents' needs were to be placed above persons and organizations outside their congressional districts, particularly those who sought to buy influence.

Reaganism crushed the national government's institutional competence and capacity for compromise needed to sustain representative democracy.

To start with, Reaganism's ideological fervor bred increasing polarization between the Democrats and the Republicans. Serious deliberations and reasoned bipartisanship almost vanished in Congress as that body became less and less able to carry out even its most basic functions such as passing annual budgets.

In the executive branch, presidents became increasingly secretive, pulled political control to the top, and turned the presidency into a spin machine meant to deceive the public. The White House gained greater political control at the expense of the institutional capability to make sound policy.

Since 1981, excessive deregulation and massive rate reductions in the highest income tax brackets produced a rapidly growing maldistribution of income and wealth that provided corporate America and the nation's wealthiest citizens with ample financial resources to fill the campaign coffers of incumbents and to hire an army of lobbyists.

Big money's clout in the halls of Congress and in the early stages of the national election process at least partially disenfranchised the constituents of the members of the House and Senate.

As Reaganism led to the death of representative democracy, the nation underwent a radical political transformation. The Gilded Age of the late 19th century and its robber barons had morphed into the late 20th century and its predatory corporate chief executive officers such as Enron's Kenneth Lay. The much weakened institutions of governance were again dominated by moneyed interests.

Rebuilding the federal government's institutional capacity is the first pivotal step toward restoring a truly representative government. If the key institutions are to be revivified, the nation must turn away from Reaganism.

Such a change will come about, however, only if ordinary Americans can cut through the unceasing propaganda to see the harm being done to them individually and to the United States in total. The problem is that the broad middle class appears to have limited comprehension that their declining economic security and political equality derive in part from Reaganism and the harsh application of its principles by President Bush.

In the Constitution, the Preamble began "We The People" to signify that the government did not belong to hereditary aristocrats, but to ordinary citizens. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people, however, will perish unless the people's vigilance can keep representative governance alive.

The people failed their most basic political responsibility. Reaganism had stolen representative democracy from them.



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