"Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other." -- The New York Times Magazine (14 November 1965), p. 174
"If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism." --Reason Magazine (1 July 1975)
"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."--Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981.
"I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself."
--Joke at the Gridiron Club annual dinner. (24 March 1984)
"A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not." --(Testimony to the Tower Commission) (4 March 1987)
Like Drake McHugh, the amputate football player whose character made actor Ronald Reagan a star, the 40th President of the United States advocated a conservative strong on style, weak in substance.
Even his rhetoric inadvertently exposed his sloppy thinking, which would veer from visionary vanity to outright irresponsibility.
Conservative without anxiety, as George Will characterized Reagan's conservatism, an ideology which permitted the United State to vocally despise government, yet at the same time still enjoy its extensive benefits.
For example, his outright disdain for government, like the hobbled Drake McHugh, ignored the necessary systems and procedures necessary for a nation state to function.
"Government is like a baby," Reagan quipped. A telling insult, considering the painstaking erudition and discussion that crafted the Constitution for ratification. Rather than being a bilious baby, the federal government is an intentionally complex system, not designed to create immediate legislation for emotional or purely partisan ends.
Reagan further insults government per se as "an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other." Sadly, this repartee would apply aptly to the Gipper's Presidency, in which he with like-minded Democrats passed extensive tax cuts, yet continued deficit-spending, only to thrust the economic consequences on his successor.
Continuing with the theme of incomplete conservative agenda and missing body parts, Reagan made a profound analysis of conservative, both revealing and pithy, yet also lacking:
"If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism."
Libertarianism is a visionary economic philosophy, an ideal which fails to take into account the greater context of language, custom, and society. Though many pundits would love to undo the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, as a useless encroachment of the state into the private lives of its citizens, the political and social fallout of attacking a mainstay of the Civil Rights Movement would offend too many in the Beltway and throughout the country. And the dialogue which would have to ensue to make the repeal understandable and viable would not survive the sound-bite scrutiny of Internet media cycles.
Free markets loosed from unnecessary government regulation, even if the heart and soul, cannot function without a brain, the mind of concerted government process, drafting laws in concert with deliberating agents of one nation. Legislatures and executives direct the limited energies of the state to protect the rights of its citizens and secure the nation's borders. Reagan wanted to lead with the heart, but the head -- and the rest of the body, including political traditions and factional interests, also had to be taken into account.
And on this divide between the heart and the head, the desire of conservatism with the necessary rules and guidelines for its effective practice, no inference more indicts Reagan's irresponsible conservatism without perceived anxieties than his non mea culpa following the Iran-Contra scandal:
""A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not." --(Testimony to the Tower Commission) (4 March 1987)"
Truth is a necessary condition to functioning conservatism, beginning with the sober reality that human nature is inherently conflicted and troublesome, seeking its own at the expense of one's neighbor. A policy of good intentions can never suffice to lead a free people, securing their rights and persons. In his half-hearted admission of wrong-doing, Reagan evinces his insistence on trusting his heart and intentions, the ideal optimism which propelled him to the Presidency and galvanized a weary electorate, yet will not steer the United States of today out of the terrible economic morass of crushing national debt and deficit spending.
No longer will the benign humor of style without substance suffice. Reagan's dismissive attitude: "I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself," somewhat laughable in 1984, will not do away with the dire problems of today.
One of the core rebuttals of the conservative movement against the left is the liberal insistence not to consider the facts and traditions already in place, but rather to arrogantly assume that one may dismiss the present conditions and dream up a better world. However, facts are stubborn things, which cannot be so easily dismissed. The hard facts and hardened traditions must not be so easily dispense with either. As quoted above, the facts plainly implicated Reagan in illegal arms-dealing, and real conservatism cannot dispense with the facts on the ground, nor the evidence which puts to shame the growth of government as the greatest threat to an individual's liberty.
"Where's the rest of me?" A fitting question for conservative stalwarts who want to advance a limited government, free market agenda defined primarily by Reaganite rhetoric. Reagan's antipathies to govern remove the necessary power to restore government to its constitutional boundaries.
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