George Will, as has been his custom over the last few years, gets it wrong again. You see, George Will does not like Ronald Reagan, has never liked Ronald Reagan, and will never like Ronald Reagan. He is one of those paleocons who dislike Reagan because Reagan was down to earth, he didn't speak in the bloviating tones of William F. Buckley, that he was not an intellectual, that he appealed to the common man. In other words, what George Will has done is sell his soul to the Republican party over ideals. In a recent column, he says conservatives need to forget about Reagan and instead simply embrace the "new realities" of the Republican party. In other words, he thinks Reaganism belongs on the ash heap of history. Reagan's ideals, Mr. Will, are still relevant because they were ideas never fully achieved, but ideals which still should guide this country. To back up his claims, this self-important coward of a columnist cites some liberal CUNY professor's new book where he basically takes down Ronald Reagan from a conservative icon to someone who is more akin to Bill Clinton. Check out this gem that Will cites from this book:
Diggins' thesis is that the 1980s were America's "Emersonian moment" because Reagan, a "political romantic" from the Midwest and West, echoed New England's Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Emerson was right," Reagan said several times of the man who wrote, "No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature." Hence Reagan's unique, and perhaps oxymoronic, doctrine - conservatism without anxieties. Reagan's preternatural serenity derived from his conception of the supernatural.
Diggins says Reagan imbibed his mother's form of Christianity, a strand of 19th-century Unitarianism from which Reagan took a foundational belief that he expressed in a 1951 letter: "God couldn't create evil so the desires he planted in us are good." This logic - God is good, therefore so are God-given desires - leads to the Emersonian faith that we please God by pleasing ourselves. Therefore there is no need for the people to discipline their desires. So, no leader needs to suggest that the public has shortcomings and should engage in critical self-examination.
So, in his urge to get us to go back to Barry Goldwater instead of Ronald Reagan, Will is using the argument that basically Ronald Reagan belives the same is Bill Clinton, that if it feels good, do it.
Will is a self-absorbed, self-important hack. Of course, Will and this author he cites tell us that Reagan's era was one of big government conservatism, I guess because spending grew. Well, you morons, you see, the Congress was Democrat and reneged on pledges to cut spending. Reagan attempted to cut spending, as his proposed budgets show again and again, upon examination. However, unlike you two academic ivory tower dwellers, he had a difficult choice: fight communism or fight congress and lose our chance to end Leninist Communism in the USSR. he chose the former. You two would have him choose the latter and have us fighting Communist and Islamist fanatics today.
Reagan was not some" romantic" from the Midwest. He was a pragmatic conservative who believed in self-restraint, not restraint from the government. It sounds like the person who is not relevant to the conservative cause anymore is you, Mr. Will. Reagan's ideas of peace through strength, less spending, and more freedom from the tyranny of government are exactly what we need now. Mr. Will, a hundred years from now, you will be the one on the ash heap of history and Ronald Reagan will still be as relevant then as he was in his time, and as he is today. You need to get over your own perceived intellectual superiority over Reagan and acknowledge that he was right, and you, as is typical, are wrong. You, sir, are the one who needs to check your egos and nostalgia at the door.
The days of isolationism are over, sir. Like it or not, we can't go back to you paleocons dream of thumbing our noses at what goes on in other areas of the world and simply sitting in our ivory towers. We are a global leader, and we still need to protect our interests around the world, and that means staying involved.
What is really disgusting about Mr. Will is he chooses to go after Reagan based on some academic's definition of Ronald Reagan's faith and beliefs. That is just disgusting, and typical of people who really have no true argument. Ronald Reagan was not some godless humanist, as it appears you are growing to be, what with your increasing intolerance of evangelicals and anyone who attempts to be a person of faith and a politician. George Will, you have shown you have no tolerance for anything in conservatism other than your own echo chamber of Barry Goldwater and Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke, for heaven's sake! Here you talk about how Reagan is no longer relevant and we need to move past him, and you preach about Burkean conservatism? Come come now sir. You are more concerned with impressing us with your intelligence than is realizing the audacity and stupidity of your argument.
George Will is the one who is no longer relevant, ladies and gentlemen, not Ronald Reagan. Will thinks conservatives must be as he is: humorless, godless, and fatalistic--in other words, we should all look and act like Henry Kissinger, or Richard Nixon. No, sir, being optimistic, you sanctimonious windbag, does not equal big government. Ronald Reagan was optimistic because he believed that if they knew the consequences, as well as saw the results of the alternative to big government, that people would reject, not encourage, more government. It is sad that someone who believes they are a conservative thinker is really neither. The academic's argument that you use is flawed, because the writer picks and chooses things out of Reagan's inaugural to support their opinion. It is never given in context, at least in your column, Mr. Will.
Mr. Will, if we abandon Ronald Reagan's optimism to be more of your "pure and true" views, then we truly abandon what was good and noble about conservatism and we become the stereotype of conservatives: humorless, angry, hateful, naysayers--in other words, Mr. Will, we become you.
No thank you.
