Matt Yglesias

The Soviet Union Was a Real Empire, And Really Bad Too

Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague, 1968

I’ve been trying to stay out of the Sarah Palin blogging. But though there’s a lot to be said about her, the really important thing is that for a prospective national leader she has terrifyingly little grasp of public policy issues. For example, take this curious remark from a softball interview with National Review:

“The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally,” says Palin. The phrase is “a lot like when President Reagan used to refer to the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire.’ He got his point across. He got people thinking and researching what he was talking about. It was quite effective. Same thing with the ‘death panels.’ I would characterize them like that again, in a heartbeat.”

This is a reminder that faced with anything other than a bending-over-backwards-to-not-embarrass-her interview, Palin can’t get through the easiest questions without humiliating herself. Dave Weigel suggests the obvious followup: “Which part of ‘evil empire’ was not literal?”

The Soviet Union was an honest-to-god literal empire and Reagan was calling it evil. Not metaphorically evil. Evil. That was the point. To show that he wasn’t going to let the practicalities of détente stop him from calling it like it is. And this isn’t just a random point of history, it’s relevant to an ongoing political and policy controversy about the merits of putting “moral clarity” at the center of your approach to dealing with autocratic regimes.

Times Change, Successful Political Movements Change With Them

Noemie Emery did a pretty goofy article for the Weekly Standard, suggesting that conservatives need to emulate Ronald Reagan’s actions from 1977 to put themselves back in power. Missing from the piece is any kind of sense that Reagan’s political successes might have related to specific elements of the era that aren’t necessarily replicable at all times and places. Ed Kilgore notes:

I’d add that even Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric and domestic agenda is hardly a panacea today. In 1977 the federal government had been steadily acquiring barnacles for 35 years. The top federal income tax rate was 70%. The number of violent crimes had more than doubled in the previous ten years, as had the number of Americans on public assistance

At any rate, to state the obvious successful political movements need plausible answers to problems people care about. When marginal tax rates were extremely high, “cut marginal tax rates” fit the bill. With rates much lower, it’s not clear that it does these days. But in some ways, the crime thing is the best example. Violent crime went up a lot under the liberal regime of the mid-60s to late-70s and was a fruitful issue for the right in the 1980s. More recently, crime is down from its peak. But the murder rate in the United States is still much higher than it was back in the “good old days” and also much higher than in other developed countries. So this could, in principle, continue to be a fruitful political issue. But since it’s not really financially feasible to undertake further dramatic expansions in the prison population, conservatives seem to have just dropped the whole subject.

The Right’s Reagan Fixation

This whole conversation is so last week, but damnit I’m only now getting around to it. As all normal people understand, contemporary American conservatism has a bizarre cult-like obsession with Ronald Reagan. Over at MSNBC’s First Read they injected a dose of false equivalence into the conversation about this, equating it to Democrats’ love of JFK. Jon Chait and Steve Benen got at some of what was wrong with the analogy, but I’d take another angle on it—what’s really weird about the right’s relationship with Reagan is how exclusive it is.

Scratch a liberal, and he’ll find some good things to say about FDR. Some good things to say about JFK. These days there’s more and more appreciation of the fact that Lyndon Johnson did some very great things along with some very bad ones. Jimmy Carter’s not so popular, but there’s still stuff to like in his legacy. Bill Clinton’s administration was in many ways a disappointment but also in many ways an exemplar of successful governance. And so it goes. History is a mixed bag, and major historical figures in the progressive tradition all have their praiseworthy aspects along with their shortcomings.

In the conservative official view, by contrast, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George HW Bush, and George W. Bush were all big government sellouts who strayed from the True Path as defined exclusively by Ronald Reagan. And yet at the very same time we’re supposed to believe that America is an intrinsically conservative country that yearns for hard-right policies. There’s an obvious contradiction. And the portrait of Reagan as a down-the-line man of the right isn’t even accurate. The whole thing is bizarre, and there’s genuinely nothing like it on the left.

The Kids Love Lincoln

Here’s some Gallup findings that are fun to think about:

Young people, like people who know what they’re talking about, rate Lincoln as Top President. Middle-aged people, meanwhile, are hard-core rightwingers—they put Reagan at the top and have an unusual aversion to FDR. Old people, by contrast, love FDR. The really weird thing here, that you also see in a lot of other polls, is a truly bizarre level of Kennedy-love. If conservatives want to say that Ronald Reagan was a better president than Lincoln or Roosevelt or the oddly underrated George Washington, then we’ll just need to agree to disagree. But I can’t imagine a coherent ideological viewpoint that would justify the high ratings Americans over-35 give to Kennedy.

Now of course if you could take the Kennedy-Johnson years as a whole, then divide them up into one presidency that was dominated by Vietnam and another one that’s responsible for Civil Rights and the Great Society, then you’d have one shitty president and one great president. A lot of people seem to have basically decided to divide things up this way and call the shitty president “Johnson” while the good president is called “Kennedy.” That, however, doesn’t have a great deal to do with reality.

What Obama Could Learn from Watchmen

Ana Marie Cox does a webchat for The Washington Post:

Singapore: Obama likes comics; can he learn anything from Watchmen?

Ana Marie Cox: We can all learn something from the Watchmen. Personally, I hope he repeals the law against costumed vigilantes soon.

More seriously (tho not totally so), I think Cheney and Bush modeled their presidency on Ozymandias.

I like the idea of the Ozymandias reference, but I’m not sure that I actually get it. By contrast, though you shouldn’t click the links unless you want an implicit Watchmen spoler, Ronald Reagan actually did attempt to base his second-term approach to US-Soviet relations in part on a hypothetical version of the Ozymandias strategy. And though the argument was kind of odd, it actually went hand-in-hand with a brave and correct policy stance that helped contribute to the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War.

Alex Massie Wonders Why a Center-Right Nation Never Elects Conservative Presidents

The UK Labour Party’s 12-year grip on power seems set to end at the next elections. Conventional wisdom would attribute the Tories’ success to a mix of the bad economy, public fatigue with Labour scandals after more than a decade in office, and David Cameron’s success in moving the party to the center. Some see here a lesson for the Republicans—to win, you need to take advantage of Democratic mistakes, but also modernize the party. John O’Sullivan writing in National Review is having none of it and says there are no positive lessons to be learned from Cameronism. Alex Massie takes Sullivan’s article apart and then moves on to a more provocative point:

Equally, if a return to “true” conservatism is all that is needed for victory, why is it that, by the conservative movement’s own strict standards, there has been only one truly conservative president since the Second World War? Reagan is the only Republican president who hasn’t been written out the movement. This suggests that, far from being a guarantee of electoral success, Reaganism might better be viewed as an outlier, not a reliable template for future victories. The United States may well be, by international standards, a centre-right nation, but common sense dictates that the “centre” bit matters just as much as the “right”.

I’d venture that there’s something to that. Relatedly, try as some might to deny it, I just don’t see any way to deny that Bush-era governance was substantially more dominated by the conservative movement than was Reagan-era governance. Reagan was constrained by congress for a longer period of time (1983-88 years versus 2007-8) and dominated congress less definitively (even in 1981-82 he needed conservative Democrat votes in the House and he dealt with a much more robust bloc of moderate Republicans) at the height of his powers. His administration, meanwhile, included a number of members of the moderate wing of the party in positions of influence. Conservatives like Reagan better because he was more successful. But he was more successful in large part because his administration was less thoroughly dominated by the hard-right. That put them in a position to forge statesmanlike compromises on Social Security and the 1986 tax reform as well as engage in some course-corrections of policies that didn’t seem to be working. The conservative element was obviously there, but more moderate elements were crucial ballast and integral to Reagan’s successes.

FDR, Reagan and Our Current Predicament

CNBC had a segment last night in which Cato’s David Boaz and CAP’s Heather Boushey debated whether Ronald Reagan or FDR would make the best model for Barack Obama. It’s striking that the host starts out by saying that “FDR and Reagan both faced similar crises in their presidencies” even though they didn’t, in fact, face similar crises. Reagan faced a situation when the inflation rate was very high. This led the Fed to raise interest rates and strangle the economy in an effort to choke inflation. That worked, but it created a big recession. This is nothing like our current recession, where we’re trying to ward off the possibility of deflation:

Heather makes this point straight out of the gate. At this point, the anchor seems to agree that her intro was totally off-base, but it makes you wonder why she said it in the first place. Boaz, meanwhile, agrees that the situation doesn’t resemble the situation Reagan faced, but then just says we need Reaganite policies anyway! Which I suppose is a pretty good encapsulation of libertarianism’s one-note approach to public policy.

But the fact remains that these are different situations and the differences are important. We shouldn’t just emulate what FDR did. But that’s because some of the things FDR did were bad ideas. What we need is to do something similar to what we would advise FDR to do if we had a time machine. To model our approach on what worked in Depression-era policymaking (not just in the U.S., but abroad) and that avoids what didn’t work or what was counterproductive. The Reagan era is just irrelevant. Reagan did some good things, like remaining relatively steadfast in the face of the short-term pain caused by Volcker’s interest rate policies. And he did a lot of bad things. But you don’t want to emulate either of those things because the situation is different.

Longest Expansion Ever

Someone told me that last night Sean Hannity was talking about how Ronald Reagan “dropped the top marginal rate and we had the longest period of peacetime economic growth.” I was trying to use Google to find the transcript and was foiled. Foiled by, among other things, the fact that apparently conservatives say this all the time. For example, this is Hannity in October:

He dropped the top marginal rates from 70 to 28 percent; created 20 million new jobs; doubled revenues to the government; and gave us, at the time, the longest period of peacetime economic growth in history. Compare the two models.

The claim, though popular, is straightforwardly false:

The longest peacetime expansion coincided roughly with the Clinton administration and was preceded by increases in tax rates for the wealthy signed by Clinton and George H.W. Bush. I’m going to be generous to conservatives and say they’re just confused here. It was true, at the time that the expansion following the 1982 recession was the longest peacetime expansion on record. But that record was surpassed by the very next expansion. Meanwhile, the ‘82 recession was the most severe recession since the Great Depression though it now looks like we’ll likely beat that record.

But consider the conservative movement put on notice! If you see people making this claim again, send ‘em my post.

CORRECTION: Yikes — sloppy! The Hannity quote I pulled is accurate, he qualifies it by saying “at the time.” Apologies for the error. There are plenty of instances on the web of conservatives getting this wrong, but the one I picked he gets it right. My bad.