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Tuesday, 29 November 2005 11:18 |
| Mark West
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The greatest propaganda success of the Republican propaganda machine has been the notion that Ronald Reagan was a great president. The widening gap between rich and poor, the dismantling of the public safety net and the other changes he wrought on the nation were disasters, not achievements. But, from the Republican point of view, he was indeed a very important president. He taught the oligarchs who have come to be in charge of the Republican party two lessons ?? lessons that enabled them to take control of the ship of state and send it careening toward the nearest cataract, sails billowing.
The first lesson was that the American political landscape had changed. Once, top-down party leadership cadres met in smoke-filled rooms to determine who was the best candidate; but in the Reagan era, it became evident that what mattered was television appeal. ?®Would this person be a good president??∆ was replaced by a more image-oriented question: ?®Would you like to have this person over to dinner??∆ Reagan, playing his best role ever as a genial figurehead, a sort of cornball Maynard G. Krebs, could be counted on to win the hearts of a public convinced that ?®character,?∆ as judged by appearances, counted more than ideas ?? while all the time following the advice of the Texas svengali, James Baker.
But there was a second lesson: Reagan made errors, some colossal, and he needed political cover, so attack dogs had to be provided for his defense. During his administration, both right-wing talk radio and smashmouth politics were born.
During the Reagan era, the opiate of the masses of the neoconservatives
was perfected. Research has suggested that most Americans, like the
children of Lake Wobegon who are all above average, believe that they
will someday be rich. The genius of the Republican party has been to
convince this broad swath of the public that they would already be
rich, were it not for the special treatment accorded to ?®special?∆
groups ?? gay people, Easterners, environmentalists, city dwellers,
liberals, blacks.
This nasty assertion has won great headway with much of the American
public, and, along with outsourcing and the decline of the unions, more
or less put the nails in the coffin of the industrial-era social
compromises that led to the post-war surges in prosperity in America.
But it contains within it a fundamental contradition, a contradiction
that recent events have made so glaring that they threaten to scuttle
the presidency of George W. Bush, perhaps the most witless son of
privilege ever to hold the highest office of our land.
The fundamental contradition of the Republican party is that it asserts
that government gets in the way of the well-being of the public.
Perhaps; but then, why do Republicans ?? whom, we are assured, are
clever and noble and seeking the good of the public ?? seek office so
ferociously, and hold onto it so tenaciously? If we must ?®starve the
beast?∆ of big government, as Grover Norquist so startlingly put it,
then why, under George Bush, has our government grown so rapidly?
Americans, perhaps perversely, continue to expect that their government
will provide them with the goods that private enterprise cannot. This
includes aid in times of natural disaster. And it has been Hurricane
Katrina that showed the divisive results of neoconservative policies.
Not everyone in the United States was getting rich; in fact, there were
poor folk ?±?± plenty of poor folk ?±?± whom the government seemed to
abandon. The government seemed totally impotent when it came to getting
aid to people in need. And the president and all his men seemed at a
loss when something happened that Karl Rove hadn??t scripted out well in
advance.
It is, in the failed response to Hurricane Katrina, that we see the
real Reagan legacy. Government agencies, long underfunded, can not
provide the public with the help they need in times of emergency. The
public can be distracted from the effects of increasing disparities
between the rich and poor by an ever-tawdrier ?®entertainment?∆ industry
for only so long.
We can but hope that the Democrats ?? long engaged in a disastrous
policy of trying to ape the strategies of the Republicans ?? will return
to their populist heritage and provide a real alternative.
Soon.
?ÿ
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
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