Roosevelt, Vidal; Reagan, Buckley
The two modern political traditions of our country are liberalism and conservatism, and they can be characterized by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, respectively. These two men established standards of excellence that politicians now aspire to. Gore Vidal and William Buckley Jr. are two of the most significant political commentators of the last century, and for the most part, they judge politicians on how they stack up compared to the traditions as represented by the two. For Vidal, not a single president has even come close to Roosevelt’s production and leadership, and for Buckley, Reagan remains the epitome and exemplar of conservatism.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, otherwise known as FDR, presided over one of the most turbulent phases of American history. Roosevelt was born into the two most distinguished families of New York at the time, the Roosevelts and the Delanos. Ulysses S. Grant and Calvin Coolidge were notable members of the latter family, and Theodore Roosevelt was a prominent representative of the former. Roosevelt led the country through the Great Depression and World War II, two ordeals that an overwhelming percentage of historians agree were among the three greatest challenges that America has ever faced (along with the Civil War).
Roosevelt entered the international political scene at one of its most chaotic times. Europe had been devastated by World War I. In the Weimer Republic, for example, inflation destroyed the reputation of the government; Germans lost faith in their leaders when hyperinflation hit and their life savings became nearly worthless. As John Maynard Keynes, an economist during the time period stated, “The various belligerent Governments, unable, or too timid or too short-sighted to secure from loans or taxes the resources they required, have printed notes for the balance.” The countries of Europe lost millions of acres of farmland during World War I, and entire manufacturing districts in England and Germany were decimated.
Following World War I, the United States emerged as a world superpower and Americans started to grow more confident. Innovations during the 1920s persuaded Americans to spend extravagantly, and the practice of spending on credit became widespread. When people realized they couldn’t pay back their debts and that companies had based their stock quotes on this fictional payment from their customers, the economy collapsed. Luckily for citizens, a strong crusader for the people emerged from the Democrats in FDR. Roosevelt saw the need for dramatic reforms in order to regain favor and trust his country. He instated the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps in order to create new jobs for Americans, and established the National Recovery Administration and the Congress of Industrial Organizations in order to increase regulation on large business. For the long term, Roosevelt saw the need to create a safety net for the American people, to ensure that families were never again devastated as they were during the Great Depression. FDR signed the Glass-Steagall Act, which created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), giving Americans the assurance that they would not lose their money (insuring up to $5,000, worth approximately $60,000 in 1940) if the banks collapsed again. He also signed and partially drafted the Social Security Act, which gave all citizens the benefits of unemployment insurance and old age pensions. This was the first time that our government had created such a permeating federal assistance program. Roosevelt’s overall body of work, legislatively, led to the creation of modern liberalism, which supports an equitable welfare state (Social Security Act and FDIC), and government involvement in economy (NRA and CIO).
Reagan is the Roosevelt of the Republicans. He reinvigorated and reinvented the Republican Party, something that had not been done since another Roosevelt was in office. Reagan is most celebrated by conservatives as the champion of supply-side economics. Centuries earlier, Adam Smith had envisioned an “invisible hand” that pushed market outcomes to naturally be the most efficient. He hypothesized that taxes were bad for any economy because they pushed this invisible hand away from the “equilibrium,” or natural balance, of the market. Andrew Mellon, as the Secretary of the Treasury under Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover, themselves US presidents, all studied and were influenced by Smith’s book “The Wealth of Nations”, widely considered to be the magnum opus of economics. Mellon saw the advantages of reducing taxes, and up until the Great Depression, facilitated the reduction of the national debt, ultimately achieving a 47.6% decrease. Arthur Laffer, a renowned economist and member of Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board, then labored over a way to prove the effectiveness of cutting taxes.
What he produced is now known as the Laffer curve, and is a staple of modern economics; it is a visual representation of the rate of government revenue with different taxes. A simplified view of his theory is that tax revenues would be zero if tax rates were either 0% or 100%, and somewhere in between 0% and 100% is a tax rate that maximizes total revenue. Laffer’s belief was that the tax rate that maximizes revenue was at a much lower level than previously believed: so low that current tax rates (2012) were above the level where revenue is maximized. Reagan became the first president to support the cutting of taxes on the basis that American taxes were not centered (which represents maximum revenue) on the Laffer curve. While government revenue only nominally raised, supply-side economics had some very positive effects on America’s economy: inflation was reduced from 12.5% to 4.4%, and unemployment declined from 7.1% to 5.5%. Decreases in import and export taxes (tariffs especially) led to favorable trade arrangements with the rest of the world; the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement forged a stronger bond with Canada, and for the first time American trade in the 1980s, even during the Cold War, surpassed Europe’s.
Reagan was seen as a hero for ending the Cold War, but much of this can be attributed to the USSR’s implosion following incredible military spending and economic stagnancy. Reagan’s other foreign affairs were not as successful.
Approximately seven decades after the Panama Canal was completed, Reagan was faced with the problem of whether or not to return the canal back to the Panamanians, to whom the land rightfully belonged. Reagan believed that since American had paid Colombia war reparations, the canal was the property of the United States. General Noriega of Panama had worked as an informant for almost two decades before Reagan’s presidency, and amid disputes over the ownership of the canal, Reagan asked Noriega to step down. (Noriega was also a CIA informant during the Cold War, and answered to the CIA). Instead, Noriega seized power of the country, expanded the force of his military dictatorship, and cut ties with the U.S. Reagan sent multiple search missions into Panama, but could not locate Noriega. A large number of civilians were killed when Reagan sent hugely destructive missiles that had been produced during the military buildup of the Cold War after Noriega. Noriega eventually surrendered in Operation Nifty Package, where Navy Seals surrounded the church that he was hiding in. Reagan is often chastised by the political left for being too forceful in Panama and other countries such as Lebanon and Grenada.
Both Roosevelt and Reagan had their flaws, and these flaws are openly acknowledged by Gore Vidal and William Buckley.
Gore Vidal, like Roosevelt, was born into the upper echelon of society. His father, Eugene Vidal, worked for the Roosevelt administration as Director of Air Commerce from 1933 until 1937, and his grandfather was a senator from Illinois. Vidal had a close personal relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, who campaigned for him when he ran for Congress in 1960. But while Vidal adored Eleanor Roosevelt, his feelings for FDR were mixed. When asked about the relationship between the couple in a 2008 interview and which one he preferred, Vidal responded, “She admired him, but he didn’t admire her, which is stupid. She was much more intelligent than he.” Vidal has often criticized Roosevelt’s handling of World War II (which Vidal served in) as being too aggressive. Vidal has even accused Roosevelt of having prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attacks and not warning the bases so that America would be incited to enter the war. Vidal writes about Roosevelt,
“Having failed to persuade the American people to come to the aid of their beleaguered allies in Europe, his means of provocation was to deny Japan the oil and the scrap metal it needed to produce weapons for its defense industries.”
Vidal thought Roosevelt was too expansionist and imperialist, but agrees with his domestic policies:
“There are still a few old people around who remember the New Deal, which was the last time we had a government that showed some interest in the welfare of the American people. Now we have governments, in the last 20 to 30 years, that care only about the welfare of the rich.”
Vidal also supports Roosevelt’s use of Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes developed the idea that government involvement in the economy is necessary in times of recession. Roosevelt used this idea to justify increasing government’s role in the economy during the Great Depression. Like Roosevelt, Vidal believes that the country should evade deficit spending when the economy is not in a state of depression. Vidal even correctly predicted the economic meltdown of 2008 in a 2006 interview, and strongly opposes the Reagan policy of large military spending.
“Why is the blue-collar middle-class, middle American more willing to accept massive taxation and military spending for vague regional objectives rather than reasonable spending on social domestic issues that concern the entire nation?” he asks.
William Buckley had a more personal connection with the idol of his political party. As Lee Edwards writes,
“The Yale University graduate [Buckley] and the Eureka College alumnus [Reagan] had much in common: Each was tall (Reagan 6′1″, Buckley 6′2″), handsome, ambitious, a gifted speaker with a ready wit, an inveterate reader with an abiding interest in ideas, and a star in his profession. Each was a committed conservative — Reagan the zealous convert from liberalism, Buckley the cradle conservative. Each had a strong libertarian streak and viewed government as almost always the problem, not the solution. (One of the earliest and most important influences on Buckley was the libertarian author and social critic Albert Jay Nock.) Each was a fierce anti-Communist who believed that you could only trust the Communists to be Communists — although Reagan would come to believe that you could trust some Communists if you carefully verified their actions. A close friendship developed, reinforced by Nancy Reagan’s warm approval of Bill Buckley and his wife, Pat, who knew many of the same socially prominent New Yorkers she did.”
He and Reagan grew up on the American political scene together. They first crossed paths in 1968 during a debate on the ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty, which would grant Panama the Panama Canal by 1999. Buckley supported ratification while Reagan opposed it, saying that, “We paid for it. It’s ours.” The ratification of the treaty made Reagan realize something – that populism was the way to win a presidency, but intellectual populism was a way to create change in the world. As Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times:
“This is the principle lesson of the Buckley-Reagan relationship, as it played out across three decades — that populism doesn’t have to be stupid or bigoted, and intellectuals who wed themselves to populist figures don’t have to look like fools in the process. Intellectualism can stand up to populism when necessary, as Buckley did in his late-’70s debate with Reagan over the Panama Canal.”
Roosevelt and Reagan were able to create great political, social, and economic change during their times by making intellectual decisions that refused to be compared to those of another, previous President. They reshaped their party platforms not by opposing their party members, but by gauging and gaining the support of the people. Each realized the need for change and progression in politics. Vidal and Buckley are two modern intellectual giants that have carried on their leaders’ legacies. While it may appear that their reports on the country’s state have become more critical and even cynical as the years progress, this is a symptom – not a problem. The true problem with the American political scene today is politicians’ unwillingness to step over the lines drawn by Roosevelt and Reagan, when in fact it is what the two would have wanted.