The corporate media have filled the airwaves with days on end of nauseating tributes to Ronald Reagan. Here, Alan Maass and Lee Sustar from the US Socialist Worker tell the truth about this disgusting bigot.
It was natural that US President George Bush and the Republicans would scramble to the microphones to praise their fallen leader after former US President Ronald Reagan died. After all, Bush must hope that associating himself with "the Gipper" could pump up his plummeting popularity.
But the Republicans weren't alone in front of the TV cameras. In the wall-to-wall coverage after Reagan's death, you couldn't hear a note of dissent from any mainstream politician — and certainly not from the fawning media itself.
"Hillary and I will always remember President Ronald Reagan for the way he personified the indomitable optimism of the American people, and for keeping America at the forefront of the fight for freedom for people everywhere", simpered Bill Clinton. The Democrats' new liberal star, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, added: "He was gentle and kind, and every American can learn from his example."
Fight for freedom? Gentle and kind? The truth is that Reagan was an ignorant bigot who, every day of his political life, displayed contempt for the "ordinary working Americans" we're now told he cared so much about.
More than any other figure, Reagan symbolised the ruling-class counteroffensive — both in the US and internationally — against social reforms and struggle. Reagan was the establishment's used-car salesman — putting a spit-polish shine on an old-fashioned agenda of making the rich richer, attacking working-class organisation, promoting US imperial power, and abusing the most vulnerable in society.
The eight years that Reagan was in the White House during the 1980s dragged mainstream politics to the right — and set the tone for US politics to this day. To take an obvious example, many of the neoconservative "hawks" responsible for Washington's disaster in Iraq were Reaganites: Paul Wolfowitz, John Negroponte, Elliot Abrams, John Poindexter and Richard Perle — who even named his dog Reagan.
But the "opposition" Democrats, too, have been "Reaganised". Thus, Clinton's presidency in the 1990s carried through right-wing measures such as welfare "reform" and repressive crime legislation that Reagan never could have got away with. Mainstream Democrats today willingly accept proposals to cut the capital gains tax, thus putting even more money in the pockets of the rich — a proposal of "Reaganomics" that henchmen like David Stockman were considered crackpots for promoting.
We should celebrate the death of this man who caused so much violence and suffering around the US and the world. But we have a long way to go before we can celebrate the destruction of Ronald Reagan's foul legacy.
Racism and prejudice
Reagan began his political career in the 1940s as a Hollywood union leader and liberal. But he secretly fingered his colleagues to the FBI and collaborated with studio bosses to rid the movie industry of Communists in the 1950s. That got him a job as corporate mouthpiece for General Electric.
As the Republican right whipped up a backlash against the struggles of the 1960s, Reagan won two terms as California governor. At the end of the 1970s, Reagan presented his hard-line conservatism as the saviour of the Republicans after the Watergate scandal and the collapse of the Nixon presidency.
Reagan was widely seen as a dimwit — even by his supporters. "Poor dear", remarked British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, his closest international ally, "there's nothing between his ears". But Reagan's corporate backers realized that his grandfatherly image was indispensable in packaging their agenda — and in using vile scapegoating to make racism respectable again.
That's why Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississipi, a town with a notorious Ku Klux Klan history. He denounced "welfare queens" — a code word for Blacks — for living off "government handouts". As the AIDS epidemic began to claim tens of thousands of lives, Reagan refused to even use the name of the disease for six years. In fact, according to his authorised biography, he once said, "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague" because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments".
To the employers, Reagan was the ideal candidate to accelerate the turn to the right begun under Democratic President Jimmy Carter. Reagan fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, signalling an open war on organised labour that continues to this day. His budget cuts forced 1 million people off food stamps and denied Social Security disability benefits to 500,000.
Reagan cut the tax rate for the richest Americans from 70% to 28% with the promise that the benefits would "trickle down". Yet economic growth in the 1980s was slower than in the 1970s, despite the stimulus of military spending, which created massive federal budget deficits and tripled the federal debt.
Moreover, Reagan's policies accelerated a wave of factory closures that drove up unemployment rates to their highest levels since the 1930s. In a 1982 visit to Pittsburgh, Reagan was met by thousands of furious steelworkers chanting, "Fuck Ronald Reagan!"
To roll back the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Reagan stuffed the federal courts with hard-line conservatives. He named right-wing fanatic Antonin Scalia to the US Supreme Court and made William Rehnquist the Chief Justice.
Rebuilding US military power
Reagan's presidency represented the determination of the ruling class to rebuild US military power after its defeat in the Vietnam War. Picking up from the agenda pursued by former President Jimmy Carter, Reagan sharply increased military spending.
Millions of people rightly feared that Reagan was a madman with his finger on the nuclear trigger — all the more so after he was caught on microphone before a speech joking about ordering a nuclear attack on Russia.
Reagan sent troops to Lebanon in 1983 and ordered the invasion of Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island, the same year. He promoted "constructive engagement" with the racist apartheid regime in South Africa and branded Nelson Mandela's Africa National Congress a "terrorist organization" — but the anti-apartheid movement pressured Congress into passing sanctions on South Africa over Reagan's veto anyway.
Reagan also escalated the Cold War with the USSR by placing cruise missiles in Europe. After the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan, Reagan's CIA funnelled money and guns to the Afghan resistance — which included Osama Bin Laden.
But Reagan's twin obsessions — reasserting US control over the Middle East and destroying the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution — nearly blew up his administration. Reagan administration operatives organised an army of counter-revolutionaries, or "contras", to wage a guerrilla war against the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua, but revelations of human rights abuses by the contras forced a cut-off of US aid.
Reagan's henchmen then organised a deal in which the US, via Israel, secretly supplied its archenemy in the Middle East, Iran, with weapons for its war with Iraq — and used the proceeds to illegally fund the contras. Iran, in return, used its influence to win the release of US hostages in Lebanon.
Reagan denied that it ever happened — and then denied knowing about it, as various administration officials were forced to resign. But in 1992, a memo surfaced showing that Reagan had given his direct approval.
For mainstream politicians today, however, all is forgiven — because, they claim, Reagan "triumphed" in the Cold War against the USSR "without a shot being fired". Tell that to the survivors of the massacres by Reagan-backed military dictators in El Salvador and Guatemala. And when you hear about how Reagan renewed "optimism" and "confidence" in the US, tell it to the hungry and homeless in the US inner-cities left defenceless by Reagan — and every president since.
The wealthy, the powerful and their hangers-on are all nostalgic for Reagan because he delivered so much to them. As far we're concerned, we're glad to see him finally gone.
[Reprinted from Socialist Worker, the newspaper of the US International Socialist Organization. Visit <http://www.socialistworker.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, June 23, 2004.
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