In Praise of Victor Davis Hanson

As someone who finds the Cult of Reagan a depressing, even nauseating spectacle, I doff my hat to Victor Davis Hanson for this paragraph published at National Review Online:

I hope the present primary race does not keep descending into monotonous boasts of who is the more Reaganesque of the candidates, in which we do the gutsy and often very human Reagan a real disservice by forgetting the things that he sometimes thought he had to do to survive or to govern — or the things he was sometimes just plain naive or wrong about. George Bush’s Alito and Roberts appointments were far more conservative than either Reagan’s O’Connor or Kennedy. In a matter of a few years, Reagan’s disastrous 1986 blanket amnesty for illegal aliens changed the very fabric of the American southwest and was the source of much of the present financial and legal mess. Well apart from Iran-Contra, he was lax in going after the bombers of the Marine barracks in Lebanon and had utopian spasms about nuclear disarmament. As far as taxes and big government, he signed payroll and gas tax increases, and added a secretary of veterans’ affairs. He was not a budget balancer in the Ike mode. His earlier record as California governor — especially on abortion and taxes — was often flip-floppy. Haig, Regan, Deaver, MacFarlane, Poindexter, and others were not always models of White House unity or even, in some cases, probity. So we have reached the surreal when a present flip-flop is derided as something Ronald Reagan would never do.

You might, a I would, disagree with parts of this critique but the greater point is that Reagan was a man of his time and the challenges that faced the United States then are not all the same as those that face it now. Asking What Would Reagan Do? is most often a fatuous question and, given the identity of those that ask and answer it, most often likely to produce fatuous answers too.

Next item: hoping that people remember that Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill weren’t always right about everything either.

UPDATE: Ben Smith notices that Reagan’s relationship with Israel was, well, the kind of thing that causes silly people to talking about “throwing Israel under a bus” today. The point is not that Reagan was right (or wrong) but that cultishness is bad news for a political party.