Ideas matter most when they’re paired with moral clarity — from IN PURSUIT
Before Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” the nation endured a long and difficult twilight. By the mid-1970s, America was experiencing overlapping economic, social, and foreign policy crises. The unemployment rate hit 9 percent in May of 1975 and inflation reached 15 percent by 1980. Between 1960 and 1980, divorce rates doubled, violent crime rates nearly tripled, and drug use exploded. The Soviet Union—far from the weak and doomed enterprise it appears in retrospect—had made communists gains from Cambodia to Angola. In 1964, 78 percent of Americans reported that they trusted government to do the right thing. By 1980, after Vietnam, Watergate, and deteriorating conditions at home, only 26 percent of voters said that. In 1979 Jimmy Carter delivered his notorious malaise speech, in which he described an American “crisis of confidence…threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.”
By the end of Reagan’s first term, America looked and felt very different. American society had gradually begun to shift to the right, with Congress cutting taxes and deregulating the airline and trucking industries. Reagan won re-election by one of the biggest landslide majorities in history. From 1982 to 1990 the American economy grew by about 4 percent a year. By the time he left office in 1988, Reagan’s approval rating stood at 63 percent. The Berlin wall fell a year later.
How did Reagan lead the country out of hard times and rekindle Americans’ faith in themselves? What made Reagan such a successful president?
This is not an easy question to answer. As the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell put it: “Even those who count Ronald Reagan among the handful of great American presidents have a hard time saying exactly where his greatness lay, or how it made itself felt. Reagan was an enigma: affable but friendless, a nonintellectual man of ideas, an ingenuous power politician.” Out of the riddle of Reagan, however, one lesson emerges clearly: that ideas matter most when they’re paired with moral clarity.
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President Reagan grabbing handful of jellybeans with Alexander Haig and Richard Allen during a meeting with Interagency Working Committee on Terrorism in the Cabinet Room. January 26, 1981. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum.
One of the keys to Reagan’s success, paradoxically, was that he was old. When he entered the White House at age 69, he was six years older than FDR was when he died in office. Reagan was born in 1911, chronologically closer to Thomas Jefferson’s presidency than to Donald Trump’s. He was formed in an earlier age, before many of the ideological currents that rocked the 20th century. (continued on page 2)