The Possum Bistro

A faded picture to remember him by, that which does not do the Great Communicator justice, but which is what he would have wanted.

To be perfectly honest, I do not know much about the American presidency and its occupants, and regrettably enough there are only a select few modules at my university that actually focus on the U.S. as a sole topic. Having being born only half a decade before the spectacular implosion of the Soviet Union, as a kid then I did not have strong recollections of Bush Senior the 41st, even though the Gulf War was raging during that period. And if those people - who sought to demonise Bill Clinton and characterise the entirety of his presidency as a sham and unworthy of praise - wanted to achieve such a simplistic stereotype that could be packaged and sold for easy consumption via the media, then it must be admitted on my part that the only thing I remember about the Clinton presidency was the Lewinsky scandal and the calls for impeachment that clamoured and tolled as frequently as the church bells.

The sheer torrent of publicity and media time dedicated to the entire affair served as an introductory look into the especial characteristics of American politics: the GOP stumbling and grasping around in the darkness, unable to live up to the unmatcheable legacy of Reagan's two consecutive terms from 1980-1988, disappointed by Newt Gingrich's inability to match rhetoric with tangible action, concerned about the polarisation and extremism of the positions that the right had to take up; Clinton seemed to be focusing on economics (having been attributed with the quote "It's the economy, stupid") but failing miserably at foreign policy. Yet the most glaring attribute of American politics at that time was the degree of emphasis placed on personality, particularly the character of the presidential nominee.

It should not be surprising at all that Americans focus more on personality than true substance these days, given the history of presidents that have graced the stage at one time or another. Sheer intellectual strength, meticulousness to detail, expertise in wheel-dealing are no longer primary attributes or even dependable signs of great things to come, or telling in any way of the effectiveness of the president in carrying out his proposed agenda. Nixon and Carter were seen as men of intellect, yet their presidencies were marred by Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis respectively. The latter has even dedicated much of his time and effort in the years after his presidency to resolving the Middle East crisis, having penned a book (Peace, Not Apartheid) that has been on the receiving end of salvoes - Carter is deemed to have committed the sin of suggesting that moral equivalence exists between the Israelis and the murderous suicide bombers in Palestine and the Gaza Strip. Having left behind an inglorious imprint upon the annals of history, Carter seeks to erase the memory of the American public of him as a misguided, weak and indecisive leader, and in place of that the perception of Carter as a rational, tough negotiator. Only history will tell whether he can redeem himself, or that he has rediscovered that misguidedness that characterised his term.

Having polished off Dinesh D' Souza's biography of Ronald Reagan: How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary Leader only hours ago on the cold marble floor of my apartment, I was struck by many aspects of his effort at recounting the events that characterised Reagan's presidency, but more crucially how Reagan himself had responded so uncharacteristically to each of those problems. Reagan seemed to be determined to shape events as they unfolded, and not let those crises run him ragged. Of course, that determination to achieve what he had espoused as his agenda empowered a man that was underestimated for the most part of his presidency to end a war, nudge a superpower towards implosion, perpetuate the circumstances favourable to the spread of democracy and freedom, and launch America into an age of prosperity that was lost to them during the 1970s and the early 1980s. By all expectations imposed upon him by others, Reagan surpassed them, much to his critics' chagrin.

Reagan's managerial style was inscrutable and an enigma to the intellectual establishment at that time, and perhaps even more so today as Americans attempt to search for that similar concoction of determination, personality and capability in their next president. Many pundits, political scientists and historians are extremely reluctant to accord any credit to Reagan's own talents in terms of managing the most challenging and toughest job in the country, in sidestepping the bureaucratic infighting and internecine warfare within Congress and the halls of the White House, in being able to eke out a better deal through negotiations than any policy-maker ever could hope to achieve. Case in point: Gorbachev, whom Reagan himself ignored all conventional "wisdom" at that time - that the Soviet Union was a monolithic structure that was inpenetrable, immutable and that its leaders were equally uncompromising - and sought to establish rapport with. Eventually, Reagan managed beyond all expectations to convince the Soviet Union to agree to mutual nuclear arms reductions and eventually roll back its own commitments in Central and Eastern Europe, among other places in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Reading about Reagan, his remarks and quotes, and his moral principles reminded me of Ayn Rand's own philosophy, laid bare in Atlas Shrugged. Reagan believed that most Americans were better off when he left the presidency than when he first stepped into the White House, and that was due not to the economic policies that he had pushed through Congress, but to the hard work and determination of the American people to earn their own living with their bare hands. Criticisms of the Reagan era are resonant even today - because they are the same arguments employed by those who seek to reward need above talent: it was an age of materialism, the corruption of moral values, the widening rich-poor gap, the erasure of welfare programs that betrays the uncaring, elitist mindset of the administration. Individualism was castigated as a sin in American society, a psyche that was the corollary of capitalism and its elevation of self-interest as the prime motivation of men. One must remember that in the 1980s, the liberals and intellectuals tended to err on the side of caution - since being labelled as an unconventional thinker still carries with it the stigma - by perceiving the Soviet Union as healthy and everlasting, since it had already done so for the past three decades. This establishment also tended to view the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as an indicator of the empire's growing confidence and ambition in its ideology, its style of governance and way of life that it sought to project overseas. What they failed to consider - or consciously ignored - was that the invasion revealed the insecurity being felt by the Kremlin, or the nomenklatura, at home, and thus the invasion would deflect attention of its internal critics to external conflict. A tried-and-tested trick by nations throughout history, it initially seems puzzling as to why the liberals would not have spotted it and thus sided with Reagan's analysis.

The air of enchantment with communism then, the hope that communism with a human face would surface and thereby deal a crushing blow to advocates of capitalism and the American way of life - these were kept alive throughout the decade preceding the Soviet Union's demise by the liberals as they sought to discredit the material wealth and prosperity generated by Reagan's economic policies, which the latter had adopted in sheer disregard of Keynesian and supply-side recommendations. Author Kevin Phillips called the 1980s a "second Glided Age". It seems unsurprising that the further one is from Russia, the lesser the degree of discreditation of communism. Central and Eastern European satellite states such as Romania and Hungary had already experienced communism firsthand and thus its peoples were intimately apprised of the fallacies of that ideology as it was distorted from theory into practice. It was distorted because that was the only way it could work in reality, and Reagan understood that as well as Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek did. Further off in Western Europe, Communist parties managed to cling onto some scrap of legitimacy as Eurocommunism continued to have a grip on the intellectual establishment there. Thus, the liberals in America across the Atlantic would certainly be much less convinced of the ugly truth about communism. And so they advanced their argument that communism would offer a more humane way of life, a more socially responsible mechanism of wealth distribution than capitalist systems ever would accommodate.

Reagan understood that the Soviet system was unsustainable due to the fact that the centralisation of economics will inevitably lead to the centralisation of politics. A totalitarianistic hand on where, to whom and how much resources will be allocated necessitates value judgements based on arbitrary whims of individuals, encouraging them to reward special interests and disregard efficiency as the main criteria for profit. A system that rewards a bum as much as it rewards a labourer is bound to destroy any form of incentive to innovate or work. Once common men and women realise that rewards are being distributed according to need rather than success, and begin to corrupt their own standards of morality - by seeking to demonstrate one's neediness as more extreme than the next - in order to survive, one can be certain that the path to self-destruction has been paved.

These people who leech are only counting upon the moral rectitude of their fellow countrymen who are unable to tolerate this corruption, and will continue to work even harder to maintain their material wealth because that is the only channel through which these virtuous men and women know they can live: through sheer hard work and determination. Their wealth is the tangible manifestation of the capability of the human intellect, and these individuals only seek to honour it because it enriches the individual, not society. Their motive is to persuade and inspire others to follow their example, to recognise that material wealth is a goal worthy of pursuit, and that to live for oneself means to utilise one's faculties fully in order to enrich oneself. Have we not heard enough about the charge made by liberals that wealth is a sin? That one should be shamed into giving away the wealth that one produced by his or her own hands to the faceless mass that is called society? We, the men of the mind, should live to serve those who are incapable or are unwilling to put their minds and arms to work? We, who have created wealth do not need it as much as others, and thus shall henceforth allow others - who have never exerted a muscle - to enjoy the fruits of our labour?

If so, then men of commonsense should cease to labour for the undeserving. In order to avoid such a dastardly conclusion for men to reach, Reagan decided to adopt measures that curbed the paternalistic tendencies of big government by abolishing welfare policies. One of the most profound yet simple utterances can be found in the book, "The best social program is a job." Only two lines down, another priceless quote expounded that the purpose of welfare "should be to eliminate...the need for its own existence." The success of welfare programs, Reagan remarked, should be measured by the degree to which it encouraged self-reliance. This was reminiscent of the theory of decommodification espoused by Gosta Esping-Andersen - he argues that individuals in a market economy are commodified, their talents are marketed and sold like goods. Decommodification is the weaning of the dependence of the individual off the market, and the degree to which it occurs is contingent on how much freedom the individual enjoys in choosing whether to have a job or not, such that his living standards, well-being and potential job prospects are not being threatened. Thus, even if a company's executive accedes to demands from his workers for a four-day week, yet implicitly threatens to fire those who accept the deal, then it does not constitute decommodification. While Esping-Andersen's theory is one-sided in a sense that it only measures self-reliance from the market, Reagan's principle of self-reliance from welfare programs seems to encapsulate the balance necessary to preserve time-honoured traditions of hard work and perseverance that are at the core of American values.

The concept of Great Society was touched upon in the book, and D' Souza mentioned that Reagan, though unopposed to helping the disadvantaged and poor, was extremely reluctant to utilise government as a tool to be wielded by intellectuals "to organise society" as they deem fit. Perhaps it struck Reagan as hard as it did to me that adoption of such a plan would only result in the expansion of bureaucratic apparatus, and government programmes are extremely difficult to abolish once established due to the "public choice" theory. It is telling that while the American people have the power to directly elect their representatives in Congress, the general consensus of recent years is that the government simply does not listen enough to the public. The problem of legitimacy of rule is evident. Reagan had asked the American public to decide whether some intellectual in a faraway land should govern them, or that the government should trust the people to govern themselves. This type of rhetoric is strikingly similar to the current malaise plaguing the European project - just substitute the intellectual with the Eurocrat, and the public with the French, the Dutch, the Spaniards, the Italians and so on.

I can only attribute this to the increasing degree to which elected politicians find themselves influenced by special interest and lobby groups with which they share links of patronage. Political candidates spend so much money campaigning, drawing donors of sometimes dubious backgrounds to sponsor them, then when elected are subjected to subtle forms of blackmail. kurt over at his site has explored the various links that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has accumulated so far, and it is not pretty. No wonder political apathy is setting in, and if those pundits would acknowledge the truth about Obama and ask tough questions about his connections, Americans would be even more cynical about the manner in which politics is being played out. Yet they are so desperate for Obama's entrance and his promise for change that it is blinding them to these charges. Denial and selectivism dominate mainstream media such that once again, pundits are encouraging false, heightened expectations that Obama is only too happy to promise to live up to. The public will believe what they want to believe, and a few years down the road will discover for themselves the flaws of their judgement - except that they will not blame themselves but Obama himself. The pundits, trust me, will be the first to lead the dolchstosselegende.

The American public has lost faith in the capability of intellectuals to organise society as they deem fit, and perhaps we should not be looking at who is to be blamed, but what is to be blamed. The problem is systemic rather than specifically attributable to certain individuals as though they are more likely to be corruptible than others. The system of patronage extends its far-reaching tentacles and dominates proceedings, forcing those operating within it to play by its rules of wheeling and dealing, and summarily ejects those unwilling to accept them. Certainly, there are instances of individuals who vow to play by their own rules, stick to their principles - such as Obama is marketing himself to be - and usher in a political revolution like Reagan did. Yet there are a significant number of politicians who pride themselves upon their sheer ability to wheel and deal, and they know that their connections can prove very valuable to those who have the clout to sign off on pork-laden bills, among other concessions. Loyalty is a tradeable commodity within the system, and most find it politically expedient to engage in it. The end result is that elected representatives pay much more attention to these clusters of "intellectuals" than their constituencies, and society's resources are organised for their own benefit.

Reagan revolutionised American politics by forcing the Democratic Party to reform itself, by infusing and re-energising the GOP with optimism and pride. Under Reagan, the Republicans successfully remodelled themselves as the party of patriotism, restoring the pride of the military and allowing Americans to regain their faith in their nation at a time when communism and the Soviet Union's domination of the world seemed inevitable. The age of prosperity that emerged under the presidency at that time also convinced the public that the Republicans were sincere and also capable of getting the nation out of the economic rut while keeping government small.

"Compassionate conservatism" - a term mostly used in recent years by liberals to criticise Bush after he had adopted it as one of his guiding principles - can be traced back to Reagan's own philosophical understanding that coincided so neatly with Hayek's and Rand's own liberal ideas about government and liberty, infused with the man's own unique style of governance that never made any American doubt his sincerity and steadfastness. Doug Wead had co-authored the book The Courage of a Conservative with Reagan's Secretary of Interior James G. Watt in 1982, and in it he dedicated five chapters to the theme of compassionate conservatism.

Revolutionising a system is inherently tougher than revolutionising a party, but in America where the two-party system exists both count for one and the same. Now the Democratic establishment is fundamentally as out-of-touch, misguided and uninspired as the Republicans, except that the former is being buoyed by the charismatic power of Obama alone. Anyone who considers personality a reliable indicator of substance, as I mentioned at the beginning of the post, is a fool, or more likely, an intellectual happily playing the part of a fool. Bush's effect on the Democrats has been to earn the GOP exponentially more critics in the eight-year period that he has been governing since his entry. The critiques have only become more damning, more despondent, more ready to discredit everything that he has done, and ultimately quicker to spell the end of Republican rule.

Yet D' Souza, only one of a few to acknowledge Reagan's impact on domestic politics, recognised it and penned his thoughts down in 1997 - eight long years after the Great Communicator himself had humbly stepped down from the presidency. Will Bush's legacy be posthumously recognised as having a revolutionary effect as well? I shall seek an answer in the second part.