As happened with Margaret Thatcher, one immediately interesting thing about Ronald Reagan was his enemies. They wrote him off as a lightweight, a product of the Californian television world. The intelligentsia had of course been very strongly on the side of Roosevelt, and had again been very strongly — gushingly so — on the side of Kennedy. Reagan could hardly have been more different. He was sixty-nine when he took the presidential election in 1980, and showed not much evidence of serious education — nothing remotely comparable with Kennedy’s grooming at Harvard and the London embassy. He also offered simplistic answers that the professionals regarded with derision and disbelief. ‘Virtually brain-dead’, said the New Republic; ‘a seven-minute attention span’, said the New York Times; ‘amiable dunce’, said Clark Clifford, grand old man of Cold War affairs. Word went round that he had more horses than books. He also went in for presidential fol-de-rols that struck the great and good as kitsch. His predecessor, the worthy Carter, had sold off Richard Nixon’s operetta guard uniforms, but Reagan had near replicas made for his own, and pranced happily around as the band played ‘Hail to the Chief’. Besides, Reagan’s answers to economic or national problems struck most professional commentators as absurdly simple-minded. His relations with academe went from bad to worse, and Harvard shuffled rather clumsily out of giving him an honorary degree, which was awarded instead, for some reason, to Lord Carrington. But Reagan was much loved outside such circles. The apparent nonentity won by a landslide because he could talk to voters worried about taxes and government inefficiency, and he could do so with humour and style — not for him the upraised-finger repetitive moralizing that came naturally to so many of his allies. Of the federal government, he remarked, ‘If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it’: a neat enough way of expressing the irritation felt by so many businessmen and property owners at government doings in the age of Johnson’s Great Society. On the whole, businessmen do not make good politicians, and Ronald Reagan was useful to them.
His period as Governor had not been particularly successful. He had a Democrat legislature, and although relations with it were surprisingly good, he was in no position to put through what would soon be called a ‘conservative’ programme. Taxes did not go down, and government spending went up; however, Reagan did gain an important bridgehead in what would soon be called the culture wars. In the later sixties, there were endless problems with academe, particularly Berkeley. Not long before, it had stood out as a successful state — as distinct from private — university, and the central European emigres to California had clustered there. Franz Werfel had made a great deal of money out of a book, turned into a film, about Lourdes (the nuns of which had saved his Mahler manuscripts from the Nazis) and he was very generous in supporting other exiles, such as Schoenberg, who lived in straitened circumstances. Thomas Mann was less generous. A curious link between Reagan’s Hollywood period and his time in office occurred with the Communist element. At Hollywood, film music had been composed by central Europeans, such as Erich Korngold or Max Steiner (who composed the music for Gone With the Wind — as it turned out, Hitler’s favourite film). There was Hanns Eisler, whose brother Gerhart was not just Communist, but chief link with the Chinese Party (and who broke with his sister, Ruth Fischer, when her Communism turned dissident) — the very type of astute Communist who knew how to stage-manage front organizations. At Berkeley, philosophers came, of whom the last, Herbert Marcuse, taught heady stuff as to liberation. Berkeley set itself up as a rival to nearby Stanford, which was privately funded and dominated by a business school. Here, two Americas confronted each other: the one anarchic and on-the-road, the other briefcase-wielding and be-suited before its time. The Berkeley anarchists of course behaved absurdly, and Ronald Reagan could make some political capital out of them (‘a haircut like Tarzan, walked like Jane and smelled like Cheetah’). The president of the University of California system, Clark Kerr, refused to discipline students who were wrecking classes and taking over buildings; like many, many others, he shrank from appearing oppressive. On the whole, the natural scientists also wanted to get on with their hard work, and frequently regarded their colleagues in the Humanities as offering only ‘recreational subjects’ which did not matter very much. They therefore tended to vote ‘soft’. Universities everywhere in the USA were set on a path leading towards ‘Black Studies’ and the rest, and the great outside public shook its head. Reagan helped the regents to get rid of Clark Kerr, and there were confrontations with students, where, again, Reagan’s allies were generally helpless — either blundering or expostulating. Reagan found ways of disarming the demonstrators. They were generally fairly shallow and they handed tricks to the quick-witted Reagan: when they said they were the new generation, that in his youth he knew nothing of aircraft, television, etc., he had the good answer that this was true but that his generation had invented them all. Besides, he knew perfectly well that, on television, the rebarbative, shouting demonstrators would only make for sympathetic viewers and votes. He had a presence of mind and a light touch that set him quite apart from the preachy, humourless figures mostly to be found in his own political camp, the money-mad doctors with rimless spectacles from Pasadena, the evangelical versions of Dickens’s Reverend Melchidesech Howler of the Ranting Persuasion, and the rest. Whatever his shortcomings as Governor, he had one sure way of uniting his camp: he became somehow the chief figure of a general movement against the sixties. As such, he entered a sort of political subconscious, symbolizing something greater than himself.
After 1974, when he had to retire as Governor, Reagan faced some wilderness years. But events in the later 1970s went his way, as they did Margaret Thatcher’s. The National Review had been set up by William Buckley in 1955 as a sort of epater les bourgeois venture, to spit in the progressive winds of the age. In 1964 Barry Goldwater had forlornly stood as Republican candidate against these winds, and had got nowhere — he had even made the cause ridiculous, as it seemed to be associated with grasping and very provincial people from Arizona, a state quite fraudulently claiming to be rugged and individualistic, which would hardly have existed at all had it not been for the enormous amounts of money poured by the government into making the desert green. Goldwater had taken the Republican nomination by surprise, for it would normally have gone to an East Coast figure, in this case Nelson Rockefeller: but his divorce alienated proper-minded supporters. There was of course more to it. The Republicans were beginning, even then, to establish themselves in the South, because the Democrats had started advancing the cause of black rights, at the expense of state rights, and a great shift of the parties was under way. The Democrats under Johnson became the sixties party, and collected votes from, for instance, great numbers of women who now, for the first time, were in employment and, at that, often public employment, of course dependent upon taxes. The Republican vote — or at any rate support, since Democrats in the South did not always change party allegiance — grew in Democrat areas, such as Texas or California. In California, in 1978, there was a remarkable straw in the wind, Proposition 13. There was a property tax, which was sometimes cruelly high — for instance, affecting elderly homeowners who did not have much income. With inflation, as house prices rose, so did the tax assessments, and the money was not even spent locally: it was redistributed, following Federal prescriptions for the equalization of school funds and the like. The state constitution allowed referenda, and there was a great taxpayers’ revolt, despite an alignment of almost the entire Californian establishment against the Proposition, which passed by a large majority. It was a sign of things to come. With the inflation of the 1970s, many none-too-well-off people were paying more tax than before, simply because the levels at which higher tax was paid were not shifted upwards to take account of the lower value of money (‘bracket creep’). A programme of tax reduction therefore made sense, though of course it was also a direct attack on government employment.
‘Conservatives’ in the American case needs inverted commas. In England, to which the word properly belonged, the Conservative Party was indissolubly associated with Church and State; its leaders spoke with a different accent, ate at different times, and had institutions to defend that had no equivalent in the United States. If anything, the Conservative Party was by far the earliest and most successful version of continental-European Christian Democracy, but since this closely involved the Catholic Church, there was a huge difference. In economic matters, the Christian Democrats were not necessarily free-marketeering at all, and the British Conservatives had
