The assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, marked the end of an American political era: the age of confident liberalism. Lyndon B. Johnson carried forward JFK's legislative legacy, cutting taxes and pushing through landmark civil rights laws. But LBJ's overambitious wars in Vietnam and on poverty were damaging to America and shattering for liberalism. The late 1960s and the 1970s saw skyrocketing crime and illegitimacy, American humiliation in Vietnam, and the tragedy of Watergate.
Finally, with the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the country hit rock bottom: malaise, gas lines, the Soviets in Afghanistan, the invasion of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Blessedly, 25 years ago today, it came to an end with the election of Ronald Reagan and the dawn of the age of confident conservatism. The ensuing two decades saw unprecedented economic growth, victory in the Cold War, and a gradual diminution of the timidity about employing U.S. military force overseas that is known as the "Vietnam syndrome." By the mid-1990s, a Democratic president was even undoing the worst excesses of LBJ's Great Society.
We're inclined to view the presidency of George W. Bush, and especially his muscular foreign policy, as a continuation of the Reagan era. There is an argument to be made on the other side: that conservatism is now in its LBJ phase, having produced swollen government at home and overextended America's capabilities abroad. The left, meanwhile, is as weak, angry and paranoid as the right was in the heyday of the John Birch society--but perhaps one day it will reconnect with reality and resurge politically.
History will reveal itself in due course, but for today let us remember how, on Nov. 4, 1980, America began to reverse its decline by electing a man who shared the country's faith in itself.
-- James Taranto
The Reagan Quarter-Century
According to conventional wisdom, there were all sorts of reasons why Reagan was unelectable in 1980. He was an actor. He was old. He was a warmonger in the age of detente who naively refused to believe that the Soviet Union was a permanent player on the world stage.
"Governor Reagan couldn't start a war," warned a Gerald Ford campaign commercial a few years earlier. "President Reagan could."
Twenty-five years ago, America was in retreat. Our then-commander-in-chief scolded us for our "inordinate fear of communism," gave speeches about a national malaise and told us where to set our thermostats.
Military actions became so rare they were micromanaged from the Oval Office. Like the Desert One rescue mission that went down in flames in the Iranian desert before ever reaching our hostages.
The secretary of state so abhorred the use of the military that he resigned in protest when we had the audacity to use our own forces to try and free our own people. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, we retaliated by ... boycotting the Olympics.
It was a time of 21% interest rates and the long-forgotten "misery index": inflation plus unemployment. It was also period when many concluded that the presidency was too big for any one man, that a committee might be better suited to the times.
Reagan changed all that instantly. In his final stump speech at a San Diego shopping center, he summed up his intentions: "In eight years here as your governor I learned to have faith in you, the people, and I envision a leadership as president taking government off your backs and turning you loose to do what I know you can do best."
He kept his word. He quickly ended government regulation of gas prices and, like magic, the "energy crisis" was over. Under Reagan, oil prices dropped 70%.
His tax cuts sparked a 92-month, noninflationary boom that generated 17 million new jobs. When Reagan came into office, the top tax rate was 70%; since he left, it has remained below 40%.
He appointed to the Supreme Court a lodestar of constitutional integrity and clarity: Antonin Scalia. He stood before the Berlin Wall and demanded that it be torn down, and in less than 2 1/2 years it was gone.
He had the mettle to walk out of the 1986 Reykjavik Summit empty-handed rather than accede to Mikhail Gorbachev's demand to abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative.
At the Oxford Union in 1984, George McGovern called Reagan's March 1983 announcement of SDI the most irresponsible speech ever made by a president of the United States. Today, few dispute the link between our commitment to build SDI and the collapse of the Soviet empire.
"Reagan's SDI was a very successful blackmail," admitted Gennady Gerasimov, senior Soviet foreign ministry spokesman in the 1980s, at the time of Reagan's death last year.
The Reagan Revolution taught us many lessons, but the most pertinent today may be this: Sometimes freedom depends on one man who knows what's right, and is willing to suffer ridicule for doing what's right.
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