Reagan Redivivus

God had a plan for his life, and Reagan didn’t have other plans.

Dear friends and supporters,

The first political lever I ever pulled (literally in those days) was for Ronald Reagan in November 1980. I’d turned 18 that August. I was a first-year student at a Bible college in Massillon, Ohio. After the scandal of Watergate (which I’d followed and well remembered), the feckless presidency of Gerald Ford, and the embarrassing Carter administration, I found Reagan a massive national relief, spearheading the first Make America Great Again program, one decisively different from — and far superior to — today’s. I kept the local newspaper from the day after the election. I suspected even then that I was witness to a significant slice of history. I wasn’t wrong.

I resonated not so much with Reagan’s bigger-than-life personality and unfailing patriotism, both of which left an indelible impression on me, but with his principled (Christian) conservatism. Years ago I explained why in my essay “Still A Reaganite After All These Years,” the title a hat tip to Paul Simon, who I’m somehow confident never voted for Reagan. Today those of our ilk are deplored as “Zombie Reaganites” by the young “conservative” populists like Vivek Ramaswamy who are troubled we might actually rise from the dead and return to political prominence.

If only.

The Movie

The current Reagan movie, based on Paul Kengor’s 2006 book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism and starring Dennis Quaid in the title role, is a splendid production from the new film company ShowBiz Direct and exudes a Christian tenor (there’s no sex, nudity, or profanity in the movie). Though occasionally it has the feel of a B flick (the CGI seems dated), what it lacks in glistening eye-candy production expertise it clearly compensates for in plot and acting.

That this is an essentially Christian movie is appropriate, because Ronald Reagan was a Christian. The movie reveals Reagan’s father (Justin Chatwin) as a big-talking, irresponsible drunk, but his mother (a restrained, tender portrayal by Jennifer O’Neill) as a godly Disciples of Christ believer. A maxim she drilled into young Ronnie that he carried with him his entire life is that “God has a plan for every life.” When as a child he asked her if God had a plan for his wastrel dad, she replied, “Yes, but your father has different plans.” The divine plan in the son’s life unfolded providentially. Reagan demonstrates how the experiences of his childhood and youth — from lifeguard to football player to radio announcer to Screen Actors Guild president — all prepared him for his life’s great mission.

In retrospect, that mission is clear — defeating communism. This objective was the flip-side combative consequence of his life’s optimistic sociopolitical tenet: liberty. Reagan was an old-fashioned liberal, the kind of liberal George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were, the kind of liberal that hated big government and economic interventionism and philosophies that bulldozed individual liberty on the way to the great earthly utopia dystopia.

Reagan highlights both his relentless Hollywood mission of exposing communists as well as the bitter controversy that ensued. This mission for liberty assured dwindling acting prospects, but he was such a liberty-lover and tyranny-hater that this was a price he was willing to pay. In the end, his first wife Jean Wyman (Mena Suvari) couldn’t endure his principled career choices, and the two sadly divorced. He soon met and married Nancy (Penelope Ann Miller), partnering defender and love of his life.

Reagan and Communism

The story unfolds through the retrospective dialogue of an aging Soviet spymaster Viktor Petrovich, played convincingly by Jon Voight, with a new aspiring Russian politician. Petrovich relates he was task in his youth with subverting the American culture to pave the way for an American Marxist regime. Again and again he kept running up against Reagan — in Hollywood; as a national surrogate for the ill-fated Barry Goldwater campaign; and as the California governor, who wouldn’t bend to law-breaking Berkeley students. The Politburo persistently gave him a patronizing head-pat, convinced the Hollywood actor was no threat to the inevitability of international Marxification.

It was a serious and, in the end, fatal miscalculation. After his election to the presidency, Reagan came to believe the most effective tactic for defeating the Soviet Union as the global center of communism was to spend them into the bankruptcy. The United States had — and the Soviet Union lacked — the resources to do this. Why? Because the Soviets lacked liberty, particularly economic liberty.  Reagan’s numerous onscreen interactions with Mikhail Gorbachev (Olek Krupa), last premier of the Soviet Union, show a test of iron wills. In the end, Gorbachev folded, and the chiseling collapse of the Berlin Wall after Reagan left office is a metaphor for the breakneck-speed demise of Soviet communism.

Reagan doesn’t intend to offer a multi-dimensional depiction of his life. Rather, it concentrates on the ideas and actions stamped by his life’s great overarching conviction: God created man for liberty, and since communism deprived liberty, he must crush communism. Reagan’s quip when asked to envision how the Cold War would end was not only memorable but also prophetic: “We win; they lose.”

God had a plan for his life, and Reagan didn’t have other plans.

The Demise of Reaganism

Reagan’s liberty philosophy shaped the Republican Party for 35 years, but there arose a generation that knew not Reagan. Today’s GOP has made its peace with the Sexual Revolution, stripping pro-life language from its platform, embracing the “pro-choice” position (Reagan brought the pro-life position into the GOP), and acting deaf-mute in the face of same-sex “marriage.” Rather than pressing for liberty everywhere, today’s GOP has cozied up to tyrants like Gorbachev’s successor Vladimir Putin. It has traded in the wealth- and, more importantly, virtue-producing principle of free markets for a miserly protectionism, which “protects” a few workers at the expensive everybody else. Rather than preserve Reagan’s maxim “Government is not the solution to the problem: government is the problem,” the New Right wrestles for coercive government power to enforce their liberty-crushing agenda. The GOP is no longer a principled party. It’s a populist party, transforming its position year to year, sometimes day to day, depending on the digitally instantaneous shift of the political winds or Donald Trump’s latest Truth Social revelation.

Reagan harks back not to a politically idyllic America, but to a time when conservatives were principled, honorable, honest and liberty-loving — like Reagan. Today’s GOP and all conservatives could do much worse than to recover Reaganism.

And, tragically, they have.

Yours for the cosmic Lord,

Founder & President, Center for Cultural Leadership

Isaiah 49:1–2

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