The lesson of Ronald Reagan: How monsters use the truth against itself.
The presidency of Ronald Reagan was before my time (I was watching Sesame Street, not political speeches), so I can't speak with authority on the atmosphere or ethos of the times. But I am aware of history, and make an effort to put myself in its shoes for the sake of greater understanding.
So, I'm struck by one Reagan speech in particular - one that a lot of us around at the time apparently dismissed as a cartoonish joke without realizing how dangerous it was or why: The "Evil Empire" speech of 1983. After a long and vapidly delusional Culture War screed to an audience of religious conservatives, Reagan says this on a much larger issue:
"...let us be aware that while (the Soviets) preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.
It was C.S. Lewis who, in his unforgettable “Screwtape Letters,” wrote: “The greatest evil is not done now…in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is…not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result, but it is conceived and ordered; moved, seconded, carried and minuted in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
Well, because these “quiet men” do not “raise their voices,” because they sometimes speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace, because, like other dictators before them, they’re always making “their final territorial demand,” some would have us accept them at their word and accommodate ourselves to their aggressive impulses. But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simpleminded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.
(...) So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride–the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."
Pared of rhetorical flourishes for his specific audience, every word of that element of the speech is not only true, but profoundly true. He reaches past the present moment and touches a fundamental truth, that people often deceive themselves into false moral equivalencies as an excuse for cowardice and laziness in the face of great struggles. But here's the problem: He was saying all this to rationalize refusing to seriously negotiate nuclear weapons agreements with the Soviet Union.
The shiny wrapping of plain, immutable, and blatantly apparent facts about the evil of a totalitarian government - all the more powerful for being so impolitic - employed as a ruse to hide that he was simply telling Soviet negotiators to fuck off so he could play the Big Man in the following year's election. Large truths used as delivery mechanisms for small, evil men - all the more ironic for his probably totally un-self-aware reference to his own administration in the C.S. Lewis quote.
The interests of the whole world were endangered and brought to a halt for the pettiest of reasons, to serve the self-image of a soulless actor pretending to be an American and a President of the United States - aping the symbols, rhetoric, and appearances he had taught himself to represent those things even while understanding and properly behaving as neither.
It's all the more galling that popular history interprets this speech as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, when in fact it actually hardened its resolve and delayed its collapse for several years, forcing reformers like Mikhail Gorbachev to tread more carefully when they might have been bolder.
Had the same truths been delivered by an honorable agent, as an assertive invitation for change rather than an arrogant menace; had they been stated at the announcement of new diplomatic initiatives rather than as a pompous ideological bloviation; the truth of it might have pierced the Soviet Union and delivered a message of change, rather than piercing the hearts and reason of the American people just to deliver Ronald Reagan's false administration a second term.
That is the lesson of Ronald Reagan: That the truth is a weapon its own enemies can wield, and profound truths are just as potent in the hands of shallow, selfish minds as in the hands of those who cherish them. The only way to defeat a lie is to tell the truth, and the only way to defeat a monster who wields the truth is to tell it better and deeper than them.
That, ironically, is how Communism really began to be defeated: By the Solidarity of Polish workers confronting it with the contradiction that Communism was now the most anti-worker force in the world, and that paradox in itself is what finally undid the ideological passions that had given birth to Communism in the first place. Perhaps there is a lesson for that in how we may finally defeat the monsters of morally bankrupt capitalism in this country.
