Scholars like Kurt Ritter suggest that Ronald Reagan had to
moderate his strident anti-Communism as he attempted to mainstream himself for
political purposes.
The necessity of
this move became apparent to Reagan after his bosses at GE, for whom he was hired
to do a long-running series of corporate talks, fired him because he had moved
too far too the right.
[1]
Moreover, if Reagan was going to appeal to a broader electoral center, he needed
to move away from meaty redbaiting and enthusiastically appeal to a broader
segment of society.
Following
his very well received delivery of “A Time for Choosing” in support of Barry
Goldwater late in 1964, Reagan began to campaign and speak even more in
earnest, branching out from his old GE circles and speaking more in support of
other candidates around the country. In Granville, Ohio on June 8 1965 Reagan
came out to speak for Rep. John M. Ashbrook at a dinner gathering. Examining
the text of this speech suggests how Reagan’s moves following his 1964 speech
maintain many similar and somewhat radical themes in his speaking, although the
move away from an explicit reliance on an existential rhetoric of annihilation
is striking.
Reagan
opens with a typical series of pleasantries and references to Ashbrook before
he transitions into his speech, which was entitled, “A Moment of Truth: Our Rendezvous
with Destiny.” Reagan’s first reference to any sort of policy matter comes in
the second paragraph, noting sarcastically of the Voting Rights Act, “I think
it’s wonderful that they’re going to have a voting bill. If tombstones and
empty warehouses, why not people?” This reference, almost certainly referring
to the suggestions that John F. Kennedy among others had repeatedly benefited
from election fraud, does double duty for Reagan: not only does it position
Democrats cannily on the side of undermining democracy, but it also diminishes
the ongoing debate over the VRA (which sought to expand the electoral franchise
in practice for blacks) by suggesting
with its sarcastic tone that voting itself was a relatively empty practice given
that corruption had soiled it. Moreover the structure of the joke relies on an
equivalence between the explicitly described “tombstones and empty warehouses”
which are inanimate objects signifying death and decay and the implicitly black
bodies that are to inhabit a parallel place in the structure of the humor.
Reagan,
having rendered suspect the most visible of democracy’s traditions, elections,
then turns to the general notion of democracy itself, suggesting that the real
threats to democracy come not from without
but from within, suggesting that,
“while Rome’s barbarians came from without—your barbarians will be engendered
by your own democratic institutions.” Reagan’s warrant is the work of Alexander
Tyler, which suggests that democracy “can only exist until the voters discover
they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury.” These comments
set up Reagan’s later pivot to discuss the dangers of the Great Society, and
its placement just a few stanzas after the denigration of the VRA suggests that
the ultimate ruin of democracy comes when everyone
can vote, with the implicit charge that giving blacks the right to vote will
ruin democracy. The very next paragraph substantiates these threats by providing
data, in the form of rising national debt, a diminished gold supply, and a
rising crime rate, suggested relays or relationships between these phenomena
and democracy’s decline.
Reagan then
suggests a rhetorical inversion in the two parties’ relationship to the idea of
the “status quo” which he says is “Latin for the ‘mess we’re in.’” The last
Democratic campaigners had portrayed conservatives as “radicals who’d bring
about some drastic upheaval” where “here we had a peaceful and prosperous
America.” Reagan continues a maneuver suggested in his earlier “A Time for
Choosing,” where he had argued that “the people” would be corrupted not because
of their intrinsic failures but instead by the power of Big Government to ruin
their good civic sense. The status quo, characterized by government expansion
that threatens to corrupt even the most well intentioned citizens, becomes the
warrant for a new conservatism. Reagan implicates this struggle by suggesting that
“Freedom is very fragile; it has flowered only a few moments in all of…history
and most of these moments have been ours.” Reagan not only taps into a well of
American exceptionalism, he positions this freedom as perilous and permanently
threatened. While sounding fewer explicitly militaristic notes as in “A Time
for Choosing” and his earlier more radical speeches for GE, the general threat
to freedom could speak to a large audience of people, especially whites,
concerned about what socio-political gains of people of color could mean for
them.
[2]
Reagan then
pivots to discuss the perils of inefficiency and bloated bureaucracy, pointing
out the difficulties the federal government has in competing with the private
sector in terms of services provided for cost. This threat is coupled with
claims that “the ultimate goal” of federal employment is meant to make it so
that “there will no longer be a need for private government agencies.” This
point combines with a series of data points about the government gathering more
information about citizens. While Reagan does not explicitly at any point
suggest what the government will do with data, this allows listeners to infer something sinister: he is,
presumably, not worried that the boxes of data will end up somewhere next to
the Ark of the Covenant. And with the specter of Big Government run rampant not
only in Reagan’s speech but also in the latent content suspicious of
totalitarianism’s European form, these claims do not need much to do their work
on the audience.
Importantly,
however, Reagan makes a good show of agreeing with the intentions of his opponents if not their results. Good intentions should not be conflated with good
outcomes, which Reagan hammers home when he tells the story of a motorcyclist
who, wearing his jacket backwards, is “rescued” from a crash by an emergency
response team that turns his head to the front
of the jacket. Reagan repeats this refrain as he acknowledges that problems
with education, housing, and other issues are salient, but emphasizes his
disagreement with government-based solution to these problems.
Government control of education,
for example, risks making education political, and “What if one day, that
pressure is of a political nature not to our liking. Education is the bulwark
of freedom. If you remove it far from the community…it becomes the tool of
tyranny.” These claims set up his historical arguments about the nature of
freedom, which he suggests, “comes but once in the history of nation” and at
this crucial moment where “we face a world that’s half slave and half free.” The
result is a world that raises the question of “whether mankind itself can
survive.” The speech finishes with many
apocalyptic tones. Reagan speaks of a “pathway of history” that is “littered with
the bones of dead empires…Every time, history tell us, that a cultured,
advanced society has met the less cultured, the barbarians triumph.” Reagan
then summons a future where “our failures will be recorded in a book yet to be
written called the Rise and Fall of the United States of America.” Reagan’s
Manichean themes of Good and Evil, which were more explicit in the original
“Time for Choosing” speech, reappear here, though they crescendo near the end
rather than being peppered throughout. The structure of the speech mirrors the
sense that one would have of perceiving the real threat to America as an
internal rather than external one: creeping realization as opposed to constant
terror.
In an earlier post I suggested that
“A Time for Choosing” exemplified Reagan’s ability to engage in affective
conflation, wherein the bodies attention to threats becomes a manner for
flattening out dangerous phenomena and articulating them to the same set of
existential anxieties. Here one can see evidence of a more sophisticated use of
this strategy, one that stakes out its distance from the bombastic rhetoric of
Goldwater but maintains a similar set of sentiments suggesting that Americans still
have to worry about existential threats to the polity. In a very telling passage near the end Reagan
speaks of
Truly forgotten Americans—unsung
heroes who get up in the morning and send their kids to school and pay their
bills; contribute to their church and their charity and their community. They
believe in God as the Creator of all our rights and freedoms and they’re
disturbed because their children can’t ask His blessing on a lunch in the
school cafeteria.
These “forgotten Americans” preview Richard Nixon’s silent
majority, not only suggesting how their disappearance (and silence) indexes
their marginal position relative to the status quo that Reagan spends a great
deal of time indicting, but also preying on their anxious worries about their own
relevance in a moment where institutions of privilege (the Church, a white
ballot box, economic self-sufficiency, and a relatively stable domestic circumstance)
were threatened by the “barbaric” forces outlined by Reagan. The American
government has created these barbaric forces by inserting itself into matters
best left to the social rather than political spheres. Reagan’s implied solution is a shrunken
government, one that poses less of a threat to the virtues of America’s
citizens. Without a smaller government, only the “barbarians” will be
remembered as those whom clamor loudest receive the most notice and acclaim. In
the context of “Great Society” programs that were premised on singling out for
improvement sectors of society, Reagan’s call about the “forgotten Americans”
transformed these Great Society programs from benign initiatives into actions
that signaled who did (and did not) matter in the eyes of the government. The
“extermination of mankind” references by Reagan creates a kind of sympathetic
relay with the disappearance from society of these “forgotten Americans” and
their replacement by poor and racially-marked barbarians who lacked the civic
sense to see that good intentions and right actions did not always meet at a coincident
point.
[1]
Ritter, “Reagan in the South.” This happened in 1962, although Reagan continued
to give versions of “The Speech” like “A Time for Choosing” and the speech
under examination here for some time.
Another crucial matter was that Reagan threatened not only ideological
embarrassment for GE, but also financial: he spoke out against programs like
the TVA which benefited GE immensely.
[2] As
explained in an earlier post, despite the rapid gains in the standard of living
and the white middle class through the fifties and early sixties, gains and
losses tended to be experienced relatively rather than absolutely through
competitive rather than cooperative logics. This suggests a pernicious element
of individualism that even robust rhetorics and logics of republicanism
struggle to snuff out.
