Governor Reagan: A Reappraisal (Ronald Reagan‪)‬

Today's Republicans seem devoted to a political apotheosis of Ronald Reagan. Determined to ensure that the "judgment of history" will rank him among the "greats," they react strongly to anyone challenging the standard assumption that Reagan demonstrated unique political gifts during his first foray into politics as governor of California and further displayed those talents as president of the United States. (1) This essay challenges only the former of these two assertions, which, nevertheless, may strike a raw nerve among the self-appointed curators of Reagan's legacy, even though the popular Great Man himself often seemed uneasy when recalling his days in the governor's chair. In his autobiography, for example, he devoted a mere five percent of its pages to those eight years 0967-1974 inclusive). (2) The probable reason for Reagan's diffidence about his gubernatorial years is an open secret rather than a puzzling mystery: the seemingly startling disconnect between ideological principle and gubernatorial practice. Campaigning as a rightwing ideologue in 1966 and a sworn enemy of big government and high taxes, he repudiated not only Pat Brown and the "spendthrift" Democrats but the entire California political system engendered in the previous half-century. Ironically, that system had been perfected almost entirely by Republicans, especially Hiram Johnson and Earl Warren. While it was complex, often inchoate, and always incrementalist, its notable success was twofold: It was activist in seeking solutions to public problems and it was pragmatic in devising and applying them. (3) Reagan, as a right-wing ideologist, was a sworn enemy to both activism and pragmatism. Another open secret is that he made pragmatic compromises between ideology and political reality, but the extent of these compromises and their consequences has been largely unexplored. Furthermore, Reagan almost never acknowledged in public having compromised, and his rhetoric ceaselessly reiterated his devotion to ideological principles that his compromises undermined. Finally, he always won this ideological-pragmatic shell game, and few among his admirers called him to account for his derelictions from ideological purity.