The Corruption of Prince Charming

Ronald Reagan is, by most accounts, the untouchable saint of recent American history. Anyone who lived during his time, including his opponents in Congress, would have called him a charming man. He had a remarkable way with people, honed by his years in front of the camera, memorizing lines and playing the good guy in film after film after film. For me personally, Reagan was my childhood president, from 1981-1989, the old man who never seemed all that old. He had a sense of humor and a smile that lit up a room. There’s a reason he earned two terms, before I could vote, before I knew much about him, before I knew much about American or Presidential History.

So for those who still hold him in high regard, brace yourselves. I’m about to put a stain on your brain.

Before we talk facts, however, it might be good to ask yourself what you actually remember about that time, if you were around. It might be good to ask yourself what you remember about Reagan, I mean. As for me, I have a running loop of his speech after the shuttle explosion in 1986, the way his words offered a great deal of comfort to a nation in shock and mourning, to kids like me. I also remember hearing something about Oliver North, something about selling illegal weapons, though I wasn’t sure whether or if that really had anything to do with the president. And then there was his late battle with Alzheimer’s Disease, a condition that only further endeared his name to the American lexicon, a great man whose memory failed him in the last ten years of life.

By adolescence and adulthood, I had seen clips of his debate quip against Walter Mondale, joking that he would not hold Mondale’s age against him. I also learned, in casual, Wikipedia-level glances, that Reagan had once been an actor, that he had once been the Governor of California, and that he had earned national attention for a speech he gave during the losing Goldwater Campaign in 1964, not unlike the speech Obama gave during the losing Kerry campaign in August of 2004, ironically just two months after Reagan died.

But the question of what made Ronald Reagan “great” still seemed elusive. For example, he famously told Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in Berlin, but neither of them were in their own countries and the wall didn’t come down until after Reagan was out of office. Neither Gorbachev nor Reagan had anything to do with that wall coming down. Germany took care of the wall on its own. Why Reagan gets props for this moment is peculiar. It’s like praising the Governor of Kansas for something he or she said about the policies of Vermont. Set that aside, and the only major legislative achievement I’m aware of, on Mr. Reagan’s watch, was the creation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983.

With all that said, I’m about to suggest the alternative, not simply that Mr. Reagan was a bad president, but that he and his administration were arguably more corrupt than most, including the hatchet crew of Richard Nixon, causing more lasting damage to America than almost anyone other president before him or after him. Now before anyone gasps for air at the thought of such claims of a beloved man, let me offer this quick start: more than 100 members of the Reagan Administration were undeniably convicted, indicted, or investigated for criminal activity, something largely forgotten in the annals of posthumous flattery. With that many people caught up in nefarious actions, the worst possible scenario for Mr. Reagan is that he was willfully and/or purposefully involved. The best possible scenario for Mr. Reagan is that he was so uninvolved in his own administration, so inept at managing domestic and foreign affairs, that he simply allowed corruption to run rampant.

So let me dig in with a simple truth. Four out of the first five Executive Orders that Reagan signed were about deregulation, the start of limitless, financial favors to big business, lobbied interests, and family friends. Oil and petroleum regulations came first. Wage and price regulations came second. Exports came third. And a general overhaul of every regulatory agency came fourth.

If you’re a conservative reader, that probably sounds amazing. So bear with me. In a nutshell, deregulation is about the removal of accountability, the presumption that all those in business and government, contrary to the Founders’ view, are saints and angels. They’re not and they never have been. During the 1970s, under two previous Republican administrations (Nixon/Ford) and one Democratic one (Carter), a number of consumer and residential agencies were established to protect our air, our water, and our products, to ensure that business was not allowed to do as they wished at the expense of American health and wellness, as many of them had for many years. Understandably, the cost of adhering to the standards of these agencies was higher than many businesses wanted or believed they could afford, so they lobbied the incoming administration to loosen the rules in Washington. Alas, Reagan became the first to do so, setting a precedent among his party leaders and party faithful that regulations were inherently bad and deregulation was inherently patriotic, that it was necessary for the free market. Nevermind that human accountability is and has been necessary for all of human history, in every form, lest the worst of us take advantage of the most vulnerable.

If you’re a liberal reader, and you’re thinking that regulation and deregulation sounds boring, that it sounds like politics as usual, that it’s got nothing to do with you, I beg to differ. But I do understand your general disinterest in the nuances of government. Unfortunately, conservatives don’t find these nuances quite as boring, and you might want to read on. The films we’ve seen in recent years, from Erin Brokovich to Dark Waters, testify of the underlying challenges that come with trying to take on big business when you believe they or their products have caused legitimate harm. How does David stand up to Goliath when the slingshot is broken, the stones are laced with poison, and the king takes his clothes, leaving him to fight naked? Enter the Reagan Administration.

The 1980s were an era when business was enabled and empowered, not to do good, but to do what it wanted to do, for good or for not. The number of administration officials who benefited from this deregulation, this effort to line pockets and benefit from the minimization of rules was, as I said earlier, the cause for more than 100 criminal convictions or indictments. Put someone in the highest seat of power and tell them they can do as they please, cutting favors for all their favorite people, and that’s a recipe for corruption. Yes, indeed. To cite all of those convictions or indictments would be a laundry list beyond the boredom you may already feel, so if you’re one of those people eager to test my claim, just hop on Google and start with a search for Reagan HUD. You can read about the eight years in which the Department of Housing and Urban Development was crippled, leading to a rising wave of racially-motivated evictions and rampant homelessness across the nation. It’s not hard to find.

But let’s talk about something else that turned out to be far worse than the empowering of business at the expense of the consumer. Prior to the election of Ronald Reagan, the government had always been an arm of the people, viewed as an instrument of support, sometimes extensive and sometimes minimal, but available to Americans nonetheless. We all paid our taxes because we knew our taxes went to the greater good. Roads, bridges, health care for the weakest Americans. Work programs, social programs, and the military. All of it was part of the imperfect process of governing, dealing with large swaths of people from different situations, each with different concerns. What Reagan did was to demonize the very government, the very institution over which he was elected to preside. He cut budgets by more than 60 percent, slashing protections for those who needed housing, needed food, needed care. He installed agency heads whose goal was to dismantle and disregard the very agencies under their charge, men and women who, in many cases, had blatant and legal conflicts of interest. And because he was such a charming guy, we ignored all of it, the cutting of major funds to major agencies, making every component of government, except for the White House alone, look like it was incapable of doing the job, making it seem like the government really was an incompetent, wasteful enemy of the people. Hardly.

Under Mr. Reagan, we amped up our military spending by leaps and bounds, showing that if we wanted to invest into something, we could and would produce something great, which we did. Conversely, in the absence of investment, fickle voters who never bother to look at or care about budgets could simply blame the boogie man of partisan politics, insisting that government is either out to get us or, at their best, they’re a bunch of bumbling idiots who haven’t the first clue how to get anything done. Again, hardly. No one asks why a low income school is struggling to educate its students. And when it does, with great success, we all concur that such a case is the exception, not the rule, because the absence of funding generally means the absence of success. A minus B equals a pretty worthless A.

Putting this all in perspective and context, Reagan reshaped the American conversation from public service to self service, from Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” to a new view that looks inward, “ask yourself if you’re better off now than you were four years ago.” The 1980s paralleled a rise of greed and self-interest, of Wall Street pride and allowable, unlitigated prejudice. We’re still feeling the weight of this today, not least because the most recent administration did the same thing, deregulation of the business sector with claims that the government can’t be trusted to do its job, all the while filling the pockets, not of average Americans, but of those in its own inner circle. In other words, Reagan’s administration, which prompted an ample supply of criminal investigations, provided a charming juice for a party that came to believe whatever he touched was gold, that whatever he did, he did for the good of America, that anyone who criticized him or his party or his people was, by contrast, unAmerican. Many of us remember what it felt like to ask questions about the invasion of Iraq, back in 2003, and hearing members of Reagan’s party insisting that to question President Bush was to be unpatriotic. Twenty years later, we’re still losing soldiers in a war based on shoddy, shady evidence that never proved true.

And of course, the last administration, with yet another catalog of criminal indictments, unparalleled dishonesty, and self-dealing corruption, only added to the mix. I’d argue that Trump was, in one form or another, a mix of Nixon and Reagan, endlessly narcissistic and paranoid beyond belief, yet quick to undo the work of progress and protection for the American people, all in the name of patriotism and American values.

But in all this, I haven’t even begun to address the direct impact Reagan had on changing our drug laws to make the very act of possession a federal crime with mandatory minimum sentences, without exceptions, laws that disproportionately imprisoned the black community in far greater numbers than those in the white suburbs, where drugs continued to be sold in high volume, without the concern of police patrols. Nor have I scratched the surface of those illegal weapon sales to Nicaragua that broke loose in the press during his final years in the White House. Nor have I mentioned that Reagan led efforts to militarize our law enforcement agencies, as if policing our streets should follow the rules of war and combat, rather than targeted investments into the most vulnerable communities, seeking to help rather than arrest, shoot, or kill. These three issues, the so-called drug war, those illegal arms exchanges, and the militarization of the police, are topics that demand an entirely separate article, but they are no less damning in the brevity of their mention here.

Alas, it’s a complicated and lengthy criticism, I fully admit, one that I imagine few people will have read to this point. But for those who did, those who made it to this final paragraph, I believe it’s worth tearing down the symbolic wall that imagines Ronald Reagan was one of the presidential paragons of the last century. Not so. He was no Teddy. He was no Franklin. He was no Eisenhower. In actuality, he and his administration caused irreparable harm to the nation, slashing essential programs with a smile, disregarding essential regulations with a wink, and in effect, dismantling our once understandable appreciation of government aid with a punch to the social and neighborly gut, altering the way all of us talk about government, about each other, and we let them get away with it, even in our memory of those days, because more than anything, we simply look back and remember that Reagan was our Prince Charming in the White House. And maybe he was, for some.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Reagan. Thank you, at the very least, for the Challenger speech.