Refuting Reaganism

As America wakes up to the ruin that has been forced on it by Reagan-Bush Republicans over the last thirty years, it is time to look at the basic tenets of Reaganism and show them for what they are.

I deal here with Reagan’s economic policies and Reagan’s social policies and show them for their error.

Tenet One of Reagan economics is that the government is a tax-and-spend operation, and that cutting taxes leads to economic growth. That has been solidly refuted by the last two administrations. The high-tax Clinton economy produced 23 million new jobs, soaring family incomes, and the greatest prosperity that America ever had. The low-tax Bush administration - with Republican Congress for six out of its eight years in power - produced collapsing family incomes and no new jobs.

The governments prior to Reagan were regarded as being "tax-and-spend." The Reagan-influenced governments however were something far more irresponsible. The Republican administrations starting with Reagan produced Borrow-And-Spend policies that put America ten trillion dollars in the hole.

This debt is now being passed on to the children and grandchildren of Reagan Republicans. And I ask this of the people behind this: How dare you speak of family values when you are doing this to your own children? How dare you speak of responsibility while you are passing on this crushing burden to those who have not had any part in making this problem or any voice in how it is dealt with? How dare you speak of fighting crime or being American patriots when you have committed this giant criminal misdeed against America?

The Reagan borrow-and-spend economics are not just wrong morally. They are also wrong economically. Government debt takes investment funds out of productive sectors of the economy, making it harder for businesses to start or expand. High levels of bond debt leads to rising interest rates. In both cases, economy falls. It did in the second way under Bush Sr; and it did the first way under Bush Jr.

The borrow-and-spend economics is also wrong in its basic contention. With government, it's not pay or not pay; it's pay now or pay later. For as long as you want roads, military, police, courts, schools, fire engines, jails, garbage pickup, you pay. Or else your children and grandchildren will have to.

Perhaps the people behind Reaganomics are working toward a 10 trillion dollar government debt default. Perhaps they are thinking the world will end before it is due. More likely, they just don’t care what they are doing to their children and to their country. In either case, the attitude is totally unacceptable.

The next tenet of Reaganism: "Get government off people's backs." And yet the most solid Republican constituencies - Texas and Plains States - exist solely by virtue of government. The economic bases for these constituencies are Texas Oil, beef industry, and the military. The third is part of government. The second is heavily subsidized by the government. And the first became and remained what it is by virtue of lobbying the government and deceiving the public.

Oil interests have deceived the nation for decades, claiming that there is no global warming and that nothing man do can affect the environment. They are responsible for the current climatic crisis. Without their conmanship, America and much of the world would have by now converted to high-intelligence, high-technology, high-job abundant clean energy such as the energy of the sun and the electrolysis of ocean water - technology that can provide for all of people's material requirements while minimally impinging on nature. Instead it was - "liberal academics this, liberal media that" - well. Now we know who has been truly brainwashing the public, and who truly has been stealing from the people their most precious commodity – their future.

The beef industry in its present form is likewise parasitical. It takes ten times as much biomass to produce a pound of beef as it does to produce an equivalent amount of grain. Government subsidies to the beef industry that make beef artificially cheap keep the country producing an inefficient, unhealthy, environmentally expensive foodstuff when it could have produced ten times as much healthy food. Food that it could have sold on world markets, reaping huge revenues, and given away in famines, reaping great international goodwill, instead of reaping disease and debt.

The true sources of American prosperity are and have always been the Democratic areas of the country. The greatest source of 1980s and 1990s prosperity - personal computer - was invented by a California hippie named Steven Jobs and put in place by Democratic constituencies in California, Washington State, and the DC area. Another big source of prosperity - Internet - was a government project. Of America's Nobel Prize - winning scientists, 90% came from Democratic states, and of its Ivy League institutions of learning, all except Duke are in solid Democratic states. America's richest states in per capita terms are DC, Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York - solidly Democratic. There is a reason for all this, and it has to do with the thinking habits that are required for innovation and for generation of true prosperity.

Innovation in science, technology, and organizational and business practices, depends on free and creative thinking. The authoritarian-minded red states cannot tolerate such a thing and suppress it wherever they find it. The Democrats on the other hand are open to such things and encourage it, nurture it, and bring it to constructive fruition. Which means that Democrats develop habits of mind needed to innovate and create true prosperity, while Republicans feed off of them, demonize and attack them, and the steal the credit. The Democratic thinking is about how to create; the Republican thinking is about how to bludgeon, deceive, steal credit and place blame. Which makes them parasitical economically as much as they are parasitical in other respects.

Another major tenet of Reaganism has been aggressive inattention to the environment. Now we all know exactly where this leads. Even the Republicans are waking up to the reality of what they have done to the world. And that is a belated big Duh for people who were so certain that they knew reality and common sense, and that everyone who thought to the contrary was a fool or a crazy.

The social policies of Reagan have been just as disastrous. Abortion and “family values” are a ruse – a false issue used to distract the public from real social issues of the day. Domestic brutality and abuse of women and children in families is and has always been the true social wrong facing the people. The Reaganists sought to silence these truths – by portraying women as losers or crazy for being in the abusive relationships and portraying them as evil if they left; by abusing the concept of personal responsibility to blame people for wrong that others did to them while exonerating the wrongdoer; and by claiming that America was losing its “moral fiber” as more women left situations of abuse. And in neither case was there anything moral in these policies. The purpose was and remains to perpetuate abusive, brutal, incestuous ways from generation to generation, and portray these horrendous practices as morality or tradition or family values.

The family values and morality that I have shown above that Reaganists have the least of, as they have forced federal debt and environmental catastrophe on their own children and on the children of everyone else.

In making major issues of nonissues, while failing to address true wrongdoing, resources were distracted from where they were needed and engaged them in battles where they could be portrayed as being against morality. This paralyzed the women’s rights and human rights agenda and kept it from being applied where it was most in need. The result has been ongoing incest, abuse and brutality all over America. And that is the true reality of Reagan conservatism – the true reality of the so-called traditional family values. Quite simply, a parent or a partner who truly practices ethics treats the partner and children in such a manner that they do not want to leave him. Whereas a parent or a partner who uses “family-value” theme to keep them from leaving is the one who is unethical in the values and actions he practices toward his family and least merits to lay a claim on the concept.

Further policies – Reagan’s anti-education, anti-academic, anti-intellectual and anti-media propaganda in particular – resulted in the thinning and hollowing out of institutions of science and education, greatly reduced levels of Nobel Prize winning work, denying the media scrutiny to matters that were of most import, and allowing corruption to go on without strong and active media and academia being there to check it. It also resulted in turning of red-state America into a morass of aggressive ignorance and violent stupidity. In Reagan society, intelligence was despised and bullied, abused, demonized, trivialized, or even criminalized and pathologized. This resulted in dumbening of the population, in America overrun by cons and cults, and in degradation in the character of American people. It also resulted in loss of what media and academia exist for – cultivation of knowledge, education of youth, scrutiny of all levels of society, checking of corruption, and address of issues of public concern.

The refusal to include birth control in population control initiatives made sure the gross overpopulation of the world. The support for militant Islam against Communism created the terrorist threat facing the world today. The “war on drugs” led to two parasitical infrastructures: Brutal gangs and cartels to deliver the forbidden goods – with most drug-related violent crime related to its distribution instead of consumption – and expensive police and prison infrastructure to keep imprisoned people who have availed themselves of drugs or were falsely convicted of having done so.

And the concept of personal responsibility was abused to blame people for the wrong that others have done to them - to blame wives for brutality by their husbands, to blame poor children for their heritage, to blame the disenfranchised for despotism and oppression against them, to blame people around the world for actions of despots, to blame "humanity" for global warming and federal debt accumulated by Reaganists – as much as it was abused to discourage people from pursuits such as teaching and science that are not well monetarily compensated but that hold supreme social value. If every person is responsible for themselves and solely for themselves, and success is measured in monetary achievement, then it is against the ethic of the times to do anything for the children, or for the country, or for the planet, or for justice and peace. This Reaganist ethic sowed not only corruption, violence, deception and sociopathy at all levels of America, but also prevented action to redress and prevent the same. This directly led to these great wrongs becoming way of life in America, when there was tons of knowledge and resources that, with better values and leadership, could have been used to correct these wrongs.

As for the nonsense of liberal-media-and-academia-are-brainwashing-you (and the people who claim such things aren't) - who indeed is more worthy of being believed: hundreds of thousands of brilliant, dedicated, hard-working people working on scientific pursuit of knowledge, or Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson style blowhards who claim them all idiots and sinners while they themselves are contributing nothing whatsoever toward that pursuit? In defunding America's scientists and teachers and discrediting its journalists and professors, Reaganists have deceived, debased and dumbened America. And that, along with global warming, federal debt, sickening of America, domestic brutality, world overpopulation, Islamic terrorism, and deterioration in American character, is a crime that Reagan “conservatives” will have to wear for decades to come.