In recognition of Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday, which was on Sunday, February 6, 2011, his two boys have written books about their father.
In My Father at 100, younger son Ron, a former ballet dancer and liberal talk radio host, offers a memoir of his dad and considers the values and qualities that made him a leader. And in The New Reagan Revolution: How Ronald Reagan's Principles Can Restore America's Greatness, Michael, an arch-conservative radio host, recalls his father's politics and presidency and argues in favor of resurrecting his ideals and vision to recover American freedom, renewing national prosperity, and reasserting American power and influence. Media attention has focused on the former work for suggesting that President Reagan began to show signs of dementia while in office. But the latter book -- bearing a foreword from new-right champion Newt Gingrich -- deserves notice as well for registering the lack of clear thinking characteristic of the right today.
Abusing the past in a way that would make his father proud, Michael Reagan appropriates radical founders Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson to the cause of the right and the Tea Party, targets liberals and progressives past and present (how many times can you lie about FDR and the New Deal?), and presents the Reagan years in terms that make them out to be the Golden Age of the late twentieth century -- you know, "Morning in America." But somehow the son of Reagan ignores the Reagan Recession and the devastation it wrought on American working people's lives, families, and communities; the legacy of ballooning deficits and widening inequalities in which the rich got much richer and the rest of us barely kept up; and the corruption of the public good and neglect of the public infrastructure that marked the Reagan administration -- all of which continue to plague us.
And yet, there's something else in Michael Reagan's rhetoric that leads one to wonder about the mindset -- if not sanity -- of the right.
By his own account, Reagan is a "hothead." He recounts an episode in 1976 in which he physically attacked his father's former campaign manager John Sears. As Reagan tells it, Sears had "jumped ship" to work for the Republican nominee, President Gerald Ford, following the party's national convention and was now actually blocking Michael himself from speaking to the Young Republican Convention in Memphis. In reaction, Michael confronted Sears in his hotel room, but apparently Sears "could only blather and stammer" in response. Still, Michael could not control himself. As he writes:
I reached out, grabbed him by the lapels, and shoved him against the wall. Then, nose to nose, I said: "If you ever do that to me again, I will find you wherever you are, I will walk into your office, and I will kick your ass!"
He gulped hard.
"And one more thing," I added. "If my father ever calls me and wants to talk to me about the conversation you and I are having right now, I will find you wherever you are, I will walk into your office, and I will kick your ass for that too!"
I let go, and he slid to the floor...
Now, some people tell me I shouldn't tell that story in this book. They say it makes me look like a hothead. Well, so be it.
"Hothead"? No, Michael, I'd say it makes you look like a thug.
While he offers no further tales of losing his temper and pushing people up against the wall, Mr. Reagan's "thuggery" continues. In a chapter titled "We win, They lose," he urges his right-wing readers to follow his father's example: "Maintain your principles and your good character: Whenever people go up against a dangerous enemy like Communism or Islamofascism or Nancy Pelosi, there is a dangerous temptation to get down in the gutter and fight as dirty as the enemy does. Don't let your enemy change who you are. Stick to your moral principles."
How can he lump Nancy Pelosi in with Stalinists and Islamofascists?
And there's more. Reagan joins the Glenn Beck mob and goes after not only financier and progressive movement benefactor George Soros, but also the 79-year-old, radical-democratic sociologist Frances Fox Piven. She, with her now late husband Richard Cloward, championed the rights of welfare recipients and strategized voter registration campaigns back in the 1960s and 1970s.
Happy Birthday Ronald Reagan -- from your boys!
Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.