Читать книгу Enemies of the People - Sam Jordison, Sam Jordison - Страница 9
ОглавлениеDate of birth/death: 6 February 1911 – 5 June 2004
In a nutshell: Man who made it rain while convincing everyone the sun was shining
Connected to: Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, George W. Bush, Donald Trump
Media pundits often talk about the ‘Overton Window’ when referring to the range of ideas that the public will accept. The theory is that for a political policy to float with the public, it has to fit within certain accepted parameters – also known as the ‘window of discourse’. The consensus is that in the UK and USA this window has gradually shifted to the right. Ideas that were once thought cruel and preposterous (such as those relating to charging students for higher education, or scrapping healthcare entitlements) are now thought mainstream. One of Ronald Reagan’s biggest legacies lies in the work he did to persuade the world to take this rightward shift. But, just as importantly, he also moved another set of parameters. A set, alas, that doesn’t yet have a fancy name. But a set that has also had huge impact. Ronald Reagan shifted the boundaries on the preposterous. We could probably call this phenomenon the ‘Trump lift’.
Before Reagan, the idea of a TV-star president seemed entirely laughable to the American public. The idea of Ronald Reagan himself seemed laughable, in fact. Here he was, a man who had first made his name as a second-rate B-movie actor and later as the genial host of brazenly partisan and commercial TV slots for the General Electric Company. He was known to have spent a lot of time testifying against his colleagues during the McCarthy era.* He had gained a certain notoriety for his enthusiastic support for the National Rifle Association and for sending the National Guard in to crush student protests. He did that at the University of California in Berkeley, when he was Governor of the state. A student was killed and Reagan commented: ‘If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.’ He was also known to take advice from an astrologer called Caroll Righter, known as the ‘gregarious Aquarius’.†
If he hadn’t won the 1980 presidential election, Reagan would just have been a handsome but strange and malicious historical footnote.
But win it he did – and the real absurdity came after he took over the reins. Astrology had nothing on the voodoo he used to steer the American economy. Reagan’s greatest superstition was ‘supply-side economics’. It was he who set us up for the fall in 2008 – and destroyed American jobs and industry in the process. Reagan believed in something called the Laffer curve. This was a theory devised by Arthur Laffer from Milton Friedman’s famous economics department at the University of Chicago.‡ It states counter-intuitively (and as it turned out, counter-factually) that government could increase revenue by decreasing taxes. The idea was that the rich would no longer have to spend their time thinking up tax-dodging ruses and so work more productively and contribute more – and so the lower rate would stimulate so much growth that revenues would just grow.
Reagan duly cut taxes on the rich. But there was no swelling of the public coffers. Instead, the deficit rose from about $900 billion to more than $3 trillion. Which is worth writing with all the digits, just so you can get an idea of the ridiculousness of the numbers involved: from 900,000,000,000 to 3,000,000,000,000. More than three times as much as the deficit Reagan spent his whole time complaining about when he was trying to get elected in the first place.
By 1982 he had also succeeded in raising unemployment to above 10 per cent for the first time since the 1930s. Oh, and by 1987 the average amount of ‘leisure time’ Americans enjoyed in a week fell to 16.6 hours. (In 1973, they’d enjoyed 26.2 hours.) His presidency also saw the first year since 1895 that America didn’t have a trade surplus. But don’t worry! Some people got richer. That’s right. The people who were already rich. Donald Trump, for instance, built the Trump Tower during Reagan’s reign. The rest of the top 2 per cent in the country did okay too and we entered the red braces and embossed business-card era of Wall Street growth – the one that would eventually lead to the subprime crisis and the hot fun of the Lehman Brothers collapse.
Lower down there were all-out assaults on unions, next to no growth in the median real wage, a drop in income per person, a huge increase in household debt and an economy that grew at a slower rate over the course of the decade than in any ten-year period in the twentieth century since World War II.
Reagan did at least get some things right. By the end of his presidency, once he had ditched many of his earlier economic ideas, he managed to cut inflation. His relentless military build-up also helped him bring about a thawing in the Cold War and led to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. For that, he earned the gratitude of millions around the world.
But if we’re going to credit Reagan for helping to end the Cold War, he should also take a good part of the blame for our current travails. Most notably, he helped arm, train and finance the radical Islamic Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan who would go on to form both the Taliban and Al Qaeda, as well as the model for ISIS. He also ensured America remained unpopular around the world. During his presidency American forces were caught meddling unsuccessfully in the Lebanon. They bombed Libya. They shot down an Iranian passenger jet. They invaded Grenada. There was also a preposterous affair where the Americans covertly sold arms to Iranians in order to fund a group called the Contras who were fighting the government in Nicaragua.
Talking of war, Reagan also launched a domestic front. ‘We’re taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts; we’re running up a battle flag,’ he said. But this war on drugs largely turned into a war on poor black Americans – one which Reagan had begun when he stated his opposition to affirmative action, his attacks on civil rights leaders and gutting of initiatives like the Civil Rights Commission. His creation of mandatory minimum sentences for possession and supply of drugs had a disproportionate effect on black communities. His signature policy was to introduce stricter sentencing for crack cocaine than normal cocaine. Why impose greater penalties for crack? Because more poor black people used this form of the drug. It was more economical – people used less to get a more intense high. It ripped through black communities and Reagan came right after it. His programme of incarceration helped ensure that, today, there are more black men in jail (often providing free labour) than were enslaved in 1850 – and more who are denied the vote.
And while all this was going on, soft-speaking and kindly-looking Reagan was somehow able to convince his people it was morning in America and the future would only get better. He also helped ensure that his legacy would be forever burnished by right-wing media channels by eliminating the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Thanks to Reagan, TV and radio news in America no longer had to present a diversity of viewpoints or to be fair or balanced. So we got unfair and unbalanced right-wing channels. And unreality TV. And all that that brought with it. Reagan may have told us it was morning. But really he was marching us into the night.
* And it was also later revealed that he had been secretly passing on names to the FBI.
† Reagan would eventually deny he took advice from astrologers. But as Governor of California in the 1960s he told the press he read Righter’s column every morning and he even issued an official proclamation of appreciation to Righter. At the press conference where Reagan claimed ‘no policy or decision in my mind has ever been influenced by astrology’, a White House spokesman was also forced to admit that Nancy Reagan’s interest in astrology had at the very least influenced Ronald’s scheduling of speeches and trips.
‡ ‘Milton Friedman I love,’ said Laffer. ‘How can you not love Milton Friedman?’
