The Reagan Revolution

What Time and Trump Hath Wrought

Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election was a landslide. He won forty-four states to Jimmy Carter’s six. The Republicans flipped twelve Senate seats, gaining a majority for the first time since 1955, and added thirty-four seats in the House, although the Democrats still held a majority.

Because of the scale of his win and his avowedly conservative commitment to overhaul government spending and social policies, the “Reagan Revolution” became the term to describe what would be happening in his administration — the reversal, finally, of the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

What actually happened in the early months of that year was recounted in William Greider’s Atlantic Monthly article, “The Education of David Stockman” in which the thirty-four-year-old director of the Office of Management and Budget portrayed to Greider (then an assistant managing editor of the Washington Post), the process by which the revolution confronted the reality of politics.

The article was a sensation. After it ran, Stockman ruefully acknowledged that President Reagan had taken him to the “woodshed” but did not fire him for sharing the truth. Reagan’s lofty commitment to cutting the size of government never happened; instead, military spending was increased and the national debt soared into the multiple trillions. It was only when Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve imposed high interest rates to drive the country into recession that inflation dropped to acceptable levels.

(An aside: The assassination attempt against Reagan on March 30, 1981, which left him badly wounded — combined with his quip to a despairing Nancy, “Honey, I forgot to duck” — provided a positive personal aura that largely endured for his two terms.)

As the scale and style of Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s intentions have unfolded in the first weeks of Trump’s presidency — taking on the Constitution and the federal workforce with a vengeance — I wondered what Stockman now thought of those objectives. I subscribed to David Stockman’s Contra Corner (a pricey $365 annual subscription) and found that the one-time boy wonder is now fierce in his judgments, data driven, and scary in his predictions, wherever you are on the political spectrum.

Here is an excerpt from February 10:

“There has a been decent outpouring of good stuff…bulls eye hits like the Donald’s ixnay on paper straws, the penny, the global climate hoax, DEI idiocy, green energy boondoggles…the rat hole of waste at USAID. Beyond that, turning the enormously gifted and committed Elon Musk loose on the Deep State bureaucracy is in itself a remarkable stroke for sanity…

“Unfortunately, we’re getting a lot of foul balls in the form of random attacks on the US trade accounts, the US labor force and America’s already wobbly fiscal foundations. And that’s to say nothing of utter stink bombs like annexing Greenland and Canada, standing up a Sovereign Wealth Fund, retaking the Panama Canal and occupying and rebuilding a Palestinian-free Gaza Strip….

“Most of this list…is going to lead to big time trouble that is almost impossible for fully imagine. Particularly the Donald’s unhinged wars on imports and immigrants could actually turn an already weak, debt-entombed national economy into a veritable basket case.”

Take that, dear subscriber.

So, the Reagan Revolution’s objectives have become the mayhem of Trump and Musk. This is the French Revolution of 1789 becoming the Committee of Public Safety, renamed for our time as the Department of Government Efficiency. You may remember that Robespierre and his cohort were eventually executed.

The fate of Trump and Musk and the United States is at stake. And speaking of stakes, whose heads will eventually roll as the consequences of what they are doing are fully realized?

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One of the most brutal (cruel will also work) of the Trump-Musk actions is the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development. USAID was established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to direct and fund foreign assistance programs in a variety of areas, including health, education, governance, economic development, environmental protection, and disaster relief. In the 2023 fiscal year, USAID’s “total obligations” were $43.4 billion.

The agency’s name was immediately removed from its headquarters, letter by letter, and nearly all of the more than ten thousand employees defenestrated. Our friends with sons and daughters who have made notable careers in places like the Departent of Justice and USAID see their lives in shambles.

The most vituperative public response to what was happening with USAID came from Andrew Natsios, who was USAID administrator in the George W. Bush years and who describes himself as, avowedly, a Republican conservative. On the PBS News Hour he said: “It’s not a takeover. It’s a destruction of the agency.” He added that people at USAID and the agency’s grant recipients are “appalled.” And then he went on CBS’s 60 Minutes and said it again and more.

Natsios said that each administration would move USAID policies from “left” to “right” as standard practice. But the pivots in American social and political policies in every respect have become more pronounced in recent years, undermining effective change.

Trump-Musk is another scale altogether.

A Financial Times poll last week found that almost “60 percent of [American] respondents agreed that funds set aside for humanitarian causes were ‘wasted on corruption or administration fees.’ Only 12 percent disagreed with that proposition.”

Whatever problems foreign assistance has had — and there are doubtless experts from all perspectives on these — the undisputed fact is that since the 1960s, virtually every meaningful measure of global livelihood has improved. World Bank and United Nations numbers report that global poverty has decreased by more than a billion people over that span.

The rhetoric around crises is so overused that it has largely lost its meaning. But the summary abolition of USAID’s programs is a crisis and cruel.

The Reagan Revolution happened forty-five years ago. In Reagan’s era, the main menace was communism. Then after 9/11 it became terrorism. In the 2024 election cycle, “woke” posed the perceived threat to the American way of life.

If you or anyone you know is around in 2070, ask them what the Trump-Musk period accomplished.

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As this Substack enters its fourth year, it becomes Peter Osnos Public Affairs Press, adapting for the digital age the name Morris B. Schnapper called his independent Washington D.C., enterprise from the 1930s to the 1980s and featuring the eagle he affixed to communications.