Well (as the Gipper himself would say), in the first instance, he didn't. The Cold War didn't end until after he was out of office. And it ended the way liberals like George Kennan foresaw that it would--by giving a corrupt system enough time to collapse in on itself, which is exactly what happened. Conservatives always saw the Cold War in apocalyptic terms. Liberals understood that Soviet-style communism could never reach the point at which the Apocalypse would be forced upon us. They were right; it wasn't.
But this blog always gives the devil his due. To the extent that Reagan could be said to have contributed to the end of the Cold War, he did so primarily by acting like a liberal. He came into office as an ideologue, and left office showing that he had learned a great deal from the people with whom he disagreed.
Who would have thought I'd live long enough to miss Reagan, in that regard? Not to mention Barry Goldwater, another true believer who made peace with the fact that not everything he believed was true. If America needs conservatives at all, it needs conservatives like them--people who cared more about being Americans than they did about being conservatives.
No comments:
Post a Comment