PrintNovember 1, 2010
The Reagan Revolution Never Died
As we've been finding with the rise of the tea parties, and will find out more definitively in Tuesday's elections, the Reagan Revolution never died. Janet Daley, writing in the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph, doesn't address this thinking directly, but does a darn good job of understanding the revolt against big government underway in the United States.
The grassroots tea parties uprisings will result in a strong voter turnout on Tuesday. A clear majority of these soon-to-be voters fervently oppose big and bigger government. It's not at all presumptuous to say that Ronald Reagan would have heartily approved of the tea parties, for the tea parties are very much in the spirit of the freedom revolution that Ronald Reagan ushered in (with a hat tip to Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley).
Oh, we know what the smart set said and wrote at the beginning of Barack Obama's presidency. You know, even those establishment conservatives, the likes of David Brooks and Peggy Noonan, blathering on about how the Reagan era and Reagan policies were so passé. The world of Barack Obama was to be the Brave New World of benevolent statism, and, my, what a wondrous world it would be.
Well, seems that something happened on the way to utopia, something in the American people's innate love of liberty. Something happened in another failed go at liberalism in the person of Barack Obama. And something happened in the smashing success of Reagan's freedom-tending economic policies, policies that set loose the entrepreneurial spirit of millions of Americans.
Americans witnessed then what Reagan's less government policies meant in terms of greater prosperity, greater choice, and greater freedom to live the lives Americans' desired. On the heels of the failed Carter presidency, with the Great Society debacle fresh on their minds, Americans recorded the stark differences between the victory of Reagan's America and the dismal failures of liberal-dominated America of the 60s and 70s.
Those lessons about statism and liberty from the 60s, 70s, and 80s weren't lost on the American people. In fact, they were etched more deeply in the American mind than anyone suspected, just as the lessons of the American Revolution and Founding have been ingrained in the American mind lo the many generations since those epic events.
The American people, through the tea parties, and beginning with Tuesday's elections, are witnessing the re-emergence of the Reagan Revolution - call it the next great chapter in the revolution begun by Ronald Reagan, as Reagan's revolution was the next great chapter in the American Revolution.
The unfolding of history doesn't often conform to our desires for quick and tidy resolution. History may well start and halt, may take all sorts of circuitous paths, hide from us and then make itself startlingly apparent. The Reagan Revolution never went away. It has been, and is, playing itself out on the great American stage for the entire world to see.
