Might and Right?

Bruce Allar, Editor

Twenty years ago, I engaged myself — and my scissors — collecting selected articles from national publications on the political events of the day. I can’t really explain why I clipped mid-1980s stories from Newsweek, the New York Times and other print media. I tuned out Washington as a coming-of-age voter during the Nixon era and I’ve steered away from covering politics as a journalist, mainly because I lack interest in a game where people say one thing but usually mean another.

As a history major in college, I learned to pull back and take the long view on current events; then I cut my career teeth as a reporter on a daily newspaper — so you can see conflicting urges at work here. Short news cycles don’t always provide a proper telescope for viewing the orbits of world events.

Out of curiosity, I recently pulled my manila file folders for 1985-86 and took a peek. Parallels with 2005-06 popped out immediately. In 1985, Ronald Reagan, as George W. Bush did last year, began a second term as president. And while he was hailed by Newsweek for triggering among Americans an “outpouring of patriotism and pride,” Reagan was also under pressure for pouring immense resources into the military and running up a huge budget deficit. There was a sentiment that he would need to deal with the red ink in his second term.

Why do I not feel a similar belt-tightening mood today when we’ve been looking in recent years at record annual deficits in the $400 billion range under Bush? My saved stories from the Reagan era depict the battle in Congress over more guns and less butter (the guns won), but today there only seem to be minor skirmishes. The argument now is how to squeeze more out of domestic programs that have been compressed for 20 years; meanwhile, the military gets a blank check and those who would starve the rest of the federal government are signing it.

Reagan was also portrayed as eager to put his imprint on the Supreme Court, which had five justices over 75 at the start of his second term. In fact, two of his nominees, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy, were confirmed during the next four years. But Newsweek’s post-Inaugural take on the Gipper’s strategy was telling: “Reagan is likely to offer the New Right words, not deeds,” the magazine said in its Jan. 28, 1985 issue. “He will address a March for Life protest rally the day after the public Inaugural, but he does not int/files/storyimages/to press the divisive abortion issue much further.”

Our current president seems to be willing to, if not push, at least hold a finger over that hot button with his second Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito. There’s a litmus test all right, and the religious right is doing the grading.

A look at my news clips indicates that some things don’t seem to change. Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, was being accused of brashness and incompetence, just as Bush’s man, Donald Rumsfeld, faces similar labels. Fraud charges were being aimed at a major defense contractor, General Dynamics, and now the funny money has moved to Halliburton and its subsidiaries. And the CIA and intelligence operations in 1985 were bucking Congressional oversight (on the eve of the Iran-Contra scandal), just as the distorted recent arguments, many from Vice President Dick Cheney, about torture and the CIA attempt to cloak operations in secrecy.

But has something changed? Have we, without some of us realizing it, created a new United States?

On the one hand, we hear that history marches on; on the other, we’re told that history runs in cycles. I’ve always held the view that the pendulum swings from left to right and right to left on the American landscape. And I hope that we’ve swayed as far to the right as we can right now and, please, let gravity start pulling us back.

But in my darker moments I fear that the pendulum has been slowed recently, perhaps even locked into place, and it may not swing again without a major push in a new direction.

A New York Times Magazine piece from June 22, 1986, foretold the current state of things by pointing out that Reagan paid obeisance to the religious right. It then quoted Republican political analyst Kevin Phillips: “The religious right has been legitimized by the six years of Ronald Reagan; they’re no longer regarded as a fringe group — they’re part of the power structure.

“In the same way that the Democrats had been perceived as bending too far to organized labor, to minorities, to gays, the Republicans are in danger of being seen as tilting too far to the religious right.”

The danger anticipated by Phillips, I’m afraid, has spread to all of us.