Sunday morning I promised to write more on Reagan's impact on my philosophy. I feel at a loss for words though. I've read lots of other bloggers' words, and find pretty amazingly that many of us conservative bloggers were actually liberals in the 80's, and changed our views later on. I also feel older, as most of the bloggers I've read were too young to vote when Reagan was President, yet I was 23, almost 24, when he became President.
So, why'd I turn around and start voting for Democrats, including the one who served as veep under President Carter? I started believing a lot of the media hype about the "religious right", that Christians were taking over the Republican party so they could control the way we live (as if liberals don't want to either - ha!). I was also failing to follow the wisdom of Psalm 37, and "becoming envious of the workers of iniquity". I was working with a bunch of young people who loved to go out and have a wild and fun time, and while I resisted the pull at first, eventually my hormones, lack of self-confidence, and desire for excitement pulled me into a hedonistic and secular lifestyle (well mostly secular - there was a lot of dabbling in different philosophies and things encouraged by that UU principle known as a search for truth and meaning - which eventually led me back to where I started from, when I realized I had turned my back on the truth in first place).
Some reflections on Reagan's philosophy and its impact on my life:
On Peace through strength:
I used to think that the nuclear arms race was mad and irrational, but now I don't think it was so much. I mean, if we have enough arms to kill everyone n times, why not build more if your opponent is going to build more and point them at you and demand you drop yours? That's the point that Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn made in speeches. The point was that if your opponent got enough weapons to make them think they could wipe you out first, it could be all over without a war even ever starting. There are people of course who think that it's all a moot point if civilization ends - I can't disregard their point entirely, but you also don't just roll over for tyranny and let it win cheap. It's no good to have peace if you're living under a tyrannical government, where the government is effectively at war with its own citizens, as it is today in the Sudan, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Cuba.
The really clinching point for me on peace through strength though was what happened later, in the 1990s, when the people of Bosnia suffered so much at the hands of the Serbs. And why did they suffer? Because anti-war people did not allow those people to get the arms they needed to defend themselves. They thought we could create peace by disarming the people, completely disregarding the arms obtained by the other side through other sources. The Bosnians were defenseless. That's the reason I took up target shooting, and disrespect the gun control movement so much; and why I strongly believe that the Second Amendment does indeed recognize the right of individual American citizens to keep and bear arms.
On leadership:
In my period of unbelief, I used to scoff at President Reagan whenever he talked about America and its heritage, his vision of a great country. It took a long time, but I finally saw that there is a big difference between leadership and management. Back before Reagan, we had Presidents who were mere managers - tweaking things here and there to make it work: Nixon and his price controls, Ford and his "Whip Inflation Now"program, then Carter with his continuation of price controls and economic micro-management (down to the level of telling us where to set out thermostats, and talk of only letting people drive their cars every other day). And as far as Communism went, the policy was to just live with it - it's here to stay. As far as I'm concerned, the greatest thing Reagan did was to shatter that type of thinking. Price controls gave way to respect for a market economy. Paul Volcker raised interest rates to drive a stake into the heart of inflation, while people got tax cuts to allow them to keep the product of their work without wasting it on failed government programs and class warfare. And of course, Reagan offered the vision of not tolerating Communism, but ending it and relegating it to its proper place: the ash heap of history. Reagan was a true leader, stomping out the status quo in order to achieve a far greater thing: liberty.