age of Reagan, The

Human Events, Summer 2001 by Kesler, Charles R

Three New Books Make the Case for Ronald Reagan's Enduring Legacy. But Has Reagan Replaced FDR as the Dominant Force in American Politics?

The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980, by Steven F. Hayward. Prima Publishing, xxxviii + 848 pages., $35

Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Freedom, by Andrew E. Busch. Rowman & Littlefield, xxx + 295 pages, $80 (cloth), $27.95 (paper)

Reagan, In His Own Hand, eds. Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson. The Free Press, xxiii + 549 cages. $30

TELL YOUR LIBERAL FRIENDS, without cracking a smile, if you can: The end is near. Not the end of history, but the end of liberal history, the kind of history written by liberals, for liberals, and usually about liberals; the kind of history that shaped the consciousness of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. A new generation of conservative scholars is coming on the scene and their writings are already beginning to alter our understanding of the 20th century.

Left-leaning scholars like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Garry Wills, and Doris Kearns Goodwin will not disappear or simply be forgotten, of course, but their near-monopoly is being broken. In Schlesinger's books, especially in his monumental (and still unfinished) The Age of Roosevelt, he expounds the canonical themes of the Left's interpretation. In the 19th century, American democracy was tempted by slavery; and the crisis over slavery, the "crisis of the House divided," was the defining event of the century. In the 20th century, America's temptor was privilege or plutocracy, which threatened to subvert democracy through the promises of an ill-gotten prosperity. Although democracy had vanquished both Tories and slaveholders, it now faced the less overt challenge of "economic royalists" who imperilled the economic equality necessary for democracy. The characteristic crisis of the 20th century, therefore, was the crisis of capitalism, epitomized in the Great Depression, and the hero who vanquished "the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties" was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who freed democracy from the chains of limited government, enabling it to subdue capitalism in the New Deal's regulatory and welfare state. This self-satisfied picture is about to change, however, because conservatives have now begun to tell their owd story and to provide a fresh, candid reinterpretation of the course of modern American politics.

Steven F. Hayward's The Age of Reagan is a magnificent new history of our times. It is a big book in every way and yet it reads quickly and delightfully. Hayward received his Ph.D. in History in 1996 from the Claremont Graduate University, where he studied with Leonard Levy, John Niven, and Harry V. Jaffa, among others. He is now a senior fellow and director of the Center for Environmental and Regulatory Reform at the Pacific Research Institute, the distinguished free-market think tank in San Francisco. It's hard to think of anyone who would bring a better set of skills to this task than Hayward, who combines a broad knowledge of 20th century history and historiography with a ready appreciation of modem economics, particularly the key breakthroughs in monetarism, supplyside theory, and public choice. He understands firsthand the ins-and-outs of modern regulatory politics, and his previous book is Churchill on Leadership, so he knows statesmanship when he sees it. Withal, he is fair to those he criticizes, rarely suppressing an argument or fact that might tell in their favor. Throughout The Age of Reagan, he appeals to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and, to a lesser extent, Murray Kempton, as witnesses who saw and said invaluable things about the resurgence of conservatism and the parlous condition of their beloved liberalism.

Above all, Hayward is a gifted writer who presents us with a vigorous historical narrative. For all its defense of traditional history, the Right cannot boast of many narrative historians, which is one reason that liberal chroniclers dominate the bookstore shelves. Hayward may have learned from the examples of John Lukacs and Paul Johnson, probably the best living conservative narrativists, but Hayward has a better command of political ideas than either and is much less error-prone than Johnson. (Hayward's prose succumbs to the occasional infelicity, however.) Having read quite a bit of Churchill, Hayward might be expected to have adopted something of the great man's heroic approach, but though Reagan is at the center of this book it is not told consistently from his point of view. Perhaps William Manchester's volumes on Churchill come closest to providing a model for Hayward's account.

At any rate, The Age of Reagan is not a biography but a history, an emphatically (though not exclusively) political history of the last third of the past century. Modeled on Schlesinger's The Age of Roosevelt, Hayward's book (the first of two proposed volumes) bears the subtitle, "The Fall of the Old Liberal Order," his wry salute to the subtitle of Schlesinger's first volume, "The Crisis of the Old Order." For Schlesinger, the old order was the regime of limited government and unlimited capitalism that he thought Roosevelt had replaced; the old order, in short, was conservatism, the conservatism of the Fathers and the post-bellum Republicans and Calvin Coolidge. For Hayward, at century's end, the old order is liberalism, the novel purposes and institutions of government ushered in by FDR and brought to new peaks of arrogance and zeal in the Great Society. Accordingly, The Age of Reagan begins in 1964, at liberalism's supreme moment of triumph and modern conservatism's ' nadir, when Lyndon Johnson had crushed Barry Goldwater in the presidential election; when the Great Society was aborning.