Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [88]
CHAPTER 12
How So Damn Much Money Defeats the Right
The most important political movement in the second half of the twentieth century began in 1964. A wildly popular Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was not going to be defeated by any Republican. The Republican Party therefore let the nomination go to the least likely Republican to win, Arizona’s senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater waged a campaign to mark out a new political movement. His ideals resonated with just a few then. But they were the seeds of a revolution for the Republican Party, at least when properly cultivated by Ronald Reagan a decade later.
Reagan’s first run for the presidency was also a defeat. On November 20, 1975, he announced he would challenge a wildly unpopular president of his own party, Gerald Ford. No one knows for sure whether Reagan really thought he could win. But no one expected that he would come so close to dislodging a sitting president. In 1980 he was the logical pick for his party’s nomination. He easily defeated the unpopular incumbent, Jimmy Carter.
People forget how important ideas were to Ronald Reagan. By the end of his term, his opponents had painted him as little more than an actor on a very important stage. But I doubt we have had a president in the past fifty years who more carefully and completely thought through a philosophy for governing and government. Reagan was more an academic than even the professor president, Barack Obama. Whether you like his ideas or not, they were ideas.
If you doubt my claim, then just listen to the extraordinary collection of radio lectures Reagan delivered between January 1975 and October 1979. Said to have been written completely by him himself, scrawled on yellow legal pads in his office in Pacific Palisades, California, without the help of aides or clerks, these thousand-plus three-minute shows mapped a series of arguments about the major issues of the day. They were not cheap shots at current events. They were not fluffy rhetoric masking empty ideas. They were instead conclusive evidence of a president with a plan. Again, ideas.
At the core of these ideas was a suspicion of government. Again and again, Reagan returned to the theme of a government gone wild. His claim was not that bureaucracies were filled with evil souls or idiots. The problem, instead, was good intentions gone bad. And not because the bureaucrats didn’t work hard enough (though Reagan didn’t often predicate “energy” of government employees). It was instead because there was something inevitable about the failure of big government. We needed a world where people relied more on themselves, Reagan argued. A world where government helped too much was a world where people did too little. Liberty, like muscle, had to be exercised. The Nanny State would inevitably weaken liberty, good intentions notwithstanding.
Lost liberty, however, wasn’t Reagan’s only concern. He worried as well about an inevitable inertia within big government. Once we let government get too large, Reagan feared, we would inevitably lose control of a certain political, or public choice, dynamic. As Reagan described, quoting (who he said was) Alexander Fraser Tytler: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the treasury—with the result that democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy.”1
As a predication, I take it that most would agree with Reagan in at least this respect: we have driven our government to the brink of bankruptcy—and if Gary Becker and Richard Posner are correct, over the brink.2 Total debt