Cass Sunstein doesn’t always get it wrong, so I’ve been told, but over at Bloomberg he can be observed lecturing Donald Trump on his manners—“A Graceless President, a National Betrayal”—which is rather like faulting a vulture on its breath.1 In the course of his peroration, Cass contrasts Trump unfavorably—as how could he not?—with Ronald Reagan.
“Unlike Trump, Reagan understood the power of humility and graciousness,” lectures Mr. Sunstein. “At critical moments, Reagan chose understatement and humility, which are part and parcel of grace. A former Democrat, he liked to say, ‘I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.’”
Well, excuse me, Mr. Sunstein, but that ain’t understatement, that ain’t humility, and it certainly ain’t “grace”.2 What it is is a damn lie. The Democratic Party did not leave Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan left it! When Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, promising, among other things, to give back to Californians the “right” not to sell their homes to blacks, he wrote a book, Where’s the Rest of Me?3, in which he candidly describes his status as a “hemophiliac liberal” as late as 1949. When Harry Truman won election in 1948, Reagan exulted to a friend “With a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president, we’ll have national health insurance for sure!” In 1961, of course, he recorded that hilarious album predicting the downfall of western civilization, “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine”, if his one-time dream became law.
Reagan, unlike Trump, was not a compulsive intellectual plug-ugly and bully. But if I were searching for an example of “understatement and humility” in politics, not to mention “grace”, however defined, I wouldn’t use Reagan’s graceless and deceitful lie regarding his political evolution.
Afterwords
To save you the trouble of searching for a footnote I wrote to an earlier post that lambasted Ronald Reagan’s civil rights record—or rather total absence of one—I repeat the text of said lambasting here:
To say that Reagan hated black people is to say too much. But he did despise the American civil rights movement, which he explicitly regarded as a communist plot, and he was contemptuous of the poor. Success was the reward of virtue; poverty was the punishment of weakness. Bruce Bartlett, in his book, Wrong on Race, which attempts to “prove” that it is the Democrats rather than the Republicans who are “wrong on race”, acknowledges uncomfortably that Reagan, though “of course” no racist, had no blacks on his staff. Bartlett’s portrait of Reagan as committed to “colorblind” society is thoroughly unconvincing. Reagan disputed all efforts by the federal government to disassemble segregation but once in office furiously assaulted affirmative action as “racist”. Racism was bad except when it helped white people.
- William Faulkner always claimed that, if required to undergo reincarnation, would choose to be a vulture: “No one would bother you, and you could eat anything.” ↩︎
- “I am relying,” Mr. Sunstein explains in a footnote, whose text I am repeating here, “on ordinary understanding, not on the distinctly Christian notion of grace, though there is a strong connection.” ↩︎
- Reagan did not have this book reprinted when he ran for president in 1980, realizing that his reflections on his hemophiliac past were too accurate to bear repeating. Garry Wills includes a valuable discussion of Where’s the Rest of Me? in his idiosyncratic but generally intriguing treatment, Reagan’s America. Reagan’s title came from his once famous line in his “big” picture, King’s Row, in which a third-billed Reagan, “Drake McHugh”, awakens from surgery to find that he’s a double amputee, sans legs, and exclaims “Where’s the rest of me?” ↩︎
