Looking over the 2012 candidates for President, many of my Republican friends express the wish for “another Reagan.” That’s the last thing we need.
Forget the categorties of “great” vs. the “failed” Presidents or the “good vs. the “bad.” Those categories tend to be drafted by historians flogging their own prejudices. Forget their rhetoric, their parties or their platforms. There are only three kinds of Presidents, the “transformational Presidents,” who change the fundamental thrust or underlying myths of the nation (often in ways they never imagined), the “constructive Presidents,” who tinker with the mechanics of the system while accepting the underlying myths and the “administrative Presidents,” who accept the nation as it is and only stir themselves to react to world events.
We have had only three transformational Presidents: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Their primary achievement was to alter the course of the nation: Washington by freeing us from our colonial past, Lincoln by instituting a national infrastructure for transforming an agricultural economy to an industrial powerhouse and FDR by shifting the country to what we have today: a “post-industrial” society where few people actually produce anything and lawyers and bureaucrats make all the rules and guys pushing buttons on Wall Street make all the money.
Washington faced a blank slate; he was forced by circumstance to create the initial myths of the nation. He created the infrastructure on which we all rely today, but accepted the existing power elite, the Southern planters and their Northern enablers, who were the richest and most powerful people in the country.
Lincoln became President in the midst of a crisis and took advantage of it to enact Whig reforms that had been trapped in a government dominated by Democrats since the days of Alexander Hamilton. Lincoln did not just free the slaves and crush ante-bellum society, he created a new system in a series of legislative moves which rivaled the New Deal in its creation of a new society: transcontinental railroads, land grant colleges, banking reform, currency reform, the list is long and impressive and when the smoke cleared at Appomattox, a new elite of industrialists launched the most impressive economic growth in the country’s history.
Franklin Roosevelt also became President in the midst of a crisis. One of the greatest misconceptions among historians is the notion that he was a “traitor to his class.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. FDR’s class was the Northern banker/enablers who assisted the Southern slaveocracy. He was threatened by the new industrial robber barons that came from nowhere to become much richer and more powerful than his family ever was. FDR was a reactionary, trying to stem the free market and its ability to create wealth and replace the idle rich with more productive people.
In some ways, he was successful: his “alphabet soup” of government agencies and regulations has prevented the creation of new heavy industry. There have been no new automobile manufacturers since the New Deal, although many talented people –Henry Kaiser, Preston Tucker, John Delorean, among others – have tried to do so. World War II was the last gasp of industrial power. We could never fight that war again. Ironically, however, he also tried to set up a permanent elite primarily of WASP upper class and in this he failed but it is also the reason he is the hero to so many progressives. When his cousins, Stewart and Joseph Alsop, astute political commentators in their own right, were asked in the 1970s what FDR’s greatest achievement was, they said that it was something he had had no intention of doing and would have been horrified if he knew what he had done: ending the dominance of white Anglo Saxon Protestants in society.
Each of these transformational Presidents created the era which existed until a new transformational President took office. These eras have their own structure and are as different from one another as one nation is from another. This is why the United States rose to the top so quickly and stayed at the top until now. It had the ability to adapt itself to meet new challenges.
Constructive Presidents take the world as it is and try to improve the way it functions. They are strongest after a transformational President, so Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses Grant and Harry Truman all cemented the transformation created by their predecessors.
Other Presidents may come later in each transformational era, changing it without affecting the thrust of the nation’s sense of progress. Thus, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Some of these Presidents could have been transformative Presidents if the times were right. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were both elitists whose families had lost their stature in the laissez faire economy and were horrified at the unschooled multimillionaires who had replaced them at the top of the social ladder. Both of them led the way for FDR. Other constructive Presidents may very well have been administrative Presidents but were forced by events to adopt a more active role. If Richard Nixon had been elected in 1960, would he have recognized China, taken the US off the gold standard, introduced affirmative action and created the Environmental Protection Agency? That is a question history, even psychobiographical history, cannot answer.
Administrative Presidents are those who take the world as it is and any progress is simply tinkering. John Quincy Adams, William McKinley, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy are examples of this sort of President. They are all for “progress” – every President touts progress and thinks of himself as a progressive of some sort or the other – but they are perfectly content to live with the world as it is.
Towards the end of each of the three eras – let’s call them the Agricultural Era for the one ushered in by Washington, the Industrial Era for the one ushered in by Lincoln and the Bureaucratic Era for FDR’s – the Administrative Presidents, tend to be corrupt or incompetent, thus Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, Harding and Hoover, Clinton and Obama. This is because the eras themselves have gotten old and tired, their fundamental myths have been taken over by conmen out for the main chance who use the prevailing rhetoric of progress in order to reward their richest friends with government largesse at the expense of the rest of us.
After a generation or two, an era becomes dominated by politicians espousing a doctrine which sounds progressive but has been twisted to reward the insiders. Thus the emphasis on states’ rights became a code to protect slave ownership, laissez faire was used to pull up the ladder of enterprise and prevent competition and, in the current era, concern for the underprivileged has become an excuse for both: forcing everyone to submit to an increasingly paternalistic state benefitting a handful of insiders while pulling up the ladder for anyone without the connections to join the ranks of the elite. This era is at an end and as long as it dictates the guiding principles of the country, the worst things will get. Economists look at a 9% unemployment rate, flippantly suggest that this rate has become structurally permanent and prescribe more of the same policies that got us here. We need a new era, with new rules for getting ahead, new myths to provide the guiding principles for the future, new leaders who will get us there.
What we don’t need is a new Reagan. Reagan was a “constructive President.” He didn’t transform anything, he just made the existing system less dysfunctional for a time. But times are different now. When economists are suggesting that we need to get used to 9 and 10% unemployment as the new normal, when plenty of laws get passed, but none of them accomplish what they set out to do, when society contains too few wealth creators and too many rich wealth redistributors, we can no longer tinker on the edges and expect things to get better.
In short, we need a transformational President. We need the anti-FDR. We need another Abe Lincoln.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
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