The Genius of America Read Free Page A

Roosevelt Democrat, union leader, corporate spokesman, Barry Goldwater advocate, conservative governor of California. Through a lifetime of experience he had honed his view that government needed to be limited. Now he looked out on a nation in turmoil. At home, inflation had sapped the country’s economic will, and the rift of Watergate was still raw. Abroad, for all its power, the nation had been humiliated by an Iranian cleric who after 444 days was just at that moment releasing the hostages he had held in the American embassy in Tehran. Reagan, speaking for the first time as president, went beyond just the idea that government was too big.
    In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time, we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? . . . We hear much of special interest groups. Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected . . .”we the people,” this breed called Americans.
    It was an important moment at the outset of what became one of the most important presidencies of the twentieth century. Reagan’s of a united American people, blocked from the realization of their dreams by an entrenched political system, signaled the start of what became known as the Reagan Revolution. One of the themes of this book is the striking extent to which much of our political debate can be traced back to either Tom Paine’s idealistic vision or James Madison’s cold-eyed pragmatism. We are not America without both.
    Reagan strongly echoed Paine 205 years earlier. In times of crisis, times that try men’s souls, turn to the People, that breed called Americans, who unfettered by government will have the wisdom to govern themselves on that blank slate called America. It is a cry raised repeatedly through American history, by reformers and radicals and just plain restless folk seeking to foment change. Its revival is a constant through our history. Particularly in times of turmoil, we fall back on the ultimate source of the nation’s authority, the people.
    Talk of the people strikes a chord in each American because it connects to the story of the American Revolution as we receive it in school. But the call to the people leaves out half the history of the Revolution. When Reagan set the people as the antithesis of the government, he was returning to the spirit of 1776. But the story of 1776 is incomplete without the story of 1787 and the writing of the Constitution, which rescued the heroism of 1776 from the dustbin of history. Whereas 1776 was the triumph of liberty, 1787 was the triumph of a new wisdom that to preserve liberty there must be a process for making choices and taking action. That process is laid out in the Constitution. The Constitution’s writers drew their government’s authority from the people, and from nowhere else. But they also rejected, quite clearly, the notion that the people could, mystically, solve the nation’s problems without a process of government to bring them together. Their own experience had violently disabused them of that notion.
    As Reagan spoke, the men behind him represented the majority leadership of the House of Representatives and the Senate. So his words about rule by an elite group might have been understood as a bit of political hyperbole meant to suggest that the problem was the specific people or the Democratic Party, which had been in control of the government just then. But this would be to miss the much larger antigovernment sentiment gathering strength in those years among Democrats and Republicans, left and right, a force that carries forward to this day.
    Two years before Reagan was