Kidnapped Conservatives

It was another harmless day in 8^th grade U.S. History when my teacher dropped the bomb. "Yes Lincoln was the first Republican president, but it is pretty obvious that were he alive today he'd be a Democrat." Dumbfounded, this was my first experience with an odious phenomenon: when a conservative is dead and buried (and has been vindicated by the course of history) the Left engages in a concerted effort to claim him as one of their own and/or use that revision against living, breathing conservatives. As Jonah Goldberg writes, "The only good conservative is a dead conservative… It's just we-the-living who are hateful ogres, troglodytes, and mopers."

Lincoln is the first example of this. The man who declared that the chief "purpose of the Republican party is eminently conservative" and who sought nothing save the restoration of "this government to its original tones…and there to maintain it, looking for no further change" was no liberal (no modern liberal). A believer in free markets, individual liberty and the rule of law, Lincoln would have loathed the large administrative state and social welfare regime Democrats envision today. These initiatives create quasi-permanent subclasses of government dependents and instill a disincentive to labor, the surest means Lincoln envisioned to self-perfection and social advancement. His opposition to slavery was predicated not only in his belief in the natural rights of man but in the knowledge that, as Allen C. Guelzo writes, "allowing one man to own the fruits of another man's labor…discouraged hard work in both."

Lincoln never spoke of leveling down the playing field or "sharing the wealth." Instead "the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men" allowing "the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else."

Lincoln's top hat simply will not fit the head of today's Democratic donkey.

Now it is Ronald Reagan. The man who declared that "government is the problem" as he sought massive reductions in its size and scope was apparently a moderate pragmatist, in sharp contrast to the conservatives of today who are….well, saying and trying to do the exact same thing. Liberals from Andrea Mitchell to Eugene Robinson to TIME have alleged an affinity between Ronald Reagan and the center-left that the world somehow failed to notice since his days as a New Dealer in the Screen Actors' Guild.

Regrettably, liberals who try to pull this stunt ignore two items, one being that pretty much everything he stood for in his public life was (and still is) inimical to the Left's creed. Not only did he come to the White House pursuing aggressive spending cuts (and would leave it lamenting that he had not cut more), but the abolition of entire cabinet-level departments. He sought cuts to Social Security and Medicare (rebuffed by Congress). He exponentially increased defense spending. He cut taxes (and when he had to raise them as part of a compromise with Congressional Democrats he lamented that his heart "wasn't in it"). He was firmly and vocally pro-life. His Justice Department aggressively promoted originalism to counter decades of the judicial left amorphously interpreting the Constitution to mean whatever they wanted it to. In a deliberate departure from détente, he pursued a policy of confrontation with the Soviet Union that could lead to one thing and one thing only: "We win, they lose."

Today's liberals not only ignore all of this in alleging that Reagan was a moderate (or even a liberal), but they also disingenuously ignore the stubborn little reality that they opposed him in all of these things in forms every bit as passionate, ranging-on-hateful as they did George W. Bush. When alive the Left labeled him a "dunce," an "ideologue," a "right-wing extremist," and a "cowboy." At one point Tip O'Neill went so far as to say that there was "evil…in the White House…And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America." Praising his diplomacy in ending the Cold War now, liberals howled when he labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire." (To call Reagan himself "evil" was apparently kosher, but damn the man who dared label a regime responsible for the death and oppression of millions in such terms.)

Had there been blogs or cable news the Kos' and Olbermanns would have treated forty every bit as vituperatively as they treated forty-three.

Ronald Reagan was no squishy moderate or liberal, and as Steven F. Hayward writes, those on the Left who now contend otherwise "should be made to explain why they appreciate the virtues of conservatives [especially Reagan] only after they are gone from the scene."

One suspects that, placed on the wrong side of history, they are not so much trying to pull Reagan towards themselves but themselves towards Reagan and away from the fact that he was right and they were wrong. (They are not above scoring cheap political points over conservatives in the here-and-now either.)

If the metaphor above may be strained a little, Reagan's top hat does not fit the heads of liberals today any better than Lincoln's.