The following op-ed is not the opinion of Illinois Review, but of one of our readers. We opted to share this op-ed with our readers in hopes of stirring something unique these days – a civil debate. We look forward to hearing what our readers think of Frank Biga's perspective.
By Frank J Biga III –
As someone who supported President Trump from the beginning of his campaign, I have been pleasantly surprised by many fellow conservatives posing the serious question as to whether President Trump is actually more conservative than Ronald Reagan. Certainly one can make this case. The President himself does it all the time although but more in relation to how his administration is the best in history.
But a serious argument can also be made that FDR, of all Presidents, actually produced more conservative results than Reagan himself. Consider the following:
First, a definition of actually what conservatism is must be established in order to do this. The general textbook definition of a conservative is someone who holds to traditional attitudes and values and one who is cautious about change or innovation. In his methods, FDR was not someone who was cautious about change. From his personal and whimsical fixing of the gold price each morning during the crisis in 1933 to his brazen attempt to pack the Supreme Court to his embrace of government intervention in the economy to find a way to get the country out of Depression, there are many ways to describe FDR as the complete opposite of a conservative according to the textbook definition cited above. FDR was indeed open to manifold changes in our operation as a country. And some of these changes are still with us today, for better or worse.
But I would argue that many of these changes that were made were superficial ones and were required to preserve the core values of our society. The changes made by FDR were not fundamental to our civilization’s and culture’s existence. In fact these changes preserved it, and this makes him a true conservative.
I think most of us who are conservative would agree that central to our civilization and culture is the preservation of the family unit. Something that develops out of this preservation is a strong and vibrant middle class. So a true conservative will be one who focuses on the end result of preserving Western civilization by promoting policies that support the family unit. In other words, true conservatives care about ends rather than means. Such a conservative would even raise taxes if that policy was what the times and economic conditions called for in order to preserve our civilization.
It can be argued that FDR, whatever he did in terms of policy, was aiming at just such a conservative goal. As FDR stated himself after the worst of the crisis had passed in 1933. “It was this administration which saved the system of private profit and free enterprise after it had been dragged to the brink of ruin.”
Yes, the government grew during his administration. But it was absolutely necessary given the massive deflationary conditions in our economy as well as the foreign threats of the time. Such conditions were a direct threat to our civilization and the family unit. If we had had a weak government, we also would never have won World War II and how would the family unit have fared under a fascist regime? FDR, like many before him, was a Hamiltonian. Hamiltonians are generally not considered liberal.
He also created a laundry list of alphabet soup agencies, many of which were completely ineffective. Or were they? Did not the money spent by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) help keep many families together? Did not the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) provide similar monetary relief along with keeping the potentially most radical elements of our society (unemployed young men) occupied and away in the national forests preventing any revolution that might have toppled the best governmental structure in human history? If such a government had been toppled how would that have worked out for the family unit?
Did not the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) assist small farmers and their families in obtaining electricity (and modern conveniences)? Did not the Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC) help refinance many families’ homes after a housing bubble collapsed?
Yes, he may have given away eastern Europe to Uncle Joe Stalin at Yalta and this consigned them to years of tyranny. Or was that what really happened? Could he really have been aiming at creating a stable post-war world in which neither the forces of communism nor rampant laissez-faire capitalism would be able to exploit the ruins of the war? Isn’t this what the United Nations original design was all about as well?
Personally, I am beginning to look at the bipolarity of the Cold War with some nostalgia as it was during this time that our country was more united that it has ever been, at least until 1968. The world of today is more dangerous in many respects than the one we had when there was a clearly delineated adversary in the USSR. Today we face threats from Iran, North Korea, China, Russia. We have been bogged down in the Middle East since 1990 with no end in sight. We now actually have endless war rather than endless diplomatic maneuvering.
Likewise, our eastern European allies like Poland and Hungary face the unwanted future of mass immigration of people of a different culture and faith simply because the EU has certain economic goals it wants to meet. They also face the moral abyss of post-modernism infiltrating their people. So, I ask, will this future be better than what they had before? Or will this not just be tyranny of a different form?
Economically speaking, they may have more stuff but how will their civilization be preserved? On that same token, WE have more stuff, so much stuff in fact that our old factories are literally being transformed into storage facilities. Just check our Route 83 in Elk Grove Village and Bensenville to see what I mean. Has all this stuff made us happier? Or better people for that matter?
We tend to get caught up and intellectually wedded to the theories we were taught in school. I know I sure did when I was younger. But I evolved. During my adolescence and young adulthood, I always wondered why my grandparents and seemingly their entire generation idolized FDR so much. Was it not the case that he was a statist who greatly expanded the role of government? Was he not a President who raised taxes to very high levels? Was he not a velvet tyrant?
But now, after they are gone, I wish I could go back and talk with them and let them know I agree with them about him. I mean, is it not obvious that the late 1940s, 50s and 60s were ideal times for starting and forming families? 78 Million Baby Boomers were born during this time. Weren’t we happier then too? It is very clear from the economic statistics that these decades were a great era of economic growth and low unemployment.
Now, FDR wasn’t the sole reason this happened. Economics is so multi-faceted and there are many factors that go into explaining any economic statistic. But the economic and geopolitical scaffolding are important. And this architecture that emerged after WWII and the Depression was one that was largely advocated and advanced through the political genius of FDR.
Nor was FDR just accidentally successful. It is clear from the record that he deeply cared about the American people and connected with them in a way no President had since Andrew Jackson. Anecdotally, a few years ago I visited FDR’s summer home in Warm Springs, GA. The museum articulates well how FDR spent his time there. But what I was struck by when looking through the exhibits were both the pictorial and video evidence of FDR with average Americans. He is compassionate, warm, and genuine in his affection. His interaction with children is really touching.
He called Governor Al Smith the Happy Warrior at the 1924 Democratic Convention, but there is no doubt he, FDR, as President, was a Warrior himself – one for the American people and especially those less fortunate then he was economically. As a man personally afflicted with polio, he knew first-hand his own mortality. And as a man of means who never had to do without in am material sense, polio grounded him not only physically, but philosophically and morally as well.
President Reagan, on the other hand, was a rhetorical conservative who used what are wrongly viewed as conservative means to achieve ends that, in the long run can hardly be called conservative. Essential to this view is the understanding that lower tax rates in and of themselves are not conservative. They are simply one of many tools that can be used to achieve conservative ends.
In so far as tax cuts improve family values and preserve our civilization and culture, I am for them. Perhaps at the time President Reagan and the Congress enacted ERTA in 1981 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 such lower tax rates were needed. Perhaps Keynesian policies had run their course and given new economic and political conditions a different tax regime was necessary to subdue the stagflationary pressures that had mounted in the 1970s.
Although Reagan’s policies could largely be called successful in the short to medium term, did they produce the conservative results that we really want in the long run? Have families been better off since his ascendance on the political scene? Did the lower tax rates create too much in the way of “animal spirits” such that conspicuous consumption became a way of life leading to two parents to be required to work to keep up with the Joneses?
Did the anti-unionism of Reagan lead to the demise of one of the counterforces that could have kept the more base and feral instincts of the now unleashed laissez-faire crowd at bay? Did the free trade zealotry of Reagan’s acolytes and successors lead to the hollowing out of our industrial base and the destitution of small-town America? Has such destitution led to the opioid crisis blighting our land?
Has the subsequent secularization of our society led to a vibrant and confident cultural scene? Are our families as intact as they were in the 50s, 60s, and 70s? Has the incessant lusting after profit-maximization made our society richer in ways others than in money? Has it made our children's futures more secure?
I would argue that in the long run these results derive mostly from Reagan’s policies and the results are most definitely NOT conservative ones. This is not just confined to domestic issues either.
Has the downfall of the Soviet Union made us more secure? Would 9/11 have ever happened if the USSR were still our adversary? Would Europe be such a mess? Would China be the threat it now is to our economic and geopolitical interests? Perhaps “Rollback” has come back to haunt us with unintended consequences?
Many will certainly disagree with the sentiments expressed here. And I understand there are valid counter points. But I do think President Trump would agree with much of the above and foresaw a lot of it before any of us did. It’s why the reports that he is pressuring congressional Republicans who haven’t boarded the Trump train that it is probably best that they retire rather than run for re-election.
Trump is also wise enough to know that the policies that got us here have to go, and whether those policies emanated from globalist Democrats or Republicans, our actual society and culture are not better off for them and they need to be changed and those responsible for them must be defeated.
True conservatives are pragmatic in their methods because their ultimate goal is conservative results and the methods used to achieve such ends are flexible. It’s ironic that the actual policies of FDR and his followers were ones that gave us a healthier society and civilization as characterized by the 1950s and 1960s. Yet the architecture created during this era was at least partially dismantled during the Reagan Revolution by ideological crusaders who were more interested in a return to a past prior to FDR which I don’t think many of them understood either. As a result, we face a future that is in doubt both as a country and a civilization. Hopefully our own Last Lion can stem the tide rising against us.
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