Editorial: Mourning in America

The Reagan years marked a hard right turn among the American electorate. Weary after the austere Jimmy Carter years, during which interest rates, unemployment and inflation soared and the nation’s global prestige was badly undercut by the Iran hostage crisis, Americans turned to a leader who exuded confidence and offered a vision of greatness.
Borrowing from John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, the collegial Reagan saw America as a “shining city upon a hill.” His vision resonated with the American people. Among those who embraced Reagan were many working-class Irish Americans, who made up the backbone of what would come to be called the “Reagan Democrats.” Conservative by nature and a few rungs higher up the economic ladder than were their fathers and mothers, they committed the apostasy of abandoning a party that, through its commitment to social and economic justice, had paved the way for their success. So persuasive was the Reagan worldview, so magnetic his personality.
The conservative social and fiscal ideologies that Reagan brought to Washington have taken deep root now, almost a quarter of a century after his first inauguration. Even Bill Clinton recognized that offering anything more radical than a centrist message would be an act of political suicide. Today, President Bush has moved conservatism to its more extreme manifestations. But unlike the Great Communicator, this president struggles to present a coherent vision. In this way he more resembles Carter. Will Americans forget the three years of economic malaise that is only now starting to dissipate? Will they continue to support our ill-conceived and poorly executed occupation of Iraq? Will Bush suffer the same political fate as Carter?
But those are questions for another day. We don’t wish to politicize Reagan’s death, so we’ll leave historians to debate the accomplishments and the failures of his presidency. What is undeniable, however, is that as president he returned optimism to the American vocabulary, and, more dramatically, brought together the loose ends of American conservatism into a potent force for change.