THE NEW POLITICS OF OLD VALUES
John Kenneth White
Hanover, N.H., and London: University Press of New England, 1988
200 pp., $18.00
Has Ronald Reagan transformed the country? Has he taken us from a time of politics-as-usual to an era that will see a return of old values--values that America once held precious, values that served and strengthened the American people throughout their history like the rocks of immutable faith? Or is this an odd interregnum in American life--an ambivalent time from the point of view of our deeper reflections? Have we moved from Gilbert K. Chesterton's "America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed" to Jim and Tammy Bakker's "You CAN make it"?
These are the fascinating and ambitious questions this interesting little book by an innovative political scientist attempts to answer. While the questions he poses are arresting and utterly right for our time, the book leaves one with more questions. But perhaps that is what John Kenneth White set out to do.
A strategy of values
White's thesis is that Ronald Reagan swept into the White House not as a leader dependent upon political dictums, but as a new-style president deliberately and committedly espousing a "strategy of values" that included precisely the values the American people feared they were losing. Reagan--movie actor, millionaire, and equivocal father--was nevertheless able to convince the American electorate that he was "one of us." Asked by a reporter what the American people saw in him, he responded deftly, "Would you laugh if I told you that I think, maybe, they see themselves and that I'm one of them? I've never been able to detach myself or think that I, somehow, am apart from them." First in 1980, and then more strongly in 1984, his election brought a profound sense of shared values to the country. Reagan proclaimed that his party was "ready to build a new consensus with all those across the land who share a community of values embodied in these words: family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom."
He spoke, often eloquently and always movingly, to "the widespread sense of personal normlessness... coupled with the pervasive ridicule of traditional values from those in positions of power." The election of 1980 was to bring something different. No ordinary election, designed merely to choose the best manager for the country, the 1980 campaign was a "struggle between two value systems and two different philosophies of governance." It was an election in which the old values of the American individual, family, community, and nation were extolled, against the emphasis on subgroups in the society that had been Jimmy Carter's calling. It was an election in which even the Democrats were forced publicly and repeatedly to embrace family values. And it was further an election with a very small "negative" vote--the overwhelming percentage of voters were for Reagan's "positive" messages and values.
In the (still-uncompleted) throes of this transformation, Reagan not only forced the Democrats to espouse some of his rhetoric, but turned the youth vote around. Even up to 1980, the Democrats had been the party of choice among the nation's youth; indeed, it had been so since the 1930s,
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