Professional Bellyachers and such
According to Richard Viguerie, the transition team had not even returned Jerry Falwell’s telephone calls since the election. “Never mind who supported Reagan in 1980,” Viguerie said. “Who supported him for fifteen years before 1980?”
This was revisionism. Falwell and the Moral Majority had indeed organized significant registration drives in the churches that by Falwell’s estimate had “Registered four million new voters who voted for the first time in their lives” and “activated another 10 million or so” who had been registered but sat out the past few elections “because of frustration.” But the religious right had not settled on Reagan until 1979. The New Right had never done much for Reagan and continued to complain about him, all the while insisting that it had catpulted him to power. Within a month of the inauguration, Conservative Digest had denounced the president’s appointment of James Baker as Chief of Staff, Nixon-Ford “retreads”, Kissinger proteges, and even veterans of the Carter Administration. It complained about the shortage of “Reaganites in the Reagan Administration.”
The first year of Reagan’s administration brought conservatives other disappointments. Reagan’s 1981 tax cut was quite popular with supply siders, as well as members of the New Right and the Religious Right, thought it was not as large as they had hoped. But then the president fulfilled a campaign promise to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court designed to reassure women of his commitment to gender equality. Conservatives rightly suspected that Sandra Day O’Connor would not provide a secure vote against abortion. Her nomination reflected the WHite House’s “growing attitude of indifference” to New Right and Religious Right objectives, they complianed. […] And Reagan’s own Secretary of the Interior, conservative Icon James Watt, declared the Sagebrush Rebellion over: “I couldn’t afford to have what I’d helped create eat me.” […]
Had Reagan turned into another Nixon? Forty-five conservative leaders gathered in Washington to evaluate the administration’s first year and signed a statement drafted by M Stanton Evans. “Co-signers range across the broad spectrum of conservativsm — from New Right to neo-conservative to Old Right,” a White House aide wrote James Baker. “Their theme is one of deep disappointment with the Administration’s recent performance in virtually all areas — economy, foreign affairs, defense, social issues, and personnel matters.” […]
Nineteen eighty-two brought fresh wounds. Reagan’s State Department talked of curtailing arms sales to Taiwan. The Presidents responded to budgetary deficits that supply-side skeptics had predicted by promoting an enormous tax increase that scaled back his 1981 tax cut. Though Reagan called for overturning Roe V Wade when he was warned that “we are in a critical moment in the relationship between the President and Prolife activists,” his appeal went nowhere. He also proposed legislation that would deny tax exemptions to private schools that practiced racial discrimination. White House staffers reported that the right’s Senate stalwarts, Orrin Hatch and Strom Thurmond were “livid” about the school legislation and the situation fued “the fires of those who claim that the non-Reaganites have taken control of things.” Even National Review became uneasy.
“Has Ronald Reagan deserted Conservatives?” Conservative Digest asked an assortment of neoconservative, conservative, New Right, religious right, and supply-side leaders. Most condemned the president’s record on economic policy and his failure to address family issues and wanted him to take a stronger stance against the Soviet Union. Richard Viguerie sent the president a copy of the issue. “He tried to write in sorrow, not anger about my betrayal of the Conservative Cause,” Reagan noted in his diary. “He used crocodile tears for ink.” […]
What had Reagan accomplished in his eight years? Viguerie asked. As president “he proclaimed the passing of the ‘evil empire’ … picked supporters of detente for the cabinet … bailed out Soviet agriculture … bailed out international banks that lent money to anti-American countries … and approved some of the biggest taxes in history.” (The White House was just as contemptuous of the New Right: One aide called Viguerie and Paul Weyrich “professional bellyachers” who had given up on Reagan “the day after he was inagurated.” Neoconservative Irving Kristol professed not to be disappointed because he had never had high expectations in an op-ed entitled “The Reagan Revolution that Never Was.”
Right Star Rising 1974-1980, pgs 364-366, Laura Kalman
An extended comparison between Regan and FDR reveals a deeper aspect of political alignment that is usually not captured in the simple model of one party replacing another as the majority. Each man took on his own party and by degrees successfully transformed it, while at the same time frustrating and deflecting the course of the rival party.
This process occurred slowly and against much resistance. Like conservatives in the Reagan era, liberals during FDR’s time were often frustrated with him and thought the New Deal fell far short of what it should accomplish. The New Republic lamented in 1940 “the slackening of pace in the New Deal,” and also that “the New Deal has been disappointing in its second phase.” The philosopher John Dewey and Minnesota’s Democratic governor Floyd Olson (really? He’s going to drag Floyd Olson as FDR’s critic into this? Then again, who the hell is Jerry Falwell? Of course, these matters are what makes any comparison to the current President fall apart a tad), among others, complained that the New Deal hadn’t gone far enough to abolish the profit motive as the fundamental organizing principle of the economy, and Socialist Party standard-bearer Norman Thomas scorned FDR’s “pale pink pills.” Historian Watler Millis wrote in 1938 that the New Deal had “been reduced to a movement with no program, no popular party strength behind it, and with no candidate.” Much the same kind of thing was said of Reagan at the end of his second term. Midge Decter wrote in Commentary: “There was no Reagan Revolution, not even a skeleton of one to hange in George Bush’s closet.” “In the end,” concurred William Niskanen, chairman of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, “There was no Reagan Revolution.”
Liberal ideolouges who despaired over the limits of the New Deal overlooked that FDR had to carry along a number of Democrats who opposed the New Deal. Reagan similarly had to carry along [etc. etc]
Steven F Haywood The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution 1980-1989