Was Reagan a “true conservative” or a pragmatist?

Certainly Reagan faithfully adhered to GOP liturgy by bashing big government and spending. “A government bureau,” he once declared, ” is the nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth.” When it came to foreign affairs, he took the hardest of hard lines in a 1983 speech that dubbed the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”

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But in assessing any president, it’s more illuminating to focus on what he did rather than the bombast delivered to the rubber-chicken-and-mashed-potato circuit. Early in his political career, as governor of California, Reagan displayed his pragmatic side, signing an abortion bill and agreeing to a $1-billion state tax hike. Similarly, as president, he paid lip service to ending abortion but never did anything about it, and he worked with congressional Democrats on a massive tax hike in 1982, thereby averting the worst effects of the supply-side deficit spending he had endorsed when he entered office the year before.

Moreover, Reagan, the putative foe of big government, accumulated hundreds of billions in debt by the end of his second term. It was Democrat Bill Clinton who cleaned up the mess, leaving a budget surplus behind in 2000…

Reagan placed a premium on alliances with Western Europe and tried to keep American troops out of foreign combat, including withdrawing them from Lebanon in 1983. He heeded his moderate advisors, such as James A. Baker III (his chief of staff, Treasury secretary and national security advisor) and George P. Shultz (his secretary of State), not extreme voices from the far right. When the far right did get its way, as in the Iran-Contra affair, a debacle that almost brought down Reagan’s presidency, it’s not clear that he was cognizant of its illegal actions.

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