The State of Reagan’s Fantasy Union : Litany of Hope Obscures His Dismantling of Social Gains

“I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy . . .”

Before the moment passes from view, buried in an avalanche of debate and commentary, let us see him whole. There he stood, cloaked in the majesty of his high office, legal heir to Washington and Jefferson, mandated to report on the State of the Union--and failing that historic obligation.

This was not the union that Ronald Reagan described, but a land of small towns and Fourth of July politicians. His hollow evocation of sacred litanies--family, community, country, greatness, glory--was unable to obscure the sound of an intention to dismantle the hard-won social gains of decades and erode the hopes and possibilities of future generations.

It was not coincidence that the one historic moment was when Reagan became the first Chief Executive to quote both from a television commercial and a teen-age movie in a State of the Union speech. These references were drawn from a world of illusion contrived to titillate and mesmerize the senses. Obviously he believes that rightly chosen words and pictures can induce an entire nation into a permanent suspension of disbelief, severing sentiment from reality, chorusing his cheerful tunes on the decks of the leaky ship.

“A real, live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July.”

But this was no Hollywood production. No harmless, even healthy diversion from the cares of daily life. This was the real thing: The President of the United States revealing his plans for our future. And no stagecraft could conceal the seriousness of his intent or the ravaging gravity of it consequence.

Before the public dialogue deteriorates into a tug of war over the rightful possession of Reagan’s pieties--who best serves family, God and country--let us try to understand the reality imperfectly cloaked in Tuesday’s somewhat tattered rhetoric.

All Presidents have some license to point with pride. Few have ever used it with such one-sided extravagance. The claim of a very real achievement--the end of runaway inflation--is leveraged into a “rising America . . . on the move.” No mention of the highest unemployment of any Administration since World War II, the loss of over a million jobs to foreign competition, the outrageous diversion of income from working Americans to the wealthy. Indeed, it would seem that the only significant problem the national government confronts--aside from the shattered families of the black ghettos--is government itself: Our own and that of the Soviet Union.

The principal, but not solitary, flaw in government seems to be its failure to balance the budget. This from a President who has never submitted a balanced budget to Congress and whose own tax and spending policies have added over $1 trillion to the national debt. I do not pretend to understand the sorcerer’s powers that enable this President to call indignantly for an end to the very policies he has so vigorously pursued. I do, however, have some idea how he intends to proceed.

Military spending (but not national security) will continue to rise. And taxes will not go up. This leaves only one option--to reduce or eliminate virtually every program enacted to sustain the impoverished or to protect the well-being of the average citizen.

To the extent this approach reflects any coherent public philosophy at all, it seems to be that only government can defend the nation and that most other needs can be met by private citizens and a competitive marketplace.

“Defense,” the President said, “is government’s prime responsibility.”

Wrong!

Government’s prime responsibility is to secure the rights of individual citizens, not only to life, but--in phrases coined long before Reagan--”to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” These rights do not belong to “families” or “communities.” They belong to each of us, as individuals--a word strangely absent from the President’s speech.

Of course the individual cannot go out and buy or organize an army, navy or air force. Neither, however, can the individual citizen go into the marketplace and purchase clean air, pure drinking water or decent schools. The unemployed cannot buy jobs. Nor can the small businessman compete in the presence of giant oligopolies.

Only through translating collective will into collective action can these needs be met. And in a democratic society the only instrument for collective action is government, not “the private sector.”

It is this historic function of government--far more deeply imbedded in our national history than the intermittent demands of war and security--which this President intends to abdicate. And the consequence, should he succeed, will be grim indeed.

Government, present leadership to the contrary, is not some alien force. It is us, all of us--the only instrument through which a free people can exert its will and fulfill its hopes. It is the medium through which we can translate into tangible reality, the secular prayer, also omitted, to “crown thy good, with brotherhood/From sea to shining sea.”