Readers React: What would Reagan do -- who cares?

To the editor: Conservatives tend to look backward for strategies for the future. And so it is with their beloved Ronald Reagan. Bereft of ideas and innovation, they ask, “What would Reagan do?” (“Reagan’s Goldwater speech: Still great after all these years,” Op-Ed, Oct. 23)

Well, it’s an entirely different world, driven primarily by technology. We face virulent terrorists because our military technology makes it foolhardy to try to match the U.S. in conventional warfare. Our economy whipsaws because computer trading and “big data” facilitate and hide institutional financial risk-taking. Chinese hackers beat on our digital gates.

These issues have never previously existed. Looking backward may yield an idea or two, but addressing our current governing vacuum will take new-century thinking.

Geoff Shawcross, Hawthorne

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To the editor: Between 1948 and 1962, Reagan transitioned from a Democrat who campaigned for Harry Truman to a staunch Republican. Throughout those formative transition years, Richard Nixon was the prominent Southern Californian Republican, and during that time, Nixon and Reagan developed a lasting friendship.

Nixon believed in the Jeffersonian Republican principles “that the greatest guarantee of freedom is decentralization of power.” He also advocated that “our experience as a free people shows beyond a doubt that free men will sooner bring about the common good but regulated men always find ways to exploit society as a whole.”

These beliefs resonated with Reagan.

It was Nixon who was the first Southwestern individualist to be a national candidate, long before Reagan. In fact, he was Reaganesque before Reagan.

The reality is that Reagan was a Nixon Republican.

Paul Carter, Long Beach

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To the editor: Candidate Reagan promised to balance the federal budget, but in 1985 his budget director, David Stockman, resigned in disgust over record-setting deficits. Reagan’s policies resulted in the tripling of our national debt by 1990.

Reagan’s election-winning, tax-cutting mantra proved to future politicians that deficits don’t politically matter, which turned America from the world’s biggest creditor nation into the world’s biggest debtor nation.

Would he call today’s nearly $18-trillion national debt “our rendezvous with destiny”?

James Cuttle, Santa Barbara

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