The reactionary legacy of Ronald Reagan

100,000 march on May 3, 1981, in D.C. against Reaganism. Photo: Workers World newspaper 1981

Based on a talk given Feb. 10 at a New York Workers World Party meeting. Go to www.workers.org to see the podcast of this talk.

Feb. 6 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan and gave the media and right wing the opportunity to subject the population to yet another celebration of the racist, anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-lesbian-gay-bi-trans and militarist legacy of the man.

For the working class and oppressed people it should be a time for reflection over what the significance of the “Reagan era” was for our class and what lessons can be learned in the fight against racism, reaction and imperialist aggression today.

Ronald Reagan began his campaign for president in 1980 by carefully choosing Philadelphia, Miss., as the site for a speech in which he extolled “states’ rights.” With confederate flags flying all around, the message was clear that the era of giving lip service to civil rights for the African-American population was over. Open racism and reaction would be the order of the day. And he chose to send this message in the very city where three young civil rights workers — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — had been lynched by the KKK and local police 16 years earlier.

It is worth setting the stage for this rightward turn in U.S. politics with some background to Reagan’s election. In April 1975, the Vietnamese liberation army swept into Saigon and forced the U.S. military and thousands of their puppets to leave Vietnam. All progressive humanity celebrated as they watched the war criminals rush to the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Ho Chi Minh City to be evacuated by helicopter. But for the U.S. military, this was a humiliating and bitter defeat that they would not soon forget.

During this same period in the 1970s liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau drove the Portuguese colonial power out of Africa and almost resulted in a proletarian revolution in Portugal itself. There were revolutions in Ethiopia, Southern Yemen, Nicaragua, Iran and Afghanistan. And the Palestinian struggle was gaining strength. Widespread insurgencies in Central America in El Salvador and Guatemala were also threatening U.S. imperialism in its own backyard.

Leader needed to assert U.S. hegemony, crush workers

It is no wonder that the U.S. ruling class was looking for a leader who would halt the decline of their fortunes abroad and, in addition, carry out an assault on the working class and oppressed people at home. The time for concessions to the working class was over as far as they were concerned.

The posture of offering peaceful coexistence to the Soviet Union was also over. Reagan labeled the Soviet Union “the evil empire” and initiated a massive arms build-up to force the Soviet Union into a renewed arms race [notably the “Star Wars” program] that was aimed at derailing their planned economy and threatening their very existence.

The Reagan administration spent tens of millions of dollars propping up the contra war against the Sandinista regime that had liberated Nicaragua from decades of U.S. puppet rule under the Somoza military dictatorship. They sent aid to the death squad regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, resulting in mass killings, torture and imprisonment of opposition forces. And his administration was a staunch supporter of the apartheid South African regime.

In 1982 Reagan sent the Marines as part of a so-called international force into Lebanon after giving the green light to their Israeli puppets to invade Lebanon earlier that year. Israel launched an all-out assault on the Palestinian refugees there and the Palestine Liberation Organization. After giving Israel cover for the massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, the expedition turned into a disaster for the U.S. when the Marine barracks in Beirut was bombed in 1983. Over 200 Marines were killed, and the U.S. was forced to withdraw their troops in 1984.

In 1983 Reagan again used the U.S. military to invade the tiny island of Grenada, which had a revolutionary government headed by Maurice Bishop of the New Jewel Movement. Bishop had opened friendly relations with Cuba. When this government was destabilized by an internal struggle, the U.S. military invaded under the excuse that the Cubans and Soviet Union were aiding Grenada to build an airport that would be a security threat to the U.S.

At the same time that Reagan was carrying out aggression abroad, he sent a chilling message to the workers at home. When 11,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went on strike for shorter hours and better pay in 1981 soon after he took office, Reagan told them to get back to work within 48 hours or face dismissal for life. When the workers did not return to work, they were all fired and banned from working as air traffic controllers. PATCO had endorsed Reagan for president.

He initiated a hateful campaign against what he called “welfare queens” as a way to sow hatred of those on welfare and justify cutbacks in Aid to Families with Dependent Children. He slashed job training programs (the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act), which in 1978 were providing 750,000 jobs across the country, many for inner-city youth. He labeled the AIDS epidemic as a “gay” disease, refusing to do anything to fund medical research for treatment. And who can forget that the Department of Agriculture under Reagan tried to reclassify ketchup as a vegetable to save money on school lunch programs for poor children.

The Reagan presidency elicited an immediate response from the movement in the U.S. The People’s Anti-War Mobilization was formed, involving anti-war groups as well as community activists, labor unions, anti-racist, LGBT, Native American, Central American and Palestinian solidarity groups. PAM mobilized more than 100,000 protesters to march on the Pentagon on May 3, 1981, under slogans of “U.S. out of El Salvador,” “Defend Atlanta’s children” and “No to racism, sexism and anti-gay bigotry.” It was the first such mobilization of that size that aimed to beat back the Reagan attack. It was the also the first major mobilization that featured a Palestinian speaker.

Legacy of hatred, oppression

In June and July 2004, following Reagan’s death, Fred Goldstein summarized the essence of the Reagan presidency in Workers World this way: “Reagan’s task was to prepare for military adventure abroad; to push back the USSR, the socialist camp and the national liberation movements; to overturn all the remaining economic, social and political concessions won by the workers’ struggles during the Roosevelt period; and to take back the gains of the Black people and all the oppressed nationalities won during the 1950s and 1960s and of women and lesbians, gay, bi and trans people during the 1970s.

“This aggressive orientation arose out of the predatory need of the capitalist class to rescue its position as the dominant exploiter of the world. This orientation has not changed since and has been pursued by every administration, Democrat and Republican, since then.”

We can easily recognize these characteristics in the policies of the Bush Sr., Clinton and G.W. Bush presidencies that followed Reagan. While the neoconservative inheritors of the Reagan legacy in the Republican Party and Tea Party heap abuse and racist slurs upon President Barack Obama, nevertheless the needs of Wall Street and big business and the demands of the military for continued occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan have gotten the highest priority from his administration.

In the last two years the hopes of the labor movement to win the Employee Free Choice Act were quickly dashed; the yearning for genuine rights for immigrant workers was answered by mass deportations of the undocumented; the expectations by women that reproductive choice would be safeguarded have been met by continuing violence against women’s health clinics. And through it all, the aggressive stance of the U.S. military not only in Afghanistan, but against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, China and Iran keep the world at the brink of wider war.

Following Reagan’s militarist posturing, in 2002 George Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld assumed that all it would take was “shock and awe” (that is, massive bombing, followed by a limited number of special forces on the ground) to bring the Iraqi people to their knees. But the whole U.S. military establishment was in for a shock of their own. Ten years later they have had to draw down their forces in Iraq and escalate the war in Afghanistan, with no end in sight.

The ground has now given way under the puppet Mubarak, with all his billions of dollars in U.S. military aid. We can see in the living struggle the feet of clay of the tyrants once the people are in motion. And we look forward to the next chapter in the unfolding revolution in Egypt. This is the future, not the legacy of hatred and oppression of a man like Ronald Reagan.