Op-Ed: Young Conservatives’ Criticisms of Ronald Reagan Are Misplaced

Some GenZ conservatives are attacking Ronald Reagan on abortion and immigration. That’s a mistake, as well as an injustice. I was there.

Our young friends correctly state that then-Gov. Reagan signed the bill that legalized abortion in California, six years before Roe v. Wade. They miss his conversion on the issue, which was far more genuine and profound than any other I’ve seen in American politics.

(It’s also worth noting that when Reagan signed the California bill, and for the first few years after Roe, even most Evangelicals supported abortion. They didn’t understand the issue. Once they did, the modern pro-life movement was born. But it took a while.)

Reagan was the first post-Roe President to take a pro-life stand. And that stand was noticeably without the rape or incest exceptions Republicans adopted after him. His chief GOP opponent in 1980 was explicitly pro-abortion, as was the immediate-past GOP president, Gerald Ford.

No president has worked against abortion as much as Ronald Reagan, not even the president whose nominees overturned Roe.

On immigration, Reagan’s actions are taken out of context. The 1986 immigration act certainly included an amnesty. But it was a deal with an overwhelmingly-Democratic House, in exchange for tougher border security measures. I wasn’t for it then, and I’m not now. Neither was Reagan later. But he attempted a compromise that would secure the border, while the Democrats pretended to negotiate in good faith.

They weren’t actually, and so the compromise didn’t work. America got the amnesty without the enhanced border security. But that has little to do with the millions crossing the border each year 40 years later.

Incidentally, this was far from the only instance of Democratic perfidy in those years. As George H.W. Bush learned to his horror in 1990 when he foolishly refused to learn the lesson and made a deal with Democratic leadership to raise taxes in exchange for spending cuts: The Democrats did indeed raise taxes, but for every $1 of new taxes they actually increased spending $1.82. But such open dishonesty was a relatively new thing in such negotiations then.

In any case, that 1986 immigration bill was one of the very least important things that happened in one of the most consequential presidencies in American history.

A handful of examples:

1. In just the five years before Reagan, 26 countries had fallen to Communism, and America was in severe danger of outright military defeat, possibly nuclear; under Reagan, America engineered the bankruptcy and collapse of the Soviet Empire.

The foreign policy establishment in both parties was adamant that both those things were not just impossible but that pursuing them was “dangerous and destabilizing.” They fought Reagan’s efforts all the way. Yet Reagan ended — and won — the most dangerous conflict in world history, without firing a shot.

2. Between 1945 and 1982, America averaged a major recession every 2.5 years; in direct consequence of Reagan’s policies, we’ve only had four recessions since 1982 (and one of those was because of a global pandemic).

3. In 1980, the top tax rate was 70 percent, and before that, it had been 90 percent. Reagan cut it to just 28 percent, for the first time since before the Great Depression. (It’s back up to 37 percent today.)

4. In 1980, just 15 percent of Americans owned $5,000 or more of stocks and other securities. Because of Reagan’s policies (like tax cuts, deregulation, IRAs and 401(k)s, not to mention the slaying of inflation and the end of every 2.5-year-recession), that number hit a whopping 54 percent by the end of the 1990s. Reagan “democratized the means of production,” but through private ownership rather than Marxist revolution.

5. Finally, as I said, Reagan was the first pro-life president after Roe and the first president to demand that the Republican platform be explicitly pro-life. Before Reagan that was absolutely unthinkable.

These are just a few highlights. I understand that it is currently in vogue to “forget” these things. But we cannot advance the conservative movement now by attacking its pioneers, especially those who fought when there was almost no conservative movement at all. And the truth is, considering where we were at the end of the 1970s and what we know now from the fallen Soviet Union’s archives, had it not been for Reagan, there very likely wouldn’t be an America today at all.

Rather, we should learn from our forerunners’ mistakes, laud their successes, and strive every day for more.

That was certainly Reagan’s own view.

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