In this winter of their discontents, nostalgia for Ronald Reagan has become for many conservatives a substitute for thinking. This mental paralysis — gratitude decaying into idolatry — is sterile: Neither the man nor his moment will recur. Conservatives should face the fact that Reaganism cannot define conservatism.

George Will reviews John Patrick Diggins’s new book Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History for the Washington Post here. Basically Diggins (and Will) are saying that Reagan was an anomaly of the conservative movement and hint strongly that he perhaps wasn’t much of a true conservative himself.

. . . [Diggins] notes that Reagan’s theory was radically unlike that of Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism, and very like that of Burke’s nemesis, Thomas Paine. Burke believed that the past is prescriptive because tradition is a repository of moral wisdom. Reagan frequently quoted Paine’s preposterous cry that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Whatever your feelings on Thomas Paine aside (and as a conservative you probably have strong feelings one way or the other) I think it is important to look at that final statement in both the time it was written and the time Reagan repeated it. The former was a time of unprecedented upheaval in which a monarchy that had existed since the time of Charlemagne was crushed from within by the desire of the common man for his freedom. The most powerful empire the world had known up until that point was defeated by a disorganized group of men united behind the idea of freedom. These were heady times for a man of Paine’s political persuasion. It surely must have seemed like the beginning of a new age if not a new world, unlike any man had ever seen before.
Was he right? Can the world be made anew by mere men? Not an easy question to answer, especially depending on how your view of God. Some would say only God could do such a powerful thing. Others would respond that man is God’s instrument upon this earth and that striving for freedom is surely the fulfillment of God’s will for him.

Burke scoffs at anything “new” and his tendency to look to the past for the answer has been proven countless times to be nothing if not pure wisdom. Paine isn’t even speaking the same language as he urges man to become the master of his own destiny and create the world of his deepest desires.

There is truth of course in both philosophies. Burke for all his wisdom could not foresee the future, if he had lived in ancient Rome he would have proclaimed something akin to the industrial revolution impossible. It was not even conceivable in such a time. Ditto its bastard child Marxism. The concepts to construct such mental constructs didn’t exist yet and wouldn’t for over a thousand years.

Paine’s folly is far more plain: the aftermath of the French Revolution that began with such promise and ended with the horror of a pile of severed heads and the dictatorship of Napoleon.

We all know that Reagan was referring to the collapse of world-wide Communism and the ability of peoples’ desire to be free to remake the world. Since then much good has happened but we don’t seem to be living in Utopia yet. I find it overly harsh for Will to imply that Reagan’s urgings for people to remake the world into the image of their desire to be free of tyranny is somehow not classically conservative. I would also point out that Reagan’s message of freedom and Bush’s message of freedom were vastly different. Bush has ignored history as Burke warned against, while Reagan was aware of the historical forces at work behind the Iron Curtain.

“Emerson was right,” Reagan said several times of the man who wrote, “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.” Hence Reagan’s unique, and perhaps oxymoronic, doctrine — conservatism without anxieties.

I am not a conservative so I can experience the anxiety of being so. If that is what Will thinks keeps a good conservative walking the straight and narrow path I have to question his grasp of human nature. Guilt does not a good Catholic make. Anxiety results from internal conflict regarding the nature of our thoughts and actions. Emerson was right and Prohibition is the proof. Given many social conservatives’ druthers, prohibition would come roaring back along with a nanny state ban on smoking no doubt added to it. Reagan appealed for the law and human nature to align as nicely as they could, for it is in the gaps between those two forces that we find society breaking down under the weight of unjust law and the corruption it breeds. This is not to say that cannibalism should be made legal to align with the sick desires of some mad man. Reagan was saying that law must be considered just according to the society that creates it while Will seems to be insisting that law be used to craft society into an ideal image. I thought the past was prescriptive?

The rest of the review is equally interesting, but similarly askew. When a man like Will writes an article like this he is trying to say something and in this case I think it is two things. Firstly, that the people need to sit down and shut up and let the elites of our nation solve our problems. Will has expressed distaste for such concepts as blogging in the past which gives people like me a voice as potentially has powerful as his own. The elitism of his words drip off of the page. Secondly, he seems to be hinting to fellow conservatives that the future of the movement is in a man like Mitt Romney, not Mike Pence. I like George Will but he shows us his darkside in this piece.