“There’s a bear in the woods,” warns ad man Hal Riney, as a grizzly appears on screen.  “For some people, the bear is easy to see.  Others don’t see it at all.  Some people say the bear is tame.  Others say it is vicious and dangerous.  Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear?  If there is a bear.”

In the last scene, a man appears, and the bear steps back.  Cut to a picture of Ronald Reagan: “President Reagan, prepared for peace.”

The highly effective “bear ad” ran as part of President Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, one that included ads featuring the memorable tag lines “It’s morning again in America” and “America’s back!”  The ads were optimistic, did not “go negative” in political-attack mode, and complimented Reagan’s avuncular pitchman persona.

The bear ad was softer than the President’s anti-Soviet rhetoric, taking some edge off the image of a man who had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and, in a sound test caught by a live microphone, said he would “outlaw Russia.”  (“My fellow Americans.  I’m pleased to announce that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever.  We begin bombing in five minutes.”)  The impression left on most viewers was that of a “peace through strength” policy.  It undercut the attempts of Reagan’s opponents to portray him as dangerously aggressive, but remained in keeping with something basic about Reaganism: its focus on the external enemy.

In less skillful style, the bear ad was revamped for George W. Bush’s campaign in 2004, recasting the external enemy (unidentified terrorists) as a wolf pack.  The Bush ad concluded with this line: “And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.”  The ad was markedly less subtle and more somber in tone.  Still, there was no denying that Reaganism’s fundamental optimism and all’s-well-with-America attitude remained at the heart of the Republican Party.  Recall President Bush, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, calling on Americans to show the enemy what we are all about—go about your business, go shopping.  The threat was external.  And George W. Bush was in positive-spin mode when he characterized Islam as a “religion of peace.”

His words were a distant echo of Reagan’s, who, when his anti-Soviet blinders were in operation, praised the “Afghan freedom fighters” in a style that was long on expediency and short on any sober assessment of who the “freedom fighters” were.  “Every country and every people,” said President Reagan, “has a stake in the Afghan resistance, for the freedom fighters of Afghanistan are defending principles of independence and freedom that form the basis of global security and stability.”

The American lack of historical perspective would evolve into an anti-intellectualism on the right personified by “W” himself.  Under George W. Bush, the universal optimism of Reaganism was put to work in the Herculean task of ridding the world of evil, a task that assumed America herself was not only sound and healthy but fit for a messianic undertaking that, in scope, was not unlike the Soviet mission of spreading communism or Islam’s mission of expanding the realm of the prophet.

The “morning again in America” rhetoric would not have worked in the 1980’s were it not for a sense that the terrible 60’s were over, that the kids were all right if a bit rebellious (aren’t all young people like that?), and that business still operated on an assumption that what’s good for General Motors is good for America and vice versa.  America was back, strong and healthy.  The enemy was that bear prowling in the woods.  “Liberals” were well meaning but naive.  And the American Dream was assumed to be universal.  This mundane optimism has as its basis a very unconservative notion, that all people are basically good.  Those who embraced it were not far from a belief in America as the “universal nation” and a “conservatism” that had no notion of American identity beyond a “creed” that could be summed up in sound bites.

An America that was sound and healthy could afford to entertain loose talk about “revolution” and universal equality.  Here is President Reagan at Moscow State University in 1988: “Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things.  It is the continuous revolution of the marketplace.”  And here is Reagan on America as a universal nation: “America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal.  Not in spite of, but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world.  That is the American way.”  It was a short step from this to “diversity is our strength.”  There is no sense in these words of the American people as an historical nation.  Without that notion, foreign policy becomes a matter of mission, not national interests.

And what of the bear?  Like generals fighting the last war, and with anticommunism as the glue holding together mainstream conservatism, the conservatives of the Reagan era made anticommunism the chief test for membership in the movement.  In retrospect, no serious, sustained attempts at rolling back liberalism were made.  The Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, signed into law by President Reagan, placed the country’s mythic origins in those awful 1960’s conservatives were supposed to hate.  And the President (who, to his credit, later said he regretted this) signed an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens, setting the stage for future attempts to amnesty ever-growing numbers of aliens in our midst.  The “bear” was the real enemy, something  mainstream conservatives could define ourselves against.  For many whites, militaristic patriotism became an outlet for expressing ourselves as a people, so long as we focused on the “bear” and not the wolves who were already inside the gates.

How great a threat was the Soviet Union in the Reagan era?  By 1980, the Soviet Union was ruled by a corrupt and vulnerable gerontocracy; the bear was a doddering and senile beast not long for this world.  Admittedly, to the casual observer, this did not seem to be the case.  But the writing was on the wall for those who had eyes to see it.  (I was not one of them, being a young man inspired partly by Reaganism’s stand against the Soviet bear to join the Cold Warriors even as the Cold War was petering out.)  By the mid-70’s, the Brezhnev regime had established a comfortable accord with various Soviet leadership factions; the aging leaders lived well, while corruption mushroomed in a post-Stalinist bureaucracy.  The military got what it wanted from the budget.  Russian nationalism helped prop up the regime, while Moscow became financially dependent on oil sales and hard-currency income.

Soviet expansion continued, fueled by Western colonial withdrawal and anti-Western nationalism, signaling Moscow’s “imperial overstretch.”  The Soviets became dependent on food imports.  Internal controls were relaxed, and dissident movements sprang up across the Soviet bloc.  The regime was running out of steam and taxing itself on expansion and maintaining the Warsaw Pact, even as the command economy failed to deliver.  The Soviet army was stuck in the Afghanistan quagmire (made worse, to be sure, by U.S. support for the Afghan “freedom fighters”).  Soviet society was showing signs of social pathologies, including rampant alcoholism.  The complacent Soviet leadership simply chose to ignore the decay from within.

Cold War lore has it that, in order to hurt Moscow’s budget, Washington encouraged the Saudis to stop supporting oil prices as their oil production rose.  Regardless of the precipitating causes, when the Saudis announced a policy shift in 1985, the Soviets were faced with tough choices: End subsidies to the Warsaw Pact, cut military production, or reduce food imports.  The leadership decided, instead, to kick the can down the road by massive borrowing.  By the late 80’s, with debts piling up, Mikhail Gorbachev was ready to negotiate the terms of surrendering the Eastern Bloc in exchange for Western credits.  (This period is ably described in Yegor Gaidar’s 2006 book Gibel’ Imperii: Uroki dlya sovremennoi Rossii, or The Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia.)  President Reagan, much to the chagrin of some hard-line Cold Warriors, wisely decided that Gorbachev was someone with whom the United States could deal.

The Cold War ended, and Ronald Reagan deserves credit for managing the conclusion of that confrontation.  Whether his global approach and his “Star Wars” program actually played the decisive role in the Soviet surrender, and whether the focus on the Soviet threat should have been the key policy of Reagan-era conservatism, are debatable.  That Reaganism’s preoccupation with, and expenditure of enormous amounts of time, money, and energy on, the external enemy distracted conservatives from the decay within America is indisputable.  Along the way, the neoconservatives took the reins of mainstream conservatism, a coup made easier by the revolutionary and egalitarian rhetoric employed by Reagan himself, language David Priestland, in The Red Flag: A History of Communism, described as “Marxist inflected,” reflecting “revolutionary idealism”—the antithesis of anything that can rightly be called conservative. 

Now as then, the crisis faced by the United States is social, demographic, spiritual, and economic, and mainstream conservatives are intellectually ill equipped to pose the right questions and focus on the real and present dangers to the nation.  A retreat to Reaganism, with its sunny optimism, revolutionary and egalitarian rhetoric, and focus on external threats, is not the way to join the present battle.  The time of a Reaganist conservatism had already passed in 1980, and Reaganism will likely prove impotent against the threats our country faces today.  As the late Samuel Francis once wrote, while movement conservatives were celebrating “morning in America,” it was really the 11th hour.