St. Ronnie (Reagan) and the 11th Commandment

from OurFuture.org:



St. Ronnie and the 11th Commandment
Submitted by Rick Perlstein on November 12, 2007 - 10:26am.


Sixteen days ago Atrios posted something offhand about Ronald Reagan and the famous "11th Commandment"—"Though shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican"—that I've been meaning to comment upon, to make some general points about Reagan. But sixteen days is officially 47.6 years in Blog Time, and I was afraid my moment for Reagan bashing had passed.

Until, that is, some useful controversy flared up about the Great Communicator's memory this week.

First, the recent controversy. David Brooks wrote a stunningly simple-minded column claiming that to call Ronald Reagan a panderer for the votes of racist white Southerners was a "slur" against Reagan. Specifically, he tried to rebut the charge that the smoking gun proving Reagan's intentions was the infamous opening of Reagan's 1980 general election campaign at Mississippi's Neshoba County Fair, just down the road a piece from where Klansmen slaughtered three civil rights workers during Freedom Summer in 1964. Brooks, apparently inspired by the account of Bruce Bartlett, basically exculpates Reagan for the Neshoba appearance—in which he praised "states rights," as in the name of Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist States Rights Party—as an accident of scheduling. Now, however, the man who probably knows more about the rise of the Republican Party in Mississippi than any man alive, Emory professor Joseph Crespino, author of In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution, usefully puts the whole conservative-invented "controversy" to rest with both a crucial discussion of historical context, and a documentary smoking gun: a 1979 letter from a leading Mississippi Republican leader suggesting that if he wanted the "George Wallace inclined voters," the Neshoba County Fair was the place to speak.

Come on, Brooks: clear enough for you yet?

Anyhoo. Now to Atrios's post. Atrios offhandly explains that he recently learned that what's been popularly enshrined as "Reagan's" 11th Commandment was actually the coinage of that California's Republican chairman Gaylord Parkinson, in 1966, after that state's divisive 1964 Republican presidential primary.

And so it was. Now to my broader point, which is that Reagan, so uncontroversially enshrined in popular memory as a sunny innocent and freedom-loving optimist, was actually both a calculating and a bad man. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/st_ronnie_and_11th_commandment?tx=3