Times Are Ripe for a New Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan was an artist.

This is one of the most important things about the 40th president, perhaps even the thing that made him great. Many conservatives don't understand this, never mind the left.

One person who understands this is John Patrick Diggins, a history professor at the City University of New York and the author of a tremendously readable and compelling 2007 book, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History.

Diggins is a liberal, and says some goofy things in his book, but he also has powerful insight into Reagan -- insight that has eluded the hagiographers on the right and the doubters on the left. Diggins refutes the idea that Reagan was a religious nut or a warmonger, calling him instead an Emersonian who believed in "defying fate and the paralysis of the will."

Diggins then offers this exquisite line: "If government is the call of duty, democracy is the theater of desire as well as freedom, and the actor, more than the politician or the preacher, knows that the heart vibrates to dreams born of desire." Reagan would not have been Reagan, would not have been as successful a leader, had be not been an actor.

Conservatives often remark that it would do the liberals in the Northeastern media-political axis a lot of good to hang out with the "regular Americans" in flyover country. They would see that most Americans are smart, decent people who are easy to talk to and willing to debate political points with civility.

Yet I also think it would do conservatives good to hang out with some actors. My brother was a successful Washington, D.C. actor in the 1980s, even winning the prestigious Helen Hayes Award one year. Through him I got to know some actors -- including one or two who would go on to become famous.

There's no doubt that all of these thespians were liberal. But most of them were liberal in a thoughtful way that desired to learn deeper truths about life and human nature.

I spent long hours in bars and restaurants with these people, having the kind marathon conversations that young artists excel in. The first thing I learned is that actors, at least stage actors that I knew, have an amazing work ethic. What they do, at least the ones who do it well, is not easy. I still remember the best show I ever saw, Hamlet at the Shakespeare Theater, starring Tom Hulce.

I knew Hulce as Pinto in Animal House, and was stunned by his performance in Hamlet. What particularly struck me was the athleticism of Hulce's craft. I was the jock in my family, and I realized that what my brother and his friends were doing was in its own way as demanding as playing in a baseball game.

They also, obviously, were empathetic people who were perceptive readers of human motivation and emotion.

Critics of Reagan always drew a correlation between acting and living in some kind of self-created fantasy land. The truth is quite the opposite: through fantasy and role playing, actors can often develop greater insight into reality. A professional actor who has played MacBeth well knows as much about politics and power as any graduate of Harvard's Kennedy School of Politics.

David Gergen once noted that Reagan ranked high in "inter-personal intelligence." This is a category of intelligence discovered by Howard Gardner, author of the book Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership. Gardner created the theory of "multiple intelligences," which held that different people can be stronger in different forms of intelligence. An IT ace from MIT may be able to write dazzling computer code while being lost in a conversation with a foreign leader. In fact, an actor may actually be the one to excel in such a situation.

Of course, Reagan also had more than just "inter-personal intelligence."

He was a reader who was fascinated with ideas and their consequences in the real world. This is the thing that kept Reagan to actor from succumbing to the illogic of so much modern liberalism. In his book The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years, Thomas Evans notes that Reagan would sometimes travel with a suitcase full of books he was reading. Reagan subscribed to National Review, a magazine whose arguments helped win the future president to conservatism. One of his favorite books was Witness, the masterpiece by Whittaker Chambers.

The times today are ripe for a new Ronald Reagan.

I don't mean that in the sense that many conservatives do; most of them simply want the Reagan they knew and loved to be cloned and placed into 21st Century America. Rather, a charismatic conservative actor could both convince Hollywood to tell stories it refuses to -- Obama as false messiah, anyone? -- and effectively communicate to the American people the problems we face.

America and the West are experiencing a great contraction. We are beginning to realize that we are going to have to live with limits. It is a situation that calls for a spiritual interpretation as much as a political one.

An actor who has done Waiting for Godot or the plays of Samuel Becket, and who has read a few books like Witness, is more able to understand this than a president whose liberal fantasy world is more out of touch than Bedtime for Bonzo.