Getting Right with Reagan: The Struggle for True Conservatism, 1980-2016.

• Author: Munger, Michael C.

* Getting Right with Reagan: The Struggle for True Conservatism, 1980-2016

By Marcus M. Witcher

Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2019.

Pp. xi, 428. $39.95 hardcover.

What is "conservatism"? Which U.S. president do "conservatives" most admire?

For many people, the answer to the second question is "Ronald Reagan." For more than a few people, Reagan is also the answer to the first question: Reagan embodied American conservatism or the return of American conservatism or ... something.

Marcus Witcher investigates just what it was that Reagan embodied in the period between Reagan's first election in 1980 and Donald Trump's election in 2016. It's hard for me to be objective or dispassionate about all this because in 1982 I was assigned as a research assistant to Murray Weidenbaum, who was fresh back in St. Louis from his two years as chair of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. And in 1984, partly with Murray's help, I started as a staff economist at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), working in regulatory analysis in Wendy Gramm's edition of the Bureau of Economics.

I was a Reagan revolutionary. We were not stodgy conservatives but classical liberal econo-gods in Washington to cut red tape and smite the regulatory and tax barriers to growth and prosperity. In the election of 1984, Reagan won 525 Electoral College votes, running the table except for the District of Columbia and the People's Republic of Minnesota. Now, we were really going to be able to get some things done: a mandate! It was morning again in America!

Except that not much really happened. Reagan made a lot of speeches, and there were some tax cuts and some typically time-wasting task forces. (I spent at least thirty hours in FTC small-business red-tape task force meetings just in 1985; we had to pay for our own coffee.) But trade barriers were raised, not lowered, and the Voluntary Restraint Agreement on steel and autos was actually tightened. This didn't seem like a revolution; it seemed like our job was to talk about congratulating ourselves on a revolution that had just disappeared like a puff of smoke on a windy day.

Marcus Witcher's thesis is that Reagan's success as a politician was his ability to make speeches from the right but govern from the middle. It is tempting to contrast Reagan with Barack Obama along these lines, but Obama only did the "speeches" part, from the left. There was a difference: Obama was not pragmatic and was for the most part satisfied to...