Workers World, Vol. 23, No. 4
January 21: Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address was long on rhetoric and short on any type of specific solution to the problems of unemployment, galloping inflation, deterioration of the cities, the closing of plants, and the vandalizing of the environment by the giant corporations. In the main, his talk was a recitation of the same old, stale platitudes and banalities that are the staple of the Republican right.
There was no solid sentence, not even a phrase, from which one could detect a departure in a more progressive direction.
It took that great and sturdy pillar of simon-pure, unadulterated liberalism in the Eastern Establishment, the New York Times, to find Reagan in the “role of a moderate in a script of gradualism.” And in the same editorial comment of January 21, 1981, the Times finds that Reagan “means to move from the right wing to command the center. We wish him fulfillment.”
Perhaps we hadn’t read Reagan’s address carefully enough, so we did it again. There is, however, not a scintilla of evidence to sustain any such conclusion as that which the Times seeks to impose on its readers. The truth of the matter is that it is not Reagan who has at this date gone from right to center; it is this simon-pure liberal pillar of imperialism which has gone from phony center to the right.
The ink is hardly dry on the mendacious editorial they had a few days ago, endorsing the would-be man on horseback and warmonger, General Haig, the appointee of the unbridled militarists and the military-industrial establishment.
Indeed, was it not the New York Times which was relied on to carry on a bold fight against the confirmation of Haig – as with Watergate? The publishing dynasty of the house of Sulzberger did begin to do so – half-heartedly. But just when the handful of timid Democratic Senators were looking for some support to open a confirmation fight, the Times turned tail, threw in the towel, and gave the militarist a clean bill of health. This occasioned Reagan to triumphantly proclaim, “Nobody even laid a glove on him!”
Indeed, he was gloating over the capitulation by the Eastern Establishment as a whole. No wonder the Times now finds in the same editorial that Reagan will lead an “inspiring diplomacy.” Really! The lethal weapons now being handed over to the genocidal junta in El Salvador are exceptionally inspiring to all the reactionaries on the planet.
But it is not only on the foreign policy issue that this dynasty has moved to the right. It has even ventured to improve on Reagan’s domestic economic strangulation efforts unloaded on the poor. Earlier in the week it only lauded Reagan’s effort to cut the size of the federal civil service; it had a genuinely new, imaginative and really original idea on how to do it. Reagan’s cuts in the federal establishment should not be confined “to white collars alone. There are also blue collar workers.” Ah, get after them, too! Therein lies the real lesson of imperialist liberalism on the road to embrace the right.
As a flunky heeds his master’s voice, so the independent-minded senior columnist and erstwhile vice-president of the Times, James Reston, has also found it necessary to do a real doubletake. In the 1976 primaries, Reston said, in analyzing the foreign policy of the Republican and Democratic primary candidates, “There are only three men who, if they succeeded to the office of the Presidency, would change the foreign policy of the United States. They are George Wallace, Henry Jackson, and Ronald Reagan. None will succeed.”
Why? asked Reston. “They are extremists.”
Now that one of the extremists as succeeded, Reston finds that “though he [Reagan] says he will never ‘compromise’ on the conservative principles he insisted upon during his two Presidential campaigns, [he] is now talking in gentler ways now that he has entered the White House.” Like master, like servant.
Further on, Reston says, “It is a paradox that those who were most determined to elect Mr. Reagan now seem more worried about what he will do as President than those who opposed him.” In other words, Reagan has become the captive of the center. What nonsense!
Of course, every leader of a formidable political tendency in the spectrum of capitalist politics has both a left and a right to which he is the center. Even Hitler had a left and a right to which he was the center. But this is to confuse the fact that the Reaganite cabal is a right-wing, reactionary political tendency in the spectrum of imperialist politics, of a most dangerous and adventuristic character.
Whether Reagan and his administration can enforce his right-wing policies is another question, which does not at all depend on Reagan and his cabal of big business, military-industrial complex leaders, and bankers. It depends on the force of historic circumstances, on the complex of interdependent world conditions. Not the lease of these is the world revolutionary process, of which the American working class and the oppressed peoples are not merely an integral but a very formidable force.
The Reaganites have merely won an electoral victory. The huge mass of the truly viable section of society, the working class, the oppressed people, and their allies, have only suffered a psychological and political defeat. But in the struggle of the major social classes of contemporary capitalist society, that is not decisive. The real struggle still lies ahead.
The other great pillar of liberalism in the Eastern Establishment doesn’t find any clear line of moderation or a turning away from the right to the center in Reagan’s address, but it finds great virtue in his intention to demonstrate the benefits of a reduced federal government role in the economy.
“He is brave and right to set that priority,” says the Washington Post in its editorial comment on Reagan’s address. In this it is all at one with the big bankers, the industrialists, the multinational corporations, and the entire spectrum of the conservative bourgeoisie. All of them are in praise of the most banal of platitudes in the Reagan address.
“It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed,” intoned Reagan. “It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people.”
Pure, unadulterated demagogy! Bourgeois demagogy, hoary with age.
Why does it find so much applause in the ruling class, and why do even the smallest of petty proprietors, cockroach manufacturers, and lesser petty bourgeois elements applaud this in concert with the giants of industry?
The latter know why. Exxon knows perfectly well why it is championing curbing the size and influence of the federal government and shifting power to the states. Sure it knows. It would like nothing better than to have the poorly populated state of Alaska get complete jurisdiction over all the oil and natural resources there. It is so easy for this giant, in concert with some of its sister oil companies, to cajole, batter down, and literally bribe the legislature, to the point of embarrassment, to get what it wants from a lightly populated state rather than deal with the federal government, which on occasion is forced to heed the broad mass of the people, especially in times of elections.
Isn’t it easier for the Du Pont dynasty to control the tiny state of Delaware than deal with the federal government as a whole. Wouldn’t the Hooker Chemical Corporation prefer to see the county of Niagara in the state of New York have the sole jurisdiction over the chemical disaster which it caused to the people rather than to have to deal with the federal government?
To them it’s a minor matter that the county government couldn’t clean up the chemical wastes and hazards or compensate for the toll in human health and life of a Love Canal disaster. And of course they see nothing wrong with a handful of county officials having to fight a worldwide monopoly with millions at its disposal.
“Checking and curbing the size of the federal governments” means not checking the military-industrial establishment or the banks or the profits of the multinational corporations. It means unloading the debts and expenditures on the states, from the states to the cities and counties, and then onto the backs of the people.
It means dismantling OSHA, crippling the National Labor Relations Board, curtailing the administrative personnel of the food stamp program so no attention can be paid to the millions of people dependent on it, and so on and so forth. It means the unleashing of an ever larger and vaster amount of dangerous chemicals, untested and unsupervised. It means greater hazards in food, in the air we breathe, in the war we drink. In truth, less government means more profit of uncontrollable dimensions by the handful of monopolies and deprivation for the millions, especially the working class and oppressed people.
It is, of course, incontestably true that so-called “big government,” meaning thereby the capitalist state, continues to grow and grow to monstrous and virtually uncontrollable proportions. But this has very little to do with which capitalist party is in control, nor can it be attributed solely to fraud, waste, inefficiency, bureaucratic red tape, and the like.
The state continues to grow irresistibly because it originated at the dawn of class society, when society became split into antagonistic classes. The state arose as an instrument of class domination and terror against the subjugated and exploited class by the exploiting class.
The state continues to grow because class antagonisms grow in the same proportion. As the class antagonisms heighten and become more acute, especially in the imperialist epoch of global class struggle, the state truly becomes a behemoth, a veritable parasite which threatens to swallow up all society.
The state can only vanish after class antagonisms vanish, and in no other way.
What Reagan and the Reaganite followers in the bourgeois camp mean to eliminate, however, are some of the economic and social functions of a progressive character which the working class and the people as a whole have forced the capitalist state to do collectively because of the inability of the individual employers and exploiters to do them – such as Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, etc.
A real clue (if one still really needs one) to Reagan’s foreign policy as gleaned from his address came when he singled out by name an American soldier who died in battle in World War I as the model for Americans, especially the young ones, to follow today. It is the sort of “ask not what your country will do for you, but ...” etc., which President Kennedy used in his inaugural and found practical application for in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the brink of nuclear disaster which he took us to then.
The soldier, Martin Treptow, whose name Reagan invokes and who died on the battlefield in World War I, is alleged to have written in his notebook:
“America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure. I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost as if the issue of the whole struggle depended upon me alone.”
It is worthy of note that with the many wars that the U.S. has engaged in, and the many brave soldiers who lost their lives in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, Reagan picked out the most discredited, reactionary imperialist war, one which finds few defenders, even in the most rabid imperialist circles! To recommend that what this unfortunate soldier did then be done in the context of today’s world, signifies recommending to the youth of today to fight in an imperialist, reactionary war.
The young militants of the new generation who are sure to emerge in the developing anti-war struggle have nothing but scorn for Reagan’s model. A half a million refused to even register.
The millions will learn to fight, not on the battlefields in attempts to subjugate oppressed peoples, but in the struggle against imperialist enslavement and capitalist exploitation.
Last updated: 11 May 2026