In 1997, Apple began their famous "Think Different" campaign, featuring a variety of famous figures from the 20th century who did indeed, think very "different" from most of their peers: Edison, Einstein, Amelia Earhart, Gandhi, Muhammad Ali, and others.
One name that was missing, probably because it would taint the politically correct spirit of Apple, or at least their ad agency, was Ronald Reagan. And yet, to go back in time to the early 1960s and explore the period of American History until his inauguration on January 20 of 1981, is to understand just how "different" from the accepted common wisdom of the day he thought.
But before we do that, let's briefly flash forward to earlier this month, when Republicans regained the Senate on November 5, thus restoring the control over all three branches of government that they briefly had from President Bush's inaugural until Jim Jeffords defected to the Democrats in the spring of 2001.
Bush immediately declared that the election would be a 'no gloat zone'. Avoiding gloating is good. Avoiding hubris is even better: to paraphrase that eminent philosopher, Stan Lee, too often, with great power comes great hubris. And hubris is where the story of the Age of Reagan begins.
In The Age of Reagan, the first of a projected two volume series, Steven Hayward does an excellent job of explaining just how different Reagan's thinking that government can't solve all problems was in the 1960s, as liberalism ascended to its apogee. The Democrats were already in control of all three legislative branches in Washington when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, and the presidency transferred to Lyndon Johnson. It was at that point that the fairly jaunty "can-do" optimism of liberalism that dominated Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy ossified into arrogance.
As Hayward notes, the Kennedy administration never had the hubris to declare "a war on poverty". It was merely "an attack on poverty", begun with a pilot program on juvenile delinquency, created to test out their theories, and see what, if any results they'd achieve. Only then would they consider scaling the program up, and would no doubt have used the feedback from their first efforts to shape it.
When Johnson wanted a signature domestic policy for his nascent administration, this "demonstration project", as it was called in the Kennedy Administration, was immediately scaled up to a full-blown Texas size-equivalent of Roosevelt's New Deal, and became, as "the war on poverty", the core of Johnson's Great Society. (This would of course, be the first of many wars on, and its failure would taint every other "war on" project to come, including the "war on drugs", still of course going strong, and the burgeoning "war on terrorism". One can only pray that it delivers more promising results than the previous "wars on".
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