RAYGUN & THE WARM FUZZIES

A few weeks ago, George F. Will wrote an interesting column ("The Limits of Sunniness") that centered on how Raygun was Emersonian, based on a book about Raygun by John Patrick Diggins,"Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History."

I simply don't know enough about Emerson to evaluate this but some of Will's sentences struck a chord:

Hence Reagan's unique, and perhaps oxymoronic, doctrine -- conservatism without anxieties. Reagan's preternatural serenity derived from his conception of the supernatural.

Reagan took a foundational belief that he expressed in a 1951 letter: "God couldn't create evil so the desires he planted in us are good." This logic -- God is good, therefore so are God-given desires...

To Reagan, the idea of problems inherent in democracy was unintelligible because it implied that there were inherent problems with the demos -- the people. There was nothing -- nothing-- in Reagan's thinking akin to Lincoln's melancholy fatalism, his belief (see his Second Inaugural) that the failings of the people on both sides of the Civil War were the reasons why "the war came."

...how can people have a bad conscience after being told (in Reagan's First Inaugural) that they are all heroes? And after being assured that all their desires, which inevitably include desires for government-supplied entitlements, are good?


The pseudo-conservatives love Raygun in part because he made them feel so good about themselves.