Devine Wisdom, Informed by Reagan

For National Review today, Neal B. Freeman salutes Roger Ream, president of the Fund for American Studies (for which I was recently a Novak Fellow). I have enjoyed Roger’s company over the past few years, and I second Neal’s praise of him as “one of the few CEOs who, manifestly, has left his board begging for more,” and as one worthy of the legacy of conservative luminary John Von Kannon, after whom the award Roger received is named.

This is a good opportunity to praise Roger’s TFAS colleague Donald Devine as well. I have had the singular privilege and unique pleasure of getting to know Don over the past few years. He has had a long career in the conservative movement as a leading Frank Meyer fusionist. Once an academic, he served as the director of Ronald Reagan’s Office of Personnel Management, where his efforts to shrink government earned him the title “Reagan’s Terrible Swift Sword of the Civil Service” from the Washington Post.

And the terrible swift sword remains not only sharp but also active. The author of several books, including America’s Way Back: Reclaiming Freedom, Tradition, and Constitution and The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, Don continues to write regularly for conservative publications, including National Review. Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles: How They Can Promote Political Success Today, his latest book, is a collection of some of his recent writing.

The title captures the collection’s main thesis, as does an article I referenced last year (a year ago tomorrow, actually). It is a direct refutation of those who accuse fusionist conservatives of being “zombie Reaganites.” While it may be true, as Don concedes in the essay that opens the collection, that “Ronald Reagan is unfortunately not available to us now,” he has nonetheless “left us his core principles, which we can recover to break through the present despair.” To recover these principles, Don says we must “deemphasize current politics and personalities and look at the philosophy, governance, and individual and moral principles Reagan demonstrated that were crucial to sustaining a social renewal.”

This is only a tiny portion of the wisdom offered by Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles. The essays within range widely, from practical reflections on the operation of government to learned ruminations on the origin of civilization and the thought of various philosophers (Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Eric Voegelin, René Girard, John Gray, and others), and much in between. It is impossible to capture the anthology’s breadth without reading it. Nor is it possible to appreciate the staggering and relentlessly questing intellect behind it without doing so.

To sample it too much further would be both to spoil its riches and to leave out too many of the other treasures within. But one bit, in particular, finds Don at his most practical and Reaganesque. Drawing from his experience in government, he observes that getting ahead in Washington is easy. Why? Because D.C. is “a place where one succeeds politically by not upsetting the media — or the bureaucracy and clients that report to it — by not taking any action that could cause distress to voters.”

This works out great for the Swamp. Not so much for those outside of it, who suffer as power is drawn away from them by a centralized, bureaucratic, federal administration. Reagan came to power to contest that apparatus and to restore limited government. In doing so, he was fighting the very status quo Don describes. As I have written before, Reagan “threatened the polite-society consensus of statism more than any political figure has since.” To make good fully on that threat was a tall order. Reagan faced other challenges (and made some errors, as Don admits), hence his having left the job sadly incomplete.

So now it’s up to us, as Don puts it, to “stop bellyaching and get to work” applying Reagan’s principles to today’s challenges. It will be difficult, he admits. But that difficulty is precisely why he describes the challenge as a thrilling “adventure.” Neal Freeman, Roger Ream, Donald Devine, and others have been on this adventure for many years, have accomplished much and have much wisdom to offer us. Will the rest of us have the good sense and the courage to listen to them — and to join them?