Dark Horses

It is fashionable these days to make fun of the Reagan Administration’s jerry-built, do-it-yourself, instant-weight-loss, shake-’n’-bake policies, and to attack it for its willingness to experiment with new, wholly untested formulae. This sort of talk is intellectually satisfying to assistant professors, TV journalists, endangered Democrats, and Carl Rowan; but serious students of American politics, as well as hoarier citizens of the Republic, will recall that it was precisely that daring, that venturesomeness, for which the sainted Franklin Roosevelt was praised by liberals in the Thirties.

Then it was fashionable to argue that whether the New Deal made good sense or bad at least the President was doing something—that action had to be better than stasis. Then, indeed, it was fashionable to stress the degree to which the theoretical underpinnings of the Administration’s policies were brand new—the latest word—hot from the studies of Harvard intellectuals. Since then, of course, liberals have lost their capacity to be thrilled by the new, the adventurous: and so today they shiver with horror when they think of the Republican Party running the country on a theory scribbled by Arthur Laffer on a cocktail napkin.

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Free Market

It is fashionable these days to make fun of the Reagan Administration’s jerry-built, do-it-yourself, instant-weight-loss, shake-’n’-bake policies, and to attack it for its willingness to experiment with new, wholly untested formulae. This sort of talk is intellectually satisfying to assistant professors, TV journalists, endangered Democrats, and Carl Rowan; but serious students of American politics, as well as hoarier citizens of the Republic, will recall that it was precisely that daring, that venturesomeness, for which the sainted Franklin Roosevelt was praised by liberals in the Thirties.

Then it was fashionable to argue that whether the New Deal made good sense or bad at least the President was doing something—that action had to be better than stasis. Then, indeed, it was fashionable to stress the degree to which the theoretical underpinnings of the Administration’s policies were brand new—the latest word—hot from the studies of Harvard intellectuals. Since then, of course, liberals have lost their capacity to be thrilled by the new, the adventurous: and so today they shiver with horror when they think of the Republican Party running the country on a theory scribbled by Arthur Laffer on a cocktail napkin.