Liberals Then, Liberals Now--Always the Same
Business and Economics Op-Ed
By: Steven F. Hayward, Ph.D
6.7.2004
National Review Online, June 7, 2004
I've seen a few commentators say things like, "Gee, politics was more civil back when Reagan was around; things have really turned nasty under George W. Bush." Au contraire. We should recall what the libs said about Reagan back then. Sample: Henry Fairlie in the Washington Post, writing on the Republican convention in 1980: "The Reaganites on the floor were exactly those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy.” Fairlie was just warming up; adding that Reagan’s constituency was “narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envious, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying; trivially moral, falsely patriotic, family cheapening, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious.” One imagines that Farlie’s thesaurus could have outlasted the Post’s printing press.
Steven F. Hayward is senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of "The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order" (Prima Publishing, 2001).
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