Book Review time: Tear Down This Myth

I'd been meaning to get Tear Down This Myth by Will Bunch since he first mentioned he was working on it on his blog, "Attytood". A retrospective of how the presidency of Ronald Reagan has been lionized by the Right, and how the Reagan mythology affects our discussion of politics and policy even today, is timely, and I was pleased to purchase it as a premium in support of Buzzflash (where I highly recommend my readers to mosey on over to if they aren't already visiting for a good source of important, relevant news--they are not just an an aggregator site, but also have lots of fresh, sometimes funny, always insightful commentary from very smart people).

Anyway, on to the review. Bunch starts out his book pretty much where my renewed fascination with Reagan begins--that weird "Everybody wants to be Reagan" theme that seemed to resonate throughout the 2008 Republican primary. He moves from that point to give an overview of how the mythologers have built up a legend through a combination of revisionism and stagecraft, and then goes on to recap the actual history of Ronald Reagan as a political figure and president, and reviews it against the "myth."

I found this an actually very well researched and even-handed book. My perusal of, for example, Amazon book reviews that say otherwise, suggest that they probably consist of people who have not read it, because Bunch doesn't really slam Reagan. On the contrary, he does acknowledge that Reagan was a gifted politician, a good if not Great Communicator and a sincere person who often embraced causes based on his personal experience. But he also notes that the strengths of the man (whose self-deprecating humor always made me wonder exactly what he would have made of the way he'd become something of a conservative "saint") did not always translate into effective policies, and are even buried under the weight of the legend built up around him.

What Bunch has done especially well at is puncturing some of the better myths: low taxes = more revenue (did everybody forget the way Reagan raised taxes several times despite cutting them on the wealthy, and still ran up a helluva defecit?) and the "Tear down this wall" legend, which begins to sound more and more like Joshua blowing the shofar and tumbling Jericho with every re-telling. He points out the reciprocating stupidity of Iran-Contra and Iraq-gate and how we sold arms to the Iranians for hostages, so they took more hostages, and then weirdly enough, we also armed the Iraqis, so the Iranians would want more arms....

That was screwed up. He also points out how no one had the heart to really prosecute the issue.

And he also points out that there is a working class America that never really liked the man's policies. He didn't really speak to or for everybody. He shows the ways in which Reagan was a beneficiary of a technology boom and the imminent Soviet collapse, without having much to do with helping them along. He reminds us of how desultory his reaction was about AIDS.

I found it a detail-packed narrative, and rather well-done. He exposes not just the flaws in the Reagan myth, but also the flaws in the Reagan mythologizers. He also relates how the canonization of this one semi-successful Republican president affects us even now.

I know I covered a lot of what he has to say--but go and read it for the way he says it. Will Bunch is a quite good and witty writer who illuminates the real, flawed, and historic Reagan against the soft glow of "spin".