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Taking Stock of Stockman
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11499 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1986 |
3,535 Words |
| Author
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John Seiler
John Seiler's commentary and articles have appeared in The
Washington Times and other publications. |
THE TRIUMPH OF POLITICS
Why the Reagan Revolution Failed
David A. Stockman
New York: Harper & Rows, 1986
422 pp., $21.95
STOCKMAN
The Man, the Myth, the Future
Owen Ullman
New York: Donald I. Fine, 1986
343 pp., $18.95
Revolution is a potent word that shouldn't be thrown about. But in practice political demagogues and their hangers-on use it almost as often as they use the equally volatile 'progress'. A sensible use of 'revolution' suggests two meanings: "political revolution" and "social revolution." A political revolution topples a government, usually tyrannical in nature, but goes no further. It doesn't seek to change the basic order in society. The American Revolution in 1776 and Corazon Aquino's ouster of strongman Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986 are two examples of political revolutions. Some Tory property was seized after the American Revolution, and some Tories driven to exile in Canada or England; and some of Marcos's cronies have been harassed in the Philippines. But in general, people's lives have continued much as before.
In contrast to this placidity, social revolutions completely overthrow an existing order, replacing not just the country's government but imposing on the citizenry an abstract notion of how all aspects of life should be led.
In his memoirs, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Revolution Failed, David A. Stockman, President Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, stretches the word 'revolution' to the most absurd lengths imaginable. "Revolutions have to do with drastic, wrenching changes in an established regime," Stockman hyperbolically states. "Causing such changes to happen was not Ronald Reagan's real agenda in the first place. It was mine, and that of a small care of supply-side intellectuals.
"The Reagan Revolution, as I had defined it, required a frontal assault on the American welfare state. That was the only way to pay for the massive Kemp-Roth tax cut" of 1981, which effectively reduced all Americans' tax rates by 25 percent, and cut the 70 percent maximum rate to 50
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