As a (vice)-presidential hopeful, Republican Sen. Sam Brownback is selling himself as "a full-scale Ronald Reagan conservative." Since Brownback is a darling of contemporary social conservatism, it follows that Reagan is being marketed as its Platonic Ideal. And that makes Brownback's iconography a thing of opportunistic reinvention, for the actual history of that president's relations with social conservatives was a far different story.
Reagan's domestic agenda was economically focused -- cutting taxes and, initially, reducing the federal deficit were his key objectives, until the former nullified the latter's feasibility and the administration rushed to justify deficit spending as a minor and acceptable concern. On the other hand social conservatives, known then as the New Right, focused on promoting, naturally, a social agenda -- banning abortion and busing, reintroducing school prayer, etc.
But Reagan was no political fool. He knew electoral gold when he saw it, and in 1980 that gold came in the form of an estimated 30 to 65 million socially conservative evangelicals. So as candidate and then president he lavished lip service on them (of whom 63 percent helped put him in the White House; eighty percent in 1984).
However in actualized policies, his heart and mind remained in the economic libertarianism of Goldwater’s Old Rightism. This focus quickly angered those in the New Right’s top ranks, and an internecine war of words soon erupted.
In the midst of Reagan's first term, for example, the chairwoman of the National Pro-Family Coalition expressed her "disenchantment." Reagan had campaigned as “strongly pro-life” and "strongly ... school prayer," she said, but "then he got in and said the economy is the problem, and these issues are going to have to be on the back burner." She was not amused.
Direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie hurled threats: "Reagan ought to remember it is conservatives who have supported him for the last 15 years, not moderates or liberals." Jerry Falwell suggested that if more attention were not paid to New Right priorities the Moral Majority "wouldn’t hesitate to turn against" Reagan in 1984.
During these first-term storms the New York Times noted that social-conservative Jesse Helms "has become convinced ... that Mr. Reagan has abandoned the true conservative faith" -- causing one administration official to retort that the White House’s regard for Helms “on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being highest admiration ... [is] minus two."
Much later, with the curtain coming down on Reagan’s second term, New Rightist Paul Weyrich openly rebuked the president as "weakened in spirit" and the Conservative Caucus’ Howard Phillips concluded harshly that no other president "since Woodrow Wilson was confined to quarters with a stroke" had been "less engaged in the conduct of affairs than Ronald Reagan," meaning those morality-centric affairs that were social conservatives' focus from the start.
Reagan's conservatism never did aggressively pursue the New Right’s social agenda, so relations between the two never improved dramatically. Some among the hidebound Old Right didn't even try. For instance Reagan's mentor and idol, Barry Goldwater, said of social conservatives that "If they disagree with you one bit, you’re a no-good S.O.B. Who the hell is the New Right anyway? Who is Paul Weyrich? He’s not a leader of the Republican Party."
Yet because Reagan had gained the greater public's admiration, social conservatives went on to co-opt his image as a public relations tool, such as Sam Brownback and others are so disingenuously doing today. They simply ignore the deep and very real political chasm that existed between social conservatism and Reagan's conservatism.
The ideological divide has always threatened to topple Republicans' shaky unity. The divide still exists. And given George Bush's slipped grip and rampant devastation, David Kuo's religio-political revelations, social conservatism's growing internal divisions and Democrats' growing sensitivity to the school of social-conservative thought, it's likely to spell real trouble in 2008.
Further perpetrating the Gipper's reinvention is not only an ideological crime; at this point it is simply, probably, unhelpful to the perpetrators.