It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history.
Reagan is held up to us as an example of never raising taxes. Correction: Reagan raised taxes six of his eight years as president. Why? He was a pragmatist, not doctrinaire. He saw problems emerging, and when his policies faltered he changed his views. Flexibility, not rigidity.
The whole idea of a democracy is that we ourselves, the people, are supposed to make a path of our politics, and it is we who with our feet and our vote and our labors and our vigilance are supposed to shape our country.
If we went back to the imprisonment rate we had in the early '70s, something like four out of five people employed in the prison industry would lose their jobs. That's what you're up against.
To say that Reagan teaches us that we should be against amnesty for illegal immigrants is to contradict what Reagan himself stood for - that he was in favor of amnesty.
We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.
The big lesson of Reagan is: To think that he was some sort of simple figurehead and didn't do the thinking and simply read a script in front of him woefully underestimates him. Ronald Reagan was an extremely intelligent person with a real V8 engine under his hood.
I have criticisms of Ronald Reagan, but he lives in another universe from the kind of political theater that is represented by people, like Sarah Palin, who aren't really public servants.
Ronald Reagan, whatever his pros and cons were, was a public servant in the end.
It was widespread that the politics of Tea Party people would be foreign to Ronald Reagan and they would be seen by him as frivolous and uninformed.
What was happening was the war on drugs. That was the primary culprit I could see that was getting in the way of black progress.
Frank Capra made a series of films during World War II called 'Why We Fight' that explored America's reasons for entering the war. Today, with our troops engaged in Iraq and elsewhere for reasons far less clear, I think it's crucial to ask the questions: 'Why are we doing what we are doing? What is it doing to others? And what is it doing to us?'
You can't have a discussion about politics without mentioning Ronald Reagan.
Like most Americans, I live in the line of fire of a shooting match that is going on over Reagan's legacy. It's between shrill and extremist voices who alternately conceive of him either as an icon of all that's great and good or a representative of everything that's gone wrong with this country. And obviously neither is the case. He is just a man.
I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman.
If you watch the evening news, Dr. Kissinger is very often brought on to sort of be the statesman of his age and to reflect dispassionately on world events. And so a film challenging his legacy, a film that assesses charges that are quite grave against him, is something that is touchy for the media to show.
Reagan himself, for much of his life, was devoted against the elites. His antagonism to the Soviet Union is antagonism against oppression by the elites of the many.
It was natural to see the struggle for dignity for black people in America as a sister struggle of the Jewish struggle. So growing up, it was always a part of my breakfast cereal to think of myself as someone who was part of a larger struggle.
Ronald Reagan had many fine qualities and he had many shortcomings. He's not the simple, folksy figure that he's often portrayed as.
As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.
Ron Reagan amazingly qualifies as an honest broker. I asked him if he was a mamas boy and he said no, more of a papas boy. At the same time he was willing to say that his father had many shortcomings and needed to be held accountable.
Reagan has very significant things to teach us - positive lessons and quite negative lessons.
Elites are once again invoking Reagan, dropping their Gs and saying things in a folksy sort of way thats meant to capture the hearts of people. And its all fraud; its all stagecraft. And people are falling for a great deal of elite behavior in this country packaged as if its proletariat behavior.
There are people who are trying to advance themselves by wrapping themselves in Reagan.
I don't think Reagan is primarily funny, and I don't think he's primarily marvelous; he's complicated.
