Reagan, artist President

Here’s what they should do: They should start to think not like economists but like artists.

Often when I speak people ask, at the end, about Ronald Reagan. I often say what I’ve written, that a key to understanding him was that he saw himself in the first 40 years of his life—the years in which you become yourself—as an artist. As a young man he wrote short stories, drew, was attracted to plays, acted in college, went into radio, and then became a professional actor. He came to maturity in Hollywood, a town of craftsmen and artists. He fully identified with them.

The thing about artists is that they try to see the real shape of things. They don’t get lost in factoids and facets of problems, they try to see the thing whole. They try to capture reality. They’re creative, intuitive; they make leaps, study human nature. It has been said that a great leader has more in common with an artist than with an economist, and it’s true.

The GOP needs artists.

If an artist of Reagan’s era were looking around America in 2018, what would she or he see? Marvels, miracles and wonders. A church the other day noted on Twitter that all of us now download data from a cloud onto tablets, like Moses.

But think what would startle the artist unhappily. She or he would see broad swaths of the American middle and working class addicted and lethargic. A Reagan-era person would think: But they are the backbone! They built our roads, fought our wars, worked on the assembly line making the cars that transformed our lives. Reagan came from those people but a step below. His father wasn’t a factory worker with a union card but a somewhat itinerant shoe store salesman who was an alcoholic. Reagan’s family was not fully stable, but America was, and he could rise within it. He became not only a union member but a union president.

He believed passionately in—he defended and advanced—the free-market system. Freedom, he well knew, yields unequal results. By Peggy Nolan