Topic: Decline of the West
One thing—though not the only thing—about Ronald Reagan that drove his left-wing political opponents absolutely bonkers was the Gipper’s imperviousness to criticism. Unlike Dick Nixon, who both loathed the Eastern Establishment and craved its approval, Reagan seemed not to give a hoot what some assistant editorial page editor at the New York Times thought of him. No matter how harsh and withering the attack, he remained genial and smiling—a phenomenon that made such attacks seem vulgar and petty.
What his enemies failed to realize was that Ronald Reagan came to politics via the celebrity culture. The reviled him as a mere actor, but they never stopped to consider the implications of Reagan’s Hollywood background. Yet here was a man who was totally familiar with the customs and folkways of celebrity, who was quite used to reading nasty little comments about himself in the gossip columns, and who’d worked and partied with the biggest names in Tinsletown. Why, indeed, would a man like that care what some leftie nosebleed on the Harvard faculty or some know-it-all journalist thought of him?
Deep down, I suspect, Ronald Reagan’s most vicious enemies hated him not for his politics, but for his dismissive attitude toward them. His total lack of interest in what they had to say about him was received as a deadly insult. The insufferable Christopher Hitchens once sneered that when Reagan was president, he could have spent his evenings with the world’s best and brightest. But no, Hitchens griped, the dullard Reagan preferred meat loaf for dinner on a TV tray. Perhaps what really bothered him was the suspicion that Reagan would prefer meat loaf to—Christopher Hitchens.
