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Overview
Previously published as Billionaire at the Barricades.
Americans didn’t just go to the polls in 2016. They joined a movement that swept the unlikeliest of candidates, Donald Trump, into the Oval Office. Can he complete his agenda? Or will his opponents in the media, protestor class, and political establishment block his efforts and choke off the movement he represents?
In Busting the Barricades, Laura Ingraham gives readers a front row seat to the populist revolution as she witnessed it. She reveals the origins of this movement and its connection to the Trump presidency. She unmasks the opposition, forecasts the future of the Make America Great Again agenda and offers her own prescriptions for bringing real change to the swamp of Washington.
Unlike most of her media colleagues, Ingraham understood Trump’s appeal and defied those who wrote his political obituary. Now she confronts the president’s critics and responds to those who deny the importance of his America First agenda. With sharp humor and insight she traces the DNA of the populist movement: from Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, to Nixon’s Silent Majority, to Reagan’s smashing electoral victories.
Populism fueled the insurgency campaigns of Buchanan and Perot, the election of George W. Bush, and the Tea Party rallies of the Obama presidency. But a political novice—a Manhattan billionaire—proved to be the movement’s most vocal champion. This is the inside story of his victory and the fitful struggle to enact his agenda.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250150653 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/10/2017 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
REBEL WITH A CAUSE
Ronald Reagan and the Populist WaveDon't trust me, trust yourselves.
— Ronald Reagan
I was four years old when I heard over our small kitchen radio that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed. All I knew was that he was very important and it was very sad, so I ran next door to broadcast the news to my neighbors. Not long after I remember seeing scenes on television of buildings burning in American cities (the King assassination riots in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and Kansas City).
After that, my political memories jump to a kaleidoscope of jarring images of injured soldiers being carried onto helicopters, angry kids with long hair and bell-bottoms carrying signs, police in riot gear at colleges and universities, and watching my camp counselors crying in August 1974 on the night Richard Nixon resigned.
Then my recollection takes me back to the summer of 1976, sitting on the colorful braided rug in our living room, playing cards with my friend Pam. In our small red rambler-style home, the television blared the coverage of the Republican Convention. Walter Cronkite, the lead anchor of CBS News, was, to put it mildly, not my parents' favorite, but they watched him anyway. (When he signed off his broadcasts with "That's the way it is," my dad would often say, "No, Walt, that's the way you say it is!") Ronald Reagan came up only 117 delegates short, losing the nomination to the incumbent Gerald Ford. My mother said something akin to "the Rockefeller Republicans always win." (Even though Ford had already scotched Nelson Rockefeller from the ticket, it still had a nice ring to it.) Although I didn't understand what she meant, I did know that I liked Reagan's square jaw and speaking style. Ford, even in victory, was bland and boring. But to this 13-year-old tomboy, Reagan, even in defeat, was mesmerizing and resolute.
When people ask me why I gravitated toward conservatism at such a young age, I usually attribute a good deal of it to my parents, James and Anne Ingraham. Growing up in the Hartford, Connecticut, suburb of Glastonbury, I found my own areas of anti-parental rebellion, but politics was not one of them. I caught the political bug by listening to their conversations (often not flattering) about the media, or politicians — especially liberal Republicans. For instance, they thought Lowell Weicker, former governor and three-term senator from our state, was "just as bad as the Democrats." (Weicker campaigned against a state income tax only to support it after his inauguration as governor.)
Reagan was something else altogether — he was speaking for people just like them: middle-class, hardworking, never-take-handouts, flag-flying, World War II — generation patriots. "He's Goldwater, although a hell of a lot better," my dad used to say of Reagan. Gerald Ford was a placeholder, not an incumbent in the truest meaning of the word since he was not elected, but the "Watergate president," as my father said.
Barely a teenager, I innately understood that, if implemented, Reagan's conservatism would mean the lives of average people like us would get better. We had no special connections and were not born into privilege. Allowing families to keep more of their own money, cutting wasteful government spending, law and order — it all seemed solidly grounded in truth and common sense. It resonated with me because for years I had heard my mother repeat her homespun wisdom, depending on the situation that we faced: "Work and you'll learn the value of a buck"; "Don't spend beyond your means"; or "Don't let anyone push you around." (She also said "don't chase the boys," which I confess I didn't follow too well.)
Perhaps my mother was tough and no-nonsense because she needed to be to survive. Growing up very poor in Willimantic, Connecticut, during the Depression, her mother died when she was only 14 years old. In effect, she became like a mother to her little sister Mickey, and did all the family's cooking, cleaning, and ironing. She worked at the American Thread Mill in town before she married my father in 1952. When I was a kid, she cooked and dished out food in my elementary school cafeteria. After we were all in school, she was a waitress at a local steakhouse — a job she held until she was 73 years old, her hands arthritic from carrying heavy trays for so many years. Polish people are hard workers, she would tell me. "People make fun of the Poles," she would say defensively, "Let 'em say what they want, we'll outwork 'em every time." To her, it was simply unacceptable to be an entitled American; it galled her to see "able-bodied Americans just sitting around, waiting for the mailman to deliver a government check."
In 1976, Reagan was warning of the government that spent too much, the welfare system that robbed people of their incentive to work, and the political ambivalence toward the growing threat of the Soviet Union. From my adolescent perspective, I thought Reagan and my mother would have gotten along very well.
I vividly remember the moment Reagan, at the 1976 convention, mentioned a time capsule in the off-the-cuff remarks he made when a victorious Ford brought him out on stage. We had just buried our own "time capsule" in Gideon Wells Junior High to mark the bicentennial year of the American Revolution, so he got my attention. He asked, what would the people of America, on her tricentennial, think of what we did in 1976?
Whether they will have the freedom that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Will they look back with appreciation and say, "Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom? Who kept us now a hundred years later free? Who kept our world from nuclear destruction?"
And if we fail they probably won't get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and they won't be allowed to talk of that or read of it.
Looking back at the archival footage of that night 40 years later on YouTube, I relived the experience all over again. Chills. Goose bumps. Almost as good as being front row at my first Billy Joel concert. Watching the reaction shots in the Kemper Arena, it really did seem obvious that most people knew they had nominated the wrong guy.
Such a dispiriting defeat would have wrecked many a candidate, but not Reagan. "It was this incredible, crushing defeat, and it didn't crush him," recalled Reagan policy adviser Martin Anderson. Describing Reagan's mood on the flight back to California after the painful loss, he noted: "He just came back up, shook his head, and said, 'Okay, what's next?' And that began the campaign for the year 1980."
THE BIGGEST TENT
For those who are too young to remember, Ronald Reagan's presidency was the last one that deserved a real exclamation point for conservatives. The broad-based coalition he built included many different types of voters. One of the reasons I loved Ronald Reagan was that he understood how important it was to grow the conservative movement. Social conservatives, defense hawks (the neoconservatives), populists, libertarians — they were all drawn to his transformative, bold ideas. Unlike Mitt Romney, who wrote off 47 percent of America as "unwinnable," Reagan believed his conservative message would have wide appeal if it was passionately and convincingly articulated. Obviously, he was right. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 44 states to Jimmy Carter's six. Erstwhile liberal Republican-turned-Independent John Anderson was a third-party pest, but the 6.6 percent of the vote he captured was not consequential. (Reagan beat Carter by 9.7 percent.) "He built a stunning electoral landslide by taking away Mr. Carter's Southern base, smashing his expected strength in the East, and taking command of the Middle West," wrote Hedrick Smith in TheNew York Times. Then, in 1984, Reagan went even bigger.
I remember that evening vividly. I was a student at Dartmouth College and had served as the editor of the conservative student weekly, The Dartmouth Review. Our college election night party at the Hanover Inn in 1984 was a total riot. Few of Dartmouth's liberal faculty showed up, but we at the Review put on a great celebration. It was packed. I wish we'd had cell phones back then so I could have captured on video all the seething leftists outside, peering through the glass of the Hayward Lounge where balloons and streamers turned the event into a red-white-and-blue extravaganza. Everyone was in a great mood. God, I loved the '80s.
By the end of the evening, Ronald Reagan had captured 525 out of 538 electoral votes — the highest total ever by a presidential candidate — against Democratic challenger Walter Mondale. That meant that Reagan, the ultimate anti-Establishment candidate, won 97.58 percent of all the electoral votes. In fact, the only state Mondale carried was his home state of Minnesota — and that Reagan would have won with a switch of just 1,876 votes in a state with over two million voters. Were it not for the president insisting that his campaign pull back the reins in Minnesota to give Mondale a shot at winning in his own backyard, the Gipper likely would have won all 50 states. A consummate gentleman.
A big part of the story of the last 30 years is that different people followed Reagan for different reasons. Various right-of-center factions each claim him as a shining textbook example of their beliefs borne out on the presidential stage. Reagan was a genius who combined different categories when he communicated. That's why he won 49 states in 1984. For every libertarian quote from Reagan, you can find a populist quote from Reagan. So it's easy to see why each group now amplifies their favorite Reagan themes and mutes the others.
The core of Reaganism was this: returning power to the people by disempowering behemoth bureaucratic institutions yields the greatest freedom for all. He believed in the individual over the state. Drop in at any point along the Reagan time line — even during his days as a Democrat — and you will hear him declaring his belief that power should reside with the citizens, not government. Today we refer to this idea as "Reaganism," but he would have hated that term. This, after all, was the man who had a plaque on his Oval Office desk that read: "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't care who gets the credit." But more than that, he knew that lasting political movements must be built around principles, not personalities. Reagan liked to say, "Don't trust me, trust yourselves." That was his consistent view throughout his political life, and it helped pave the path for the populist movement of the present. It's easy to see why historians have called him "a true American populist."
THE ULTIMATE OUTSIDER
Today we remember Ronald Reagan in almost mythic terms, as a towering figure whose ascendancy and landslide presidential victories were inevitable, even predictable. Yet many of those who claim to have been with Reagan all along weren't — not by a long shot. Libertarians, for example, attacked Reagan's economic populism for decades. Until recently I did not appreciate how many writers who call themselves conservatives are actually libertarians. But as we saw during the 2016 election cycle, the libertarian numbers in the GOP are just not that significant, and the same was true under Reagan.
Here is what the leading libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, wrote about Ronald Reagan's economic policies in a 1988 policy paper: "If President Reagan has a devotion to free trade, it surely must be blind, because he has been off the mark most of the time." Their beef? Reagan had the audacity to protect American jobs and companies by slapping hefty tariffs on some foreign goods, like Japanese electronics (a 100 percent tariff) and motorcycles (45 percent tariff, a move meant to help Harley-Davidson). Libertarians like to say that we can't criticize how China manipulates markets if our government occasionally interferes with a pure market system. Absurd. For one, that's like saying we could not criticize the Soviet Union for human rights abuses because we occasionally backed allies with less than pristine human rights records. And second, whatever level of interference we impose upon markets, it's infinitesimally small and in no way comparable to China for the simple reason that theirs is not a market economy at all.
For added anti-Gipper libertarian gusto, Cato likened Reagan to the man who presided over the Great Depression and dubbed him "the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover." It's one of the oldest (and lamest) tricks in the book of the anti-populists: impugn anyone who doesn't worship trade agreements and tariff-free commerce as a "protectionist," "isolationist," or "nativist." All throughout the 2016 election, Trump and any of us who supported him were showered with the "-ists." Should Reagan have had America unilaterally disarm economically against countries that subsidized their industries and manipulated their currency? Since when is it bad to "protect" our nation and its workers? Reagan wasn't picking winners and losers willy-nilly in the marketplace. He was giving American industries a fighting chance to compete against nations who rig the rules in their favor. Personally, I've never found libertarianism to be an interesting worldview. Politics takes place in the real world with real people, not in the dusty pages of an Ayn Rand novel.
But libertarians weren't the only one's sniping at Reagan. During the first half of his career, the GOP Establishment didn't have much use for him either. That is, until he dragged them kicking and screaming to seismic political victories that reshaped the contours of U.S. policy. In the 1970s, "the other major GOP players — especially Easterners and moderates — thought Reagan was a certified yahoo," recalls Reagan historian Craig Shirley. "To a person, by the time of Reagan's death in 2004, they would profess their love and devotion to Reagan and claim they were there from the beginning in 1974, which was a load of horse manure."
The political "wise men" on both sides of the aisle had spent years dismissing Reagan as a simpleton. Henry Kissinger once told President Richard Nixon that even though Reagan was "a pretty decent guy," his "brains are negligible." Clark Clifford, adviser to four Democratic presidents and Lyndon Johnson's secretary of defense, infamously labeled Reagan "an amiable dunce." History got the last laugh.
FIGHTING FOR THE LITTLE GUY
Ronald Reagan's populist-conservative instincts annoyed elites of both parties because he was everything they were not. He always fought for the little guy because his people were the "little guys." Reagan was a kid from Dixon, Illinois, with an alcoholic shoe salesman for a father and a degree from tiny Eureka College that he paid for with a football scholarship. The elites knew all the right power players. Reagan knew all the right principles. His respect for the working class was rooted in his own hard-scrabble upbringing. Even as a Hollywood actor, a General Electric spokesman, and later the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan was always most at home with everyday people. As Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan put it, "more than any president since [Andrew] Jackson, he spent the years before power with the people, the normal people of his country."
For those who know the real story, that isn't hyperbole. I sometimes have to remind myself that anyone born after 1970 has scant recollections of Reagan's presidency. Even I, as a young speechwriter in the Reagan administration in 1987 (more on that later), did not fully comprehend his improbable path to the presidency.
From 1954 to 1962, Ronald Reagan traveled the country as a spokesman for General Electric. In addition to hosting the TV show General Electric Theatre, Reagan's duties as the company's "goodwill ambassador" meant he traveled to over 135 GE factories to meet with and speak to over 250,000 workers in 38 states. The experience changed him forever.
"When I went on those tours and shook hands with all of those people, I began to see that they were very different people than the people Hollywood was talking about," Reagan recalled. "I was seeing the same people that I grew up with in Dixon, Illinois. I realized I was living in a tinsel factory. And this exposure brought me back."
Throughout his Hollywood years, Reagan had been a Franklin Delano Roosevelt New Deal Democrat. But in the eighth and final year as General Electric's traveling ambassador, Reagan made a decision that would transform American politics: he switched parties. His motives were not opportunistic, but pragmatic. Given the expansion of Soviet communism, the explosion of federal government, the soaring tax rates that ate away at the people's wealth, and Democrats' embrace of 1960s countercultural values — Reagan had simply had enough. "I didn't leave the Democratic Party," Reagan famously declared. "The party left me." And it would be that courageous decision of conscience that set off a chain reaction that would change history.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Busting the Barricades"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Laura Ingraham.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1. Rebel with a Cause: Ronald Reagan and the Populist Wave
2. King George's New World Order: The GOP Establishment Strikes Back
3. Clinton's Perverse Populism: From Bubba to Barbara Streisand
4. Endless War&Shamnesty: "W" is for Waste
5. The Great GOP Unifier: Barack Obama Unites Conservatives, Inspires the Tea Party
6. The Rise of Trump: The Republican Presidential Primary
7. The People's Victory: Donald Trump's Unconventional Convention
8. Populism's Last Stand: The Movement's Revolutionary Win
9. Where Does It Go from Here? President Trump and the Populist Movement
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