Free Letters to a Young Conservative by Dinesh D'Souza

Suddenly America was running big budget surpluses. Of course, the shameless Clinton repeatedly bowed and claimed credit for the surpluses, but what did he do to produce them? Absolutely nothing. It was the juggernaut of economic growth that began around 1983 and continued virtually uninterrupted through the 1990s that proved to be a tax bonanza for the treasury. Moreover, huge defense savings from the end of the cold war contributed to making the dreaded deficits disappear.
    On the left, revisionist historians try to deny Reagan credit for his role in ending the cold war. “The Soviet Union collapsed by itself,” they say. Or, “Gorbachev did it.” Neither of these explanations is believable. First, the Soviet Union undoubtedly had economic problems in the 1980s, but it also had such problems in the 1970s, and the 1960s, and the 1950s. Come to think of it, the Soviets had faced economic problems ever since the Bolsheviks took power. Admittedly, these sufferings imposed continual hardships on the Soviet people, but there were no signs during the 1980s that the people were up-in-arms. No mass demonstrations, no popular revolt. Moreover, the ruling class was living comfortably, as it had since Lenin’s day. So why would this group relinquish
power? No empire in history has called it quits, freed its colonies, and dissolved itself just because its economy was ailing.
    Nor does it make sense to say that Gorbachev brought about the change. First, Gorbachev did not want to end Communism but to save it. Gorbachev went to the Soviet military and said, in effect, Give me my economic reforms and I will have more resources for you to spend on weapons. Today, Gorbachev claims that he was always a democrat and a liberal, but go back and read Gorbachev’s speeches and his book Perestroika, published during the 1980s. Gorbachev sought to “reform” Communism, but the system imploded because it was too rigid to adapt to the reforms. So Gorbachev was a decent bungler who ended up producing a result that he did not intend. Curiously, it was an outcome that Reagan sought and predicted when he said, in 1982, that Soviet Communism would end up on “the ash heap of history.”
    Another point to remember, Chris, is that Reagan was largely responsible for the Soviet Politburo’s elevating Gorbachev to power. Gorbachev was completely different from the Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko types. So why did the Politburo choose him? The reason is that the Soviet strategy that had worked so well during the 1970s had stopped working during the 1980s. Between 1974 and 1980, ten countries fell into the Soviet orbit, starting with the fall of Vietnam and ending with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After 1981, when Reagan came to power, no more real estate fell into Soviet
hands; and in 1983, thanks to an American invasion, Grenada became the first country in history to be liberated from the clutches of Soviet Communism. Moreover, Reagan deployed Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe to meet the Soviet threat there. He announced the strategic missile defense program. When Chernenko died, the Politburo concluded that they needed a new type of leader to cope with this fellow Reagan. And so they put Gorbachev into the ring, where he was outmaneuvered by Reagan and ended up taking himself, and Soviet Communism, over the precipice of history.
    I have emphasized left-wing revisionism about the cold war, but there is also a right-wing revisionism that focuses on Reagan’s domestic policy. Some libertarians give Reagan credit for cutting taxes, but they blame him for not slashing domestic spending. Indeed, they point out, the percentage of the gross national product consumed by the federal government grew under Reagan. How could this happen? Reagan made a prudential judgment early on that he could not get his tax cuts and his defense increases through a Democratic Congress, controlled by Tip O’Neill, if at the same time he demanded substantial cutbacks in