Reagan's America: innocents at home.

Reagan's America: Innocents at Home

by Garry Wills (Doubleday, 472 pp.,$19.95)

THIS IS A Garry Wills Special, typicallyoverwhelming--and delicious --in its full-diapason deployment of its author's many gifts. He brings everything into play around his subject: The short list includes Milton, Mark Twain, Alfred Hitchcock, St. Augustine, Alvin Gouldner, and Frank Sinatra. He combines wide-ranging cultural savvy with deep-focus reportage. You aren't supposed to do all this in one book, but Wills, like Robert Burton, hasn't got the news yet.

But it's anti-Reagan, isn't it? Ohyes. Reagan's America is bound to be the Hive's standard book on our President, unless something better comes along (most unlikely). The only writer I can think of who makes so many imaginative connections among disparate-seeming things is Hugh Kenner. Not that Wills quite belongs in that company, but it's praise enough to say he tempts the comparison.

So it seems churlish to say that themain thing wrong with the book is the main idea. It's based on what has already become a banal conceit: Reagan, the movie actor who's out of touch with reality. Jack Reagan, his father, worked for the New Deal--as a bureaucrat!--and hired his two sons. Thus the family survived the Depression: "The New Deal bailed the Reagans out.' This is intended as an ironic comment on Reagan's subsequent hostility to "govment.' So it is. But the point bears limited weight.

Wills makes much of Reagan's habitof misremembering such things, and he links it to Reagan's way of misremembering all of American history. The West was settled by "govment,' federal subsidies and land grants, Louisiana Purchase and Mexican and Indian wars, all of them generating patterns of settlement. Free-market mythology forgets these details, Reagan being our forgetter-in-chief. The Old West was not so wild; it was as intensely communal as life aboard a ship at sea, with strict gun control and prohibition of liquor in many localities. The Reagans never comprehended this: "There was more government in their history than they knew.'

With Twain, the pretense [of frontiernaivete] was artful, highly conscious, used for cultural satire. With Reagan, the perfection of the pretense lies in the fact that he does not know he is pretending. He believes the individualist myths that help him play his communal role. He is the sincerest claimant to a heritage that never existed.

Americans prefer a "substitute past'to "the real past,' and Reagan is marvelously attuned to this craving. "That explains Americans' extraordinary tacit bargain with each other not to challenge Reagan's version of the past. The power of his appeal is the great joint confession that we cannot live with our real past.' And what's that?

Well, chapter one begins with Reaganrecalling his early life as "one of those rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idylls,' this account juxtaposed with a newspaper report, from his hometown newspaper, of a lynching. That's an intimation of our real past, though the home town was Tampico, Illinois, and the lynching actually occurred in Springfield. That's Springfield, Missouri, down in the general direction of Arkansas and Oklahoma, not Springfield, Illinois. And the date was 1906, five years before Reagan's birth, just to remove any suspicion that he helped contribute to the climate of hate that made the event possible. But what book about Reagan would be complete without images of "racism'?

So Reagan's self-servingly bad memorybecomes a metaphor for America's bad memory, its will to deny its entanglement in Original Sin, which it wanted to believe was left behind in Europe. I don't know quite how to cope with assertions so large. I wouldn't know how to prove or refute them. Reagan's America doesn't prove them, though. It counts on the empathy of a properly progressive readership --attuned to the evils of "racism,' say, but not abortion--to sustain them. At the core of all its eloquence we find a set of what are by now recognizably conventional attitudes, without which the book dissolves into brilliant particles.

Reagan's rhetorical opposition to"govment' can be excused as a politician's shorthand for something more specific, which he doesn't have time to spell out, although his approximate meaning can be collected from the literature of the conservative movement that buoys him. But Wills has nearly five hundred pages here, space enough to explain what the correct view of government is: Surely a blanket pro-"govment' rhetoric is no more satisfying than Reagan's.

But we already know the answers,not from the book itself, but from the context of the same conventional liberal attitudes it tacitly assumes and appeals to. If you don't share those attitudes already, this book isn't for you, despite its ostensibly generalized address and scholarly sweep.

In the course of arguing that "theterrorist is the true individualist of our time,' he remarks: "The lone bomber, by contrast [with most of us], is imposing his or her will.' That "or her,' the properly progressive pronoun, instantly reduces the argument to silliness --though, to be sure, there are she-terrorists. As far as that goes, terrorists belong to their own social milieu, as cooperative, in its way, as the airplane maintenance crew Wills contrasts it with. The point of individualism is voluntary affiliation, not isolation. And you don't refute libertarianism by observing that it isn't a perfect description of our past--we know that--but by showing its defects as a model for the future.

"Only a believer could make Reagan'sfictive past credible to others.' That's a trifle smug. Given a choice between two rhetorically simplified versions of our past--Reagan's heroic one and the Hive's litany of racism, anti-Semitism, slaughtered Indians (Wills dutifully calls them "native Americans'), interned Japanese, etc.--why shouldn't we prefer Reagan's way of prescinding? The dark view of our "real past' isn't particularly "credible': It too requires a certain will to believe, and those who cleave to it tend to be not the most penitent but the most priggish--the quick accusers, who ridicule the notion of "Communists under every bed' but posit bigotry everywhere, "just beneath the surface.'

Can you, though, resist a writer whoputs the Hive view in terms as fresh as these?

Only a touch of fanaticism can hold outagainst all kinds of converging evidence. But Reagan is that most disarming of political apparitions, the kindly fanatic-- closer, indeed, to the gentle inventor of Back to the Future than to well-intended bigots like Ford or Edison. For many, Reagan is not only a comfort but a necessity. He is the demagogue as rabblesoother.