I have recently been reading yet another biography about President Ronald Reagan — this one is from the eyes of one of his young speechwriters, Peter Robinson. In How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, Robinson offers a first-hand look into the man who changed the history of the twentieth century. In ten chapters, Robinson delivers about ten major insights into Reagan’s personality and how Reagan’s outlook on life became the outlook which ultimately shaped his approach to policy.
In Chapter 5, Robinson posits Reagan as having the outlook of your average American opposed to the outlook of an educated technocrat elite, or as Robinson simply puts it, “the experts.” During Robinson’s own time at Dartmouth, he watched the university turn to “experts” to define policy and the university’s continued turn toward “specialization” of fields. In the past half-century in particular, universities claim they are turning out more “sophisticated”, “specialized” “professionals” who will each specialize in one area of society. Sound Marxist to you?
Robinson, like myself, was uneasy about this while he was in college and after he observed an “expert” like Carter mishandle the economy, the Cold War, and America’s foreign policy, he saw the upside to having someone like Reagan, who never claimed to be an expert, but had a sharp and broad knowledge of the things that count.
On page 133 of his book, Robinson grasps one of the important perspectives he learned from Reagan: “Our history and ideals are accessible to anyone — that, I realize now, was one of Ronald Reagan’s most important insights.” Reflecting on the knowledge of American history he thinks everyone can have (and anyone can have), Robinson continues, “The accessibility of the American story — the way you can almost touch it — represents a central portion of our inheritance, right along with self-government and the Bill of Rights. Ronald Reagan enabled me to see that.”
Reagan related to the American people because the American people and our history are accessible. Some call Reagan a “populist” in this sense — a populist is a leader who can relate to the common man. This doesn’t mean that Reagan was a “dunce” or that the common American is a dunce. It simply means that there are shared values that most Americans relate to based on our shared history — and this history is relatively short, yet worth defending, because it is the most important experiment perhaps in human history. Ronald Reagan understood that and he communicated that message effectively to the American people and to those living behind the Iron Curtain.
As Robinson explains it, it doesn’t take an Ivy-League expert to be a great leader, anyone can do it: “You don’t have to be an expert to participate in American life. All you have to do is read some history, follow the news — and think for yourself. You have a head. Use it.”
If only college presidents could communicate that message to the students on their campuses. You don’t need to be an expert in a specialized field. You just need to equip yourself to learn, to learn to think, and to learn to think on your own.