Reagan and the Rebbe: The First Lubavitcher President?

by Gil Troy

B'NAI BRITH MAGAZINE, SUMMER 2005

When I launched my latest book, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s, our local Lubavitch rabbi and rebbetzin deemed Reagan an honorary Lubavitcher, for celebrating the 80th birthday of the Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, with a National Day of Reflection on April 4, 1982.

I confess, I could not imagine Reagan, with his ever-sunny Midwestern visage, sporting a big black hat and a beard - although he looks delighted in photographs on the Chabad Website, smiling his signature smile amid a bevy of beaming rabbis.

On reflection, the Reagan-Rebbe connection made sense. Not only did both, like the late Pope John Paul II, despise Communism when such antipathy was unfashionable - intellectuals mocked Reagan's speech declaring the Soviet Union the Evil Empire in 1983 -- Reagan and the Rebbe also championed traditional values even as Americans challenged traditional morality's very foundations.

In 1986, 60 percent of Americans felt alienated and powerless - believing "what I think doesn't count much anymore" -- and 82 percent confessed they would act on a friend's stock tip - even if it constituted illegal insider training. "Is it possible that we could become citizens again and together seek the common good in the post-industrial, postmodern age?" the sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues asked in the 1985 surprise bestseller "Habits of the Heart."

While surrounded by many material goods, many American children were growing up deprived of many moorings. Americans' "radical individualism," Bellah explained, created a largely "negative" process of "giving birth to oneself" by "breaking free from family, community, and inherited ideas." These individualistic American revolutions created a nation of searchers, as people sought to "find themselves." But "separated from family, religion, and calling as sources of authority, duty and moral example," Americans felt confused, experiencing individual misery and social dysfunction amid great comfort and unprecedented freedoms.

Reagan demonstrated that traditional paeans to morality still resonated. "Americans pause to reflect upon the ancient ethical principles and moral values which are the foundation of our character as a nation....," Reagan said when honoring the Rebbe in 1982. "Education must be more than factual enlightenment-it must enrich the character as well as the mind." Reagan abhorred modern America's "spiritual or moral fatigue." He claimed rampant "secularism" created a world where "no values are being taught or emphasized," so that "sex education in our schools" is "taught in a framework of only being a physical act - like eating a ham sandwich."

Yet Reagan's non-confrontational affability and feel-good prosperity championed libertinism, thus feeding America's social and moral crisis. The first divorced president, Reagan presided over a famously dysfunctional family. Embracing individualism and toasting material prosperity as proof of virtue encouraged selfishness. Reagan's social circle was more diverse than the average Moral Majoritarian's. Rhetorically rooted in the Midwest in his mind, Reagan at heart was more of a Hollywood liberal than he cared to admit to himself - or others. His ambivalence reflected a widespread American ambivalence: Individuals yearned to escape traditional constraints without abandoning communal standards.

This mixed message resonated with American Jews. In the 1980s, not the 1960s, Jews began catching up with their non-Jewish neighbors in the social pathology sweepstakes, with rates of divorce, alcoholism, drug use, and sexual promiscuity spiking.

"Freedom is a moral accomplishment," the British Rabbi Jonathan Sacks taught in his 1997 work, "The Politics of Hope," illustrating that the problem outlasted the 1980s and transcended Reagan's America. "It needs strong families, cohesive institutions, habits of civility and law-abidingness, and a widely diffused sense of fellow-feelin.... When moral language breaks down - as it has broken down - much else is at risk, including freedom itself."

Unfortunately, and partially thanks to Reagan, public discussion of "values" and "morality" today, makes Republicans applaud and Democrats shudder. No political party has a monopoly on morality, and no party should abdicate public values leadership. As good Jews and good Americans we need to improvise a new-old language, a new-old morality. We need to channel the best of today's freedom, tolerance, individualism, and prosperity within tradition's fundamental frameworks. Openness to creative syntheses based on common good, seeking out Reaganesque rabbis, Lubavitcher presidents, Democratic moralists and liberal-minded Republicans, could help revitalize our families, our homes, our often tired psyches and our all too often dispirited, divisive synagogues and public squares.

Gil Troy is a professor of History at McGill University and the author, most recently, of Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton University Press).