The recovery in American political thought from New Deal Progressivism began, Devine thinks, in Hayek’s 1944 classic The Road to Serfdom, a book read closely by Reagan and Meyer. In Hayek’s later work, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1973) he announces that “the most widely held ideas” of the twentieth century—a planned economy, liberation from “repressive and conventional morals,” and “permissive education”—will come to be seen as “superstitions” based on a wrongful faith in science and what it can provide us. The view of tradition as senseless and meaningless, Hayek thinks, will be rejected because we will understand that tradition lays down “foundations on which our capacity for rational thought rests.” Devine notes that Hayek sought in tradition and morality the “foundations” of “a free society.” Law and custom together, working with free markets, could achieve a new voluntary society, one also decentralized, that could bring new life to the West.
Reagan understood these principles, Devine notes, and attempted to place them at the center of his efforts at American revival. One note worth recalling comes from the book Reagan In His Own Hand (2001) where he elegantly voices his belief in the equal moral stature of citizens and why they shouldn’t be ordered around by bureaucrats:
But you I wonder about the people in those cars, who they are, what they do, what they are thinking about as they head for the warmth of home & family. Come to think of it I’ve met them—oh—maybe not those particular individuals but still I I feel I know them. Some of our social planners refer to them as “the masses” which only proves they dont [sic] know them. I’ve been privileged to meet people all over this land in the special kind of way you meet them when you are campaigning. They are not “the masses,” They are individuals. or as the elitists would have it—”the common man.” They are very uncommon. individuals who make this system work. Individuals each with his or her own hopes & dreams, plans & problems and the kind of quiet courage that makes this whole country run better than just about any other place on earth.
These lines sound like an American populism that is worthy of admiration. Yet Reagan, unlike many of our contemporary populists on the Left and the Right, sought to join his belief in the folks with constitutional and free market revival, freedom, and prosperity by way of firm limits rooted in a constitutional framework.
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