John Patrick Diggins, one of America’s premier intellectual historians, lays out a boldly revisionist view of Ronald Reagan in his new book, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007). While agreeing with the conservative view that Reagan deserves to be understood as one of the “great liberators” of the twentieth century, Diggins argues that Reagan’s relation to liberalism is more important than his relation to conservatism. Calling Reagan an “Emersonian” president, Diggins sees him as a vehicle of “big government conservatism” as well as a romantic. Is Diggins pulling a Brinks job on conservatism’s beloved president, or has he produced a definitive new synthesis of the complicated fortieth president of the United States?
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