When Newsweek titles an article ?Reagan Was Wrong,? you might expect to read reasoned analysis about the ways in which the 40th president?s policies or ideals have failed.
Instead article writer Jeremy McCarter revisits the writings of Henry Fairlie, a British Tory who didn?t like the classical liberalism that informed Ronald Reagan?s brand of American conservatism.
That?s fine, but the article suffers from an inconvenient fact: Fairlie died nearly two decades ago. Since McCarter can?t ask Fairlie whether his opinions have changed since 1990, McCarter offers unsupported assertions:
[I]f he were writing now, he would find any attempt to rebuild the Reagan coalition, or to reassert the principles that elected him, foolish and unconservative. He would argue instead that Republicans need to try once again to “civilize and broaden” conservatism, even though they’ve failed so many times before.
I would ask my standard question about shoddy journalism ? ?Says who?? ? but we know it?s impossible for McCarter to have elicited that information from any credible live source.
