Subversives All! Ronald Reagan & the Paternal Roots of “Law and Order” at Home and Abroad

I. Introduction

Law and society scholarship has established that the anxieties that suffuse American life are often voiced in a legal register. ¹ Concerns about the stability of the American nation, for example, are frequently articulated as fears that the legal order is under assault from the forces of national and international subversion. The broadcasting of such an anxiety during the late Cold War-era – that American law and order was under assault by unruly, communist-inspired subversives who were in need of strict, paternal authority – is the subject of this article.

Scholarly examination of the counter-subversive roots of recent American campaigns for “law and order” is not unprecedented. Proceeding from Michael Rogin’s insight that in the “confusion between crime and radical dissent lay the heart of the American fear of subversion,” scholars have demonstrated that calls for law and order were, in part, the expressions of fears associated with the disordering of traditional hierarchies during the Cold War-era. ² As such, the challenges that the egalitarian social movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s offered to undemocratic systems of oppression were derided as little more than criminal, disorderly, frequently communist attacks on the integrity of the nation itself. ³

On other matters involving “law and order,” however, scholars have been less clear. What difference, for example, did it make that egalitarian politics was opposed in the name of law and order? How might the law and order narrative, with its emphasis on subversion at home, have impacted Cold War-era policy abroad? To answer such questions we must cast attention, first, on the central terms of the law and order narrative and, second, on the cultural resonances and political impacts of those terms.

I will argue that the depiction of egalitarian politics consistently offered in law and order narratives – that such politics was the product of unruly children who, due to a chronic lack of paternal influence, were deficient in the prototypical American virtue of self-discipline and, so, were vulnerable to communist indoctrination – performed constitutive work. In particular, the law and order narrative ⁴ situated the egalitarian politics of the 1960’s and 1970’s within a historical story that encouraged widespread defenses of existing hierarchies. On one hand, law and order called upon culturally-resonant referents to emphasize that egalitarian politics was subversive of reigning moral and material orders and was, accordingly, an illegitimate attack on the American nation. On the other hand, the law and order narrative offered a counter-subversive response to egalitarian politics that infantilized marginalized people and thus recommended the exercise of a stern, fatherly authority that would impart to them the discipline necessary for productive American citizenship. The law and order narrative with which many Americans made sense of radical domestic protest harbored within it, and expressed, a tangled family drama that catalyzed resistance to egalitarian politics.

Furthermore, I will argue that during the late Cold War-era the law and order narrative, and its emphasis on unruly children and national subversion at home, migrated into the domain of American foreign policy. Indeed, depictions of domestic protestors as immature, morally defective, communist-inspired criminals provided an intellectual template according to which policy makers could interpret revolutionary movements in developing nations. Collective national fears of domestic disorder, international subversion, weak parents, and unruly children thus emerge as the constituent, linked elements of American campaigns for law and order at home and abroad.

These considerations come together in the figure of Ronald Reagan. Following pitched battles with the “little monsters” that populated California’s university campuses during his gubernatorial years, President Reagan applied the lessons that he learned in those battles (especially the need for stern paternal authority to discipline unruly children) to allegedly un-American behavior that originated from abroad. Indeed, Reagan’s family drama sewed actors as distinct as student protestors in Berkeley (explored in Part III of this article) and Sandinistas in Nicaragua (explored in Part IV) into one seamless, subversive garment. All, Reagan emphasized, sought a familial bloodletting – either from directly within the national bosom or, as in the case of the Sandinistas, from the edges of the American family that extended throughout the Western hemisphere.

Accordingly, Reagan employed the law and order narrative to link his anxieties of domestic subversives to the conduct of American foreign policy. “Law and order” worked, moreover, in two directions at once. On one hand, it provided the conceptual terrain on which Reagan identified the nation’s villains – a terrain on which played out a family drama in which weak parents were paired with bad, unruly children and stern fathers were paired with good, mature, disciplined citizens. On the other hand, the tangled familial pathologies at the center of American campaigns for law and order suggested aggressive, paternal responses to disorder that eventually led Reagan to champion a violent, exterminatory insurgency in Nicaragua that was the subject of Congressional prohibition.

II. “Law and Order” and the Subversive in Cold War America

Scholars now accept that Cold War pressures influenced civil rights practice in the post-World War II United States. Indeed, concerns over international perceptions of the conduct of American democracy, especially race relations, were prominent in the calculations of American diplomats and elected officials. ¹¹ These officials feared that the systematic exclusion of racial minorities from the benefits of American democracy undermined the nation’s ability to effectively combat communist appeals. Unable to guarantee the rights and liberties of its own citizens, how would America persuade the international community of the superiority of democratic capitalism? Accordingly, the fight for civil rights was frequently interpreted as a pressing matter of national security, an essential component of the Cold War’s battle for the hearts and minds of the world’s people.

Yet recent scholarship reveals that the relationship between the Cold War and civil rights was ambivalent. In addition to pressuring national officials to occasionally support civil rights activism, Cold War anxieties also made Americans sensitive to the possibility of communist aggression at home. These anxieties, in turn, catalyzed efforts to identify domestic subversives, with, ironically, civil rights activists themselves emerging as likely suspects. ¹² Frequently accused of disorderly, criminal behavior that undermined the American nation, civil rights activists were placed in the crosshairs of a potent counter-subversive politics that fused a commitment to law and order with anti-communism.

Accordingly, in post-WWII America there emerged a widely-shared mania over subversive figures whose misdeeds were thought to undermine law and order. Its emergence confirms the insight of law and society scholars that American anxieties are frequently voiced in a legal register. But my exploration of the Cold War-era subversive, and especially Ronald Reagan’s claims that this immature and unruly figure threatened both disorder and subversion, aims to expand the insight, pushing it both into the “private” realm of family dysfunction and into the “public” realm of American foreign policy. Indeed, as I shall argue in Part III, the counter-subversive obsession with disorder, and the filial unruliness that prompted such disorder, provided a conceptual lens through which Cold War foreign policy, as evident in Reagan’s conduct of the Contra War, could be viewed.

While his 1966 California gubernatorial campaign was dominated by law and order concerns, Ronald Reagan was not the first prominent public figure to oppose egalitarian social change (especially in race relations) by associating it with a breakdown in law and order. As Murakawa’s perceptive study reveals, both Northern and Southern public officials frequently defended Jim Crow segregation policies following WWII by claiming that racial integration would “increase black-on-white crime.” ¹³ Linking race reform to criminal activity, public officials throughout the 1950’s fretted that racial integration and other shows of respect for black civil rights would unleash an elemental American nightmare: black domination – social, political, and sexual – of whites as punishment for the sins of slavery. ¹⁴ Segregation was thus widely understood as necessary in order to forestall the collapse of law and order – to stave off the racial reckoning – that would be the inevitable by-product of integration. ¹⁵ Accordingly, electoral appeals to the specters of disorder made in the 1960’s by such prominent figures as Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Reagan himself relied upon an already well-established linkage between black civil rights protest and criminal disorder. ¹⁶

Black disorder was, moreover, frequently believed to be the outcome of the sinister influence of domestic and international communists. ¹⁷ The presumption of red influence was especially strong in the South, where post-WWII white society was alarmed by the increasing willingness of black citizens to resist the myriad deprivations of Jim Crow. While such resistance shattered the deeply-ingrained Southern myth that blacks were happy in subservience, Southern whites attempted to reconstruct that myth by interpreting black resistance as the product of red influence. Indeed, black protest was “so novel, so fearful, and so unthinkable that many [white Southerners] believed civil rights protests had to be the work of outside influences – namely the Communist Party.” ¹⁸

The view that blacks and reds were conspiring to undermine American law and order was not limited to the white South. In fact, as Crespino (2007) shows, Southern public officials were successful in exporting nationwide this defense of race hierarchy. Benefiting “from a cold war political climate in which almost any manner of social nonconformity could be construed as a threat to fundamental American values,” Southern segregationists made claims about the subversive nature of civil rights protests that seemed plausible to a wide swath of increasingly-anxious Americans. ¹⁹ Joining racist fantasy of black vengeance to fear of communist subversion, the “Southern red scare” ²⁰ found a frequently-receptive nationwide audience.

But reactionary opinion ultimately sourced black disorder not in communist doctrine but in a missing paternal authority that made blacks susceptible to communist influence. Consider, for example, the infamous 1965 Department of Labor report entitled “The Negro Family” (better known as the Moynihan Report after its author Daniel Patrick Moynihan). A comprehensive analysis of black inequality, Moynihan sourced such inequality in the “tangle of pathology” that suffused black life and which itself originated in the disordered black family. Following the arguments of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, Moynihan noted that, by 1965, the black family had been devastated by the brutalities of slavery, white racism, and lack of economic opportunity. Such structural forces produced comparatively high rates of separation, abandonment, illegitimate births, and welfare dependency; they emasculated the black family, removing paternal influence and authority from black society and generating instead a “matriarchal” structure. ²¹

The family dysfunction that removed fathers from black society and substituted excessive maternal influence, Moynihan emphasized, doomed black pursuits of equality. The problem was, in part, “semantic.” Whereas equality had typically referred to equality of opportunity for advancement, blacks now sought equality of results – a goal that denied the long-standing American understanding that inequality based upon achievement was legitimate.

Equality of opportunity now has a different meaning for Negroes than it has for whites. It is not (or at least no longer) a demand for liberty … to not be excluded from the competitions of life … [but] for … a distribution of achievements among Negroes roughly comparable to that among whites. ²²

But black children, though enthralled by these new (vaguely communist) expectations, were deprived of fatherly influence and, so, were incapable of achieving either equality of results or equality of opportunity: for “negro children without fathers flounder – and fail.” They were deprived of the paternal discipline that would allow them to “delay immediate gratification of their desires” – they couldn’t learn the self-discipline necessary for economic advancement – and were thus prone to “immature, criminal, and neurotic behavior.” Especially criminal behavior – for black men were so disheartened and alienated by their inability to provide for the women and children (by their inability to express the “very essence of the male animal … to strut”) that they gave in to despair and acted out their rage. Thus, in spite of an admitted lack of reliable evidence, Moynihan averred that “it is probable that at present a majority of the crimes against the person, such as rape, murder, and aggravated assault are committed by Negroes.” ²³

“The single most important social fact of the United States today,” the disorganized black family undermined black dreams of equality of results, generated immature and unproductive citizens, and menaced the bodies of American citizens (black and white) with violent crime. Social disorder spread like a virus from its source in black familial pathology to the rest of the nation. A call to action was thus necessary, Moynihan concluded, both for bringing blacks “to full and equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship” and for the integrity of American bodies (literally in the case of vulnerable citizens and metaphorically in the case of the American body politic). Indeed, if “the stability and resources of the Negro American family” were not enhanced, “there will be no social peace in the United States for generations.” ²⁴

Black disorder, and the threat that it presented to American law and order writ large, was thus a product of missing paternal authority that deprived black youth of the capacity for self-discipline. Fatherless youth, claimed Moynihan Report-enthusiast Richard Nixon in 1969, “are denied the authority, the discipline, the love that come with having a father in the home.” ²⁵ Denied these building blocks of maturity, black youth were especially unprepared to handle the disappointment associated with the fact of unequal results. This immaturity made them, as it did the student protestors explored in Part III, susceptible to alien, communist control. Encouraged by communist (and other militant) subversives, black youth raged against law and order and the legitimate patterns of privilege that it upheld.

Moynihan’s linkage of social disorder to black deficiencies in self-discipline was, on one hand, a specific reaction to the challenges that the many forms of egalitarian activism of the 1960’s presented to the American status quo. It was a reaction that was widely-shared. For example, George Gilder – a conservative intellectual and occasional presidential speechwriter whose 1981 book Wealth and Poverty championed “supply-side” economics and who became a trusted, if unofficial, adviser to President Ronald Reagan ²⁶ – endorsed Moynihan’s explanation of black disorder, even as he expanded its familial logic to explain social breakdown writ large. Tracing economic inequality to “the breakdown of family responsibilities among fathers” and, so, to the proliferation of female-headed households, Gilder argued that poverty was “governed by the rhythms of tension and release that characterize the sexual experience of young single men.” Indeed, prosperous, “civilized” society itself depended upon

The submission of the short-term sexuality of young men to the extended maternal horizons of women. This is what happens in monogamous marriage; the man disciplines his sexuality and extends it into the future through the womb of a woman. The woman gives him access to his children … a unique link to the future; he gives her faithfulness and a commitment to a lifetime of hard work.

But when a man does not engage in sexual self-discipline, “on the average, his income drops by one-third and he shows a far higher propensity for drink, drugs, and crime.” Thus, the intractable problem of inequality was sourced not in the structural prerogatives of capitalism, but instead in the lascivious sexual practices of undisciplined young men. “The problem” with poverty, and the disorder and lawlessness that it spawned in affected communities, “is neither race nor matriarchy in any meaningful sense.”

It is familial anarchy among the concentrated poor … in which flamboyant and impulsive youths rather than responsible men provide the themes of aspiration. The result is that male sexual rhythms tend to prevail, and boys are brought up without authoritative fathers in the home to instill in them the values of responsible paternity: the discipline and love of children and the dependable performance of the provider role. ²⁷

Gilder, the intellectual guru of “Reaganomics,” thus emphasized traditional family morality (a morality removed from the explicitly racialized context invoked by Moynihan) rather than governmental action as the engine of economic mobility and social tranquility.

The linkage of self-discipline to economic prosperity and profligacy to poverty and disorder, accordingly, offered a widely-shared explanation for the breakdown in American law and order evinced in the 1960’s and 1970’s. But, on the other hand, it was a linkage that was embedded within the American grain. Indeed, self-discipline has long been the primary value associated with the representative American citizen-subject. ²⁸ Self-discipline – the capacity to resist leisure and license, to harness one’s capabilities, and to achieve worldly success – is the essential marker of virtuous American citizenship; its possession constitutes the subject as meritorious, as deserving of whatever material and cultural goods that one possesses. The self-disciplined citizen is the virtuous citizen because he or she has earned their way; he or she has made their self. ²⁹ The virtuous American subject understands, as did Ronald Reagan, that “there just ‘ain’t no such thing as free lunch’” and that one’s privilege is legitimate only to the extent that it is the product of self-exertion and the discipline that makes such exertion possible. ³⁰ It follows that the self-disciplined individual deserves the blessings – the rights and privileges – of American citizenship, for they have been earned. Yet the converse is also true: if those who practice self-discipline deserve the material and cultural benefits of American citizenship, then so too must those who lack discipline deserve not to possess such benefits. ³¹

Accordingly, the understanding that Cold War-era egalitarian protest was a species of social disorder that was borne of a lack of self-discipline resonated with historic practices of American inequality. Moreover, the virtuous, self-disciplined subjectivity is a designation freighted with racial, gender, and class-based significances. Non-whites, women, gays and lesbians, and poor people have been historically envisioned by America’s political and cultural leaders as lacking the sort of self-discipline and mastery that constitutes the virtuous American citizen. Existing in an immature state of narcissistic (frequently erotic) freedom, these people refused order, even as they tempted the self-disciplined with dangerous fantasies of license and sexual perversion. ³² Embodiments of moral turpitude, they were figured as constant reminders that self-discipline and control was integral to moral virtue and good citizenship. By negative example they proved, again in Reagan’s words, that “true freedom is the freedom of self-discipline – the freedom to choose within acceptable standards. Take that framework away and you lose freedom.” ³³

Indians, blacks, women, gays and lesbians, poor people, and other so-called deviants were thus thought to refuse the discipline necessary for hard work and worldly success. Significantly, this refusal was frequently understood by political and cultural elites (as it was by Moynihan and Gilder) as both a moral failure and an emblem of personal immaturity. And such immaturity authorized governmental action in multiple domains. On one hand, the disorderly tendencies of the undisciplined threatened the interests and the bodies of virtuous citizens and so were subject to coercive governmental control. On the other hand, their disorder opened a potential site for governmental intervention. With guidance, support, and, above all, a firm hand, the undisciplined might learn self-control and attain maturity, as parental oversight in the form of a “Great Father” could transform unruly children into productive adults. ³⁴ Accordingly, the forms of control exercised on undisciplined people could be justified as necessary both for the protection of the already virtuous and for the possibility that those lacking self-discipline might one day become virtuous themselves. It follows that the patterns of material inequality that were built upon the American mythology of self-discipline, as well as the governmental actions that enforced those patterns, could be understood as legitimate.

Given its supposedly legitimate roots, such inequality was seen as properly recognized and protected in law. And, as Goodrich argues, the modern legal order traditionally has been envisioned in paternal terms, such that illegality is figured as both a product of actual paternal lack and an affront to the symbolic fatherly authority (the law and order) with which the state protects the fruits of mature, disciplined citizenship.

The social image of a divine figure whose paternal authority legitimated all other laws suffuses the Western legal tradition … the primacy of the image of the father is significant … Thus, law is the speech of the father or, more technically, speech “in the name of the father.” The same image of paternity provides the model for the social family and the domestic family … According[ly], a law is legitimate if it is issued by, traceable to, or promulgated in the name of the father. ³⁵

Because it is “predicated both internally and externally upon images of social paternity and upon the application of legal rules in the name of the father” law and order thus offers both fatherly protection of privilege that is earned through legitimate means (self-disciplined effort, in the American context) and stern rebuke of the unruly elements who threaten both that privilege and the authority that recognizes it. ³⁶

But law and order, and the privilege that it recognized, was widely understood as under attack in the Cold War-era. It was perhaps unsurprising that such patricidal attacks would come from those who had been traditionally portrayed as deficient in self-discipline, or, as Moynihan and Gilder argued, those who were the products of a fractured family structure. What was seen as alarming, however, was that attacks on law and order were being engineered by an increasing number of traditionally-advantaged white citizens. And while white liberal elites could be understood as having been duped by communist propaganda into supporting subversive attacks on American law and order, the behavior of increasing numbers of college students was perplexing.

Indeed, the protests emanating from college campuses, including from some of the nation’s most prestigious academic centers, were deeply troubling. Ronald Reagan voiced this anxiety frequently, such as when he asked an audience in the late 1960’s: “how could this [protest be happening] on the campus[es] of … great Universit[ies]?” ³⁷ Student protestors insisted that the denial of equal results, not simply the denial of equal opportunities, was a violation of right. It seemingly didn’t matter to students that the privilege that they questioned (which was, in many cases, paying for their own college attendance) had been seemingly earned through the ascetic, disciplined self-exertion of virtuous Americans; protestors mocked the ideals of hard work and self-discipline. ³⁸ In so doing, they denied the “right of man to achieve above the capacity of his fellows,” condemning the American nation for the very qualities for which it had traditionally been celebrated: that in America “to a degree unequalled any place in the world, we unleashed the individual genius of man, recognized his inherent dignity, and rewarded him commensurate with his ability and achievement.” ³⁹ Student protestors thus mocked the characteristics that were understood to animate and distinguish virtuous American citizens; in so doing they dismissed the cultural markers according to which the privilege that defined American life was legitimized. ⁴⁰ And they were willing to resist, with violence if necessary, the paternal regime of law and order that recognized and maintained that privilege.

Like many, and especially like many in the now Southern-dominated Republican Party, Ronald Reagan believed strongly in the moral order that was the target of subversives during the late Cold War-era. Reagan was particularly alarmed by the behavior of a vocal, destructive minority population of students at California’s most prestigious university. Reagan thus made the problem of student protest at Berkeley, and especially the “shameful things” that such protestors did in subverting law and order, the centerpiece of his 1966 gubernatorial campaign. ⁴¹

As I will argue in Part III, Reagan’s interpretations of student protest, as well as its viral implications for the wider American society, were evocative of the same long-held American anxieties that Moynihan and Gilder tapped in their accounts of family dysfunction. They were, that is, embedded in the cramped American mythology of self-discipline, emphasizing how the protests of unruly children that emanated from universities threatened reigning moral and material orders – how they threatened the prerogatives of law and order. These interpretations were also, I argue in Part IV, the intellectual template for President Reagan’s later counter-subversive forays in the realm of foreign policy, especially his conduct of the Contra War in Nicaragua.

Subversives all, student protestors and Sandinistas refused self-discipline, mocked American ideals by embracing communist doctrine, and, so, flouted the “age-old dream” for which America stood: “the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order.” ⁴² Imagined by Reagan as unruly children, their intransigence demanded a strong response; it required, in fact, the imposition of a paternal authority of which they had been chronically deprived. Bringing law and order to disorderly children both at home and abroad, Ronald Reagan’s counter-subversive efforts sought to defend America’s reigning moral and material orders. In so doing, they turned Reagan into the “Great Father” of American lore.

III. Little Monsters and Great Fathers

When queried about the origins of the student protest that consumed California campuses during the 1960’s, Ronald Reagan had a ready response: protest, and the disrespect for law and order that it evinced, was the result of bad parenting. The problem was rooted, ironically, in the multiple successes of his own generation. Their virtuous exertions, which were enabled by consistent displays of self-discipline and the hard work that it made possible, had: produced victory in World War II; clawed the nation out of economic depression; and propelled technical innovations that at once improved the quality of life for all Americans and generated the greatest sustained period of economic prosperity in the nation’s history. ⁴³

And yet many in Reagan’s generation had failed miserably in their parental duties. Eager to share the fruits of their considerable labors with their children, Reagan’s generation had never asked their children to earn their privilege. “All too often,” Reagan noted, “because we had to earn, we wanted to give. Our motives have been laudable, but our judgment had been bad.” ⁴⁴ The unforeseen negative consequences of such generosity ran in multiple directions.

On one hand, not having to earn their privilege, a significant proportion of America’s youth had never learned the values of discipline, sacrifice, and hard work. Deprived of these values, young Americans were also deprived of the moral bases of virtuous American citizenship. Lacking purpose in life, Reagan’s generation had “shortchanged [young people] on responsibilities or the right to earn for [themselves].” ⁴⁵ Accordingly, young people had been deprived of the means by which Americans gained maturity; their parents had failed to give them the tools to become truly adult.

On the other hand, having failed to teach the root virtues of American citizenship, Reagan’s generation was incapable of imposing the firm, yet loving, parental authority with which unruly children are transformed into morally upright, responsible citizens: ‘“No’ was either a dirty word or dropped from our vocabulary.” ⁴⁶ Such permissive parenting bred in children attitudes of disrespect for elders and other authority figures. The ordinary adolescent impulse to test boundaries and question authority thus went unchecked as children became young adults. Youth had “every right to ask the reason behind the mores and customs of what we refer to as civilization”; but they had “no right and it makes no sense to reject the wisdom of the ages simply because it is rooted in the past.” Only those people who were “sufficiently disciplined to know what the results” would be of such a rejection, only those who had “grown up as complete human beings,” could be entrusted to make the choice. ⁴⁷ And such self-discipline was an increasingly rare quality in American youth.

Indeed, Reagan was appalled at the degree to which university campuses in the 1960’s and 1970’s were overrun with “dirty and unshaven” hippies; these were people who proudly refused the practices of self-discipline that signified one’s progression into adulthood. ⁴⁸ Hippies were indecent in myriad ways: they disclaimed modest dress (they dressed “like Tarzan”); they grew their hair long (they had “hair like Jane”); they were unwashed (they smelled “like Cheetah”); and they participated in public, drug-fueled orgies (“on the dance floor girls strip to their waist(s) and some couples [find] intercourse more entertaining than dancing”). ⁴⁹ As if such barbarism wasn’t bad enough, hippies were also displeased because universities weren’t “sufficiently pleasant baby-sitting facilities.” ⁵⁰ And so they alternated between holding “raucous all night parties complete with bonfires and bongo drum serenades” and protesting university rules and regulations with “club and torch in hand.” ⁵¹

Accordingly, upon entering college the learned incapacity for self-discipline borne of easy privilege combined with the nascent disrespectful attitudes towards authority borne of permissive parenting to make a recipe for disorder. This toxic combination led a segment of students to be particularly dismissive of laws (especially property laws) that were meant to uphold the patterns of privilege that were based upon the traditional American virtues of self-discipline and hard work. ⁵² Although these patterns of privilege were inevitably unequal, the inequality itself was legitimate, Reagan held, because it was based upon the stuff of traditional American morality: “the right of man to achieve above the capacity of his fellows.” ⁵³ Such inequality, that is, was the product of self-discipline, hard work, and sacrifice; it reflected the “naturalness and rightness of a vertical structuring of society.” ⁵⁴ But these were exactly the values that protesting hippies mocked, dismissing as illegitimate the privileges that the values legitimized.

To be sure, Reagan consistently noted, inequality was unfortunate. It was reasonable to sympathize with those in poverty, and also to seek ways to help impoverished people to succeed. But inequality, so long as it was the product of virtuous self-exertion, was natural and right; railing against such legitimate forms of inequality was akin to refusing to see the world as it really was. Protesting against such a natural fact was not only useless; it was an exercise in immaturity, a childish wail against the injustice of a world that does not match one’s youthful idealism.

Yet parental failure had left student protestors unprepared to accept such hard truths. Instead, student protestors were vulnerable (as were the unruly children of Moynihan’s and Gilder’s accounts) to the un-natural, communist verities that ridiculed the vertical structuring of human life as inhumane. ⁵⁵ Subject to the control of a “sophisticated, alien order,” student protestors embraced communist doctrine; they dismissed self-discipline and hard work, as well as the privileges that such practices generated, as exercises in racist and sexist domination. ⁵⁶ Resistance to the regime of law and order that recognized the legitimacy of a vertical structuring of society was thus simultaneously a reflection of the protestors’ defective moral training and an exercise in communist-inspired subversion. Parental incompetence eventuated in the subversion of American law and order as the familial pathologies that marked disorderly homes reappeared on college campuses.

Reagan’s lurid 1966 campaign-trail depiction of a student dance that took place on the Berkeley campus linked student protestors’ immaturities and associated moral failings to the subversive threat. Indeed, the happenings at the dance – some of which were “so bad, so contrary to our standards of decent human behavior” that Reagan “could not recite them … in detail” – exemplified the degree to which parental failure had endangered America’s traditional standards of morality and, in so doing, had provided opportunities for communist subversion of American law and order.

Many of those attending [the dance] were clearly of high-school age. The hall was entirely dark except for the light from two movie screens. On these screens the nude torsos of men and women were portrayed from time to time in suggestive positions and movements. Three rock and roll bands played simultaneously. The smell of marijuana was thick throughout the hall. There were signs that some of those present had taken dope. There were indications of other happenings that cannot be mentioned here.

A “center of sexual misconduct,” the Berkeley campus was suffused with a moral indecency that made it “a rallying point for Communists” who happily stoked the “rioting [and] anarchy … the assault [on] law” that destroyed the “primary purpose of the University: to educate our young people.” ⁵⁷

How could such moral depravities, and the communist-inspired assaults on law and order that they encouraged, occur on the campus of a “great University”? “It happened,” Reagan intoned, “because those responsible abdicated their responsibilities.” ⁵⁸ Here too was Reagan’s explanation illustrative of his accounting of the larger problem of student resistance to law and order, which “began the first time that someone old enough to know better declared it was no crime to break the law in the name of social protest.” ⁵⁹ Indeed, the same parental permissiveness that created the “little monsters” whose moral immaturities at once fueled their sexual depravity and made them vulnerable to communist entreaties was reproduced on campus. ⁶⁰ University administrators repeated the parental failures that allowed student protestors to demur mature and responsible citizenship.

Reagan was frustrated by the failure of university administrators to engage in the sorts of quick and harsh measures necessary to uphold law and order. Such administrators were, he held, typically cowed by student protestors and, as such, regularly gave in to a cascading series of unreasonable (immature) curriculum and admissions demands. ⁶¹ They did not do what was needed; they did not “insist that those unwilling to abide by … rules and regulations … should get their education elsewhere.” ⁶² As Reagan put it on the campaign trail: student protestors should be “taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown off the campus – permanently.” ⁶³

Even worse was the behavior of “liberal professors.” These professors, who were vastly overrepresented in the academy, were not only ideologically sympathetic to the communist-inspired goals of campus protestors; they also provided intellectual cover for the protestors’ attacks on law and order. Unstintingly critical of the traditional American values of self-discipline and hard work because they did not produce their favored horizontal structuring of society, these professors derided American society as cruel, racist, and sexist. Such criticism, Reagan argued, misshaped the impressionable minds of immature students. Indeed, such subversive outbursts defeated what Reagan considered to be the true goal of education: “society’s attempt to enunciate certain ultimate values upon which individuals and hence society may safely build.” ⁶⁴ Liberal professors taught, instead, that American society was unequal and, thus, corrupt; the professors then sent the most radical of their students out like a “virus … [to] infect the campus” with the spirit of lawlessness. ⁶⁵

Student protestors were, in fact, victims of these liberal professors, who had abandoned the traditional faculty role of “in loco parentis” to take on the role of campus instigators – people who looked “kindly on any effort to disrupt campus and community life.” ⁶⁶ Here again student protestors were failed by authority figures. The professors knew the hard truths of the world. They knew that societies were naturally structured in vertical, not horizontal, ways; they knew that inequality, if often unfortunate, was an unavoidable feature of all human societies. Yet the professors employed student protestors as surrogates to instigate the revolution to which they were emotionally committed. Rather than exerting the paternal discipline that was needed to convert student protestors into mature and self-disciplined citizens – rather than imparting “sound discipline based on moral standards which will become self discipline in the individual student” – the professors thrilled to the disorder effectuated by their little monsters. ⁶⁷

Given this habitual lack of paternal authority – the multiple failures to exercise the tough love needed to wrench children out of immaturity and immorality and into a mature, reflective, disciplined state of liberty – Reagan took it upon himself to bring the needed law and order to California’s campuses. He had promised to do so, to public acclaim, during the 1966 gubernatorial campaign. Reagan thus didn’t hesitate when the opportunity presented itself in May 1969 at Berkeley’s “People’s Park.”

By the mid-1960’s, and owing to being the home for such flashpoint events as the free and filthy speech movements, the campus at UC-Berkeley sat at the leading edge of the student protest that increasingly consumed American universities. ⁶⁸ The events that gave rise to the “Battle of People’s Park” began in 1967, when the University obtained, through the power of eminent domain, a parcel of land located near the campus. After demolishing the houses that sat on the land, the University allowed the space to sit un-cleared of rubble and debris and unused for nearly two years. In April 1969, a coalition of students and “street people,” with the support of local merchants, converted the parcel of land into a public park. An explicit challenge to the University’s private property rights, the coalition claimed the land for the people of Berkeley and dubbed it the “People’s Revolutionary Park.” ⁶⁹

The following month, at the behest of Reagan himself, the University took the provocative action of hiring contractors to install a fence around the park in the early morning hours and to reclaim the land. Incensed at what they considered to be the heavy-handed tactics of the University, the students protested and then marched to the park to confront the police officers who were guarding it. The confrontation soon turned violent, with a segment of the protestors battling Berkeley police in hand-to-hand combat. By the end of the day, hundreds of protestors had been arrested; scores of protestors and police officers had been seriously injured; one bystander lay fatally wounded by police fire; and Reagan had dispatched the National Guard to restore order. The military occupation of Berkeley that followed over the next month was characterized by curfews, harsh treatment of students by National Guard troops, and the occasional use of chemical weapons to break up student gatherings. ⁷⁰

Reagan was not especially troubled by the outbreak of violence at People’s Park following his decision to call up the National Guard and, in his own words, to “unleash the dogs of war.” ⁷¹ He was satisfied that his unbending response was required in order to quell disorder; it was also the sort of resolve that was required writ large in order to combat the subversion of American law and order. His explanation of the People’s Park incident bears scrutiny, as it presents the linkages between parental failure, immaturity, social disorder, and national subversion.

Reagan argued that, contrary to its moniker, the People’s Park effort was instigated by well-known revolutionaries, none of whom were enrolled students. These subversives had refused the University’s “repeated efforts to enter into dialogue” and duped “a number of legitimate citizens and some students” into converting the vacant lot into a park. The subversives’ goal, in fact, was much less noble than they claimed: they did not intend to lead a “volunteer community project to pretty up an unused vacant lot” but rather to challenge “the right of private ownership in this country” as part of their ongoing attempts to establish a communist beachhead in Berkeley.

Railing against the right of private property – that aspect of law and order that most clearly affirmed the vertical structuring of society – marked the leaders of the People’s Park movement both in their immaturity and in their subversive intent. Indeed, it was not so much a park that was sought, but rather a “play-pen” in which subversives would be free to continue the debauched behavior that had characterized the People’s Park prior to the University’s reclamation.

The property … had already become something of a public nuisance. Nightly rallies, mass singing, shouted obscenities, bonfires throughout the night, and the gathering of unsavory characters had so frightened the housewives in the neighborhood that they wouldn’t even walk down the street … Part of the lush greenery that was planted … turned out to be marijuana … The property was being used as a garbage dump and a toilet … A 21-year-old man [was] picked up for indecent exposure after the police found him sitting in the park, completely nude, in full view of the occupants and passers-by. ⁷²

With their play-pen of communist iniquity at stake, the leaders of the People’s Park movement responded to the University’s reclamation with “sticks, bricks, and prepared jagged pieces of pipe and steel.” “This was no spontaneous eruption,” Reagan held: the subversive attack on law and order was well-coordinated, well-armed, and “out of control.” ⁷³ Given the situation, Reagan argued, he was duty-bound to militarize, and then occupy, Berkeley with the National Guard.

Reagan noted that protestors had found predictable allies in the liberal professoriate, whose members condemned the University, the authorities, and Reagan himself for instigating the People’s Park confrontation. Such condemnation simply continued the paternal failure of the professors – those “supposedly reasonable mature adults.” Further emboldened, the protectors issued a defiant 13-point manifesto in the aftermath of the violence. “Some of these points are very revealing,” Reagan noted. The first two points that Reagan discussed fit his patricidal interpretation of student protest nicely:

Student protestors were thus not content with their own savage indecency and communist-inspired lawlessness; they sought to spread their disorder, “like a virus,” to the entirety of the nation’s youth. ⁷⁴

To prevent the cancer that was rotting out California campuses from metastasizing to the nation’s youth writ large, it was necessary that authority figures follow Reagan’s lead and “stand firm.” ⁷⁵ During his two terms as governor, Reagan encouraged, and thrilled to, stern responses to student protest. His favorite university administrator, S.I. Hayakawa of San Francisco State University, regularly offered just these sorts of responses. ⁷⁶ Reagan made the point in a 1969 letter to a colleague: “I’m convinced we win when we defy the little monsters … after all, the Lord took a club to the money changers in the temple.” ⁷⁷ Or, as he put it even less charitably in 1970: “No more appeasement. If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” ⁷⁸

Reagan thus brought to the “cowardly little bums” the sort of stern, fatherly discipline of which they had been chronically deprived. ⁷⁹ In so doing, he reprised a role with deep roots in American political culture, one that he would attempt to repeat a decade later when confronting Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Indeed, his counter-subversive defenses of the American nation, his willingness to bring law and order to unruly children, turned Reagan into the nation’s “Great Father.”

The tendency of American political leaders to employ familial metaphors in order to imagine the body politic is deeply rooted in American experience. Wallace and Burrows (1972), for example, persuasively show that the American Revolution was habitually depicted by Americans as a wrenching family drama in which the now mature sons and daughters of Mother England were unjustly punished for their natural adult desires for independence. ⁸⁰ After independence, Rogin (1975) finds, American leaders began to imagine themselves less as the aggrieved children of Mother England and more as fathers who were responsible for bringing law and order, and the self-discipline upon which it relies and which it enforces, to the non-white children within the American bosom. ⁸¹ Indians, for example, became increasingly figured as “red children of the forest” who were marked by a savage depravity that threatened the bodies of Americans and a lascivious sexuality ⁸² that tempted those bodies with forbidden fantasies. “We are now your fathers” Thomas Jefferson told his “red children” in 1806.

Tell all your chiefs, your men, women and children, that I take them by the hand and hold it fast. That I am their father, wish their happiness and well-being, and am always ready to promote their good.

In return for submitting to paternal authority, Indians would gain discipline and maturity. With this they would: tame their war-like tendencies; cultivate and divide the land into individual parcels of property; learn to “clothe and provide for [their] families as we do”; and “establish law” to recognize and protect the products of their self-disciplined exertions. If, however, Indians refused the fatherly embrace, it “would bring on war.” ⁸³

Jefferson’s paternal exhortations were representative both of national policy makers’ attitudes towards Indians ⁸⁴ and of predominant white discourse towards those marked as non-white writ large. ⁸⁵ All, the discourse emphasized, were in need of the authority of the Great Father, whose firm hand would mold them into mature, productive, self-governing beings. It would be better if paternal authority was submitted to eagerly, but if needs be the spirit of rebelliousness, and the multiple threats that it presented to the American nation, could be quashed with counter-subversive force. Even the use of force, though, was ultimately in the best interests of the immature and was understood as a necessary, if tough, act of parental love. ⁸⁶

By the turn of the 20th century, American policy makers were also justifying the first substantive American forays into foreign policy by depicting the United States as the Great Father who brings the gift of self-government to immature, savage peoples. ⁸⁷ Woodrow Wilson, one of the first proponents of the exercise of American imperial power in the Western hemisphere, is illustrative. America was ready to take its place on the world stage, Wilson argued in 1902, because “now … in these days of our full stature … we are mature.” Indeed, the Spanish-American War signified that “the nation that was one hundred and twenty-five years in the making has now stepped forth into the open arena of the world.” ⁸⁸ America had become an “adult, disciplined, self-possessed nation.” Such capability to “make adult choice” meant not only that the American nation had “power over self” but also that it rightly exerted power “over others as well.” ⁸⁹

Just as Americans had offered the fatherly gift of maturity and self-discipline to the non-white children in their midst, so too would the nation treat the non-white children outside of its borders. For “they are children and we are men in these deep matters of government.”

We must govern with a strong hand that will brook no resistance, and according to principles of might gathered from our own experience, not from theirs, which has never yet touched the vital matter [of self-government] we are concerned with. ⁹⁰

The tough love that Ronald Reagan offered to student protestors thus signified in multiple directions. It inhabited and revived a traditional American moral logic and discourse that emphasized the forcing of paternal authority on subversive, unruly children who were located at home, within the body politic. Moreover, it provided to Reagan an intellectual template with which to make sense of the subversive threats that menaced the body politic from abroad, particularly those located in the Western hemisphere (which was, Reagan noted, “our doorstep”). ⁹¹ Calling upon the logic of the Great Father, Reagan channeled multiple icons of American democracy: the Jeffersons who offered self-discipline to non-white Americans; the Wilsons who exhorted Americans to embrace their nation’s paternal mission abroad; and the “dogs of war” who were unleashed upon those unwilling Americans (in the United States and abroad) who refused the paternal dictates of law and order.

IV. Love and Death in Nicaragua

It is fair to conclude that, when president, Ronald Reagan was obsessed with Nicaragua. There was no more pressing foreign policy issue during the first six years of Reagan’s presidency. His diaries were dominated by the issue (Reagan 2007, generally); it was the subject of 20 major presidential addresses; and his failure to garner substantial public and Congressional support for the Contras who were fighting the Sandinista regime was the source of Reagan’s greatest frustration as president. ⁹² The conflict between the Sandinista regime and the Contras was, in fact, a “great struggle”; it was “one of the greatest moral challenges in postwar history.” ⁹³

At first blush Reagan’s understanding of the Nicaraguan conflict, in which an explicitly communist government battled an anti-communist guerilla insurgency, offers a fairly straightforward instance of the anti-communism that animated Reagan’s political vision. The conflict allowed Reagan to express the full repertoire of his standard anti-communist positions: he habitually castigated the Sandinista regime as a repressive, subversive force interested only in the exporting of revolution – and the chaos, disorder, and violence that it bred – throughout the hemisphere. Yet lurking in the background of Reagan’s understanding was the same family drama that suffused his take on domestic subversives (and on student protestors in particular). Indeed, the virus of communist subversion that the Sandinistas hoped to transmit was particularly horrifying because it threatened to “spread [the] poison” of lawlessness to the entire family of American nations that occupied the western hemisphere. ⁹⁴

Indeed, as it had when applied to student protestors during his years as Governor of California, Reagan’s familicidal interpretation of the Nicaraguan conflict exerted constitutive force. By providing a conceptual terrain on which the Sandinistas were identified as an “outlaw” regime that threatened the extended American family, the terms in which Reagan made sense of the Nicaraguan conflict encouraged him to support a series of actions meant to bring law and order to Nicaragua. But the stern paternal authority that Reagan visited upon the Sandinistas: unnecessarily escalated conflict; authorized the commission of violence against innocent Nicaraguan citizens; and led his own administration to evade Congressional prohibitions. Not an example of ordinary Cold War-era anti-communism, Reagan’s conduct of the Contra War points instead to the tangled familial pathology at the heart of American law and order.

Indeed, when making the case for aggressive confrontation of the Sandinista regime, Reagan consistently, and explicitly, articulated family ties. These ties were, in part, a matter of geographic proximity. “Nicaragua,” Reagan frequently reminded audiences, “is just as close to Miami, San Antonio, San Diego, and Tucson as those cities are to Washington.” ⁹⁵ But it was not just that the nations of Central America were “our neighbors” and, so, “very close and very important to us.” ⁹⁶ Our bonds with the nations of Central America were more intimate. “We have to remember that we’re kin to each other”; we were, in fact, “all Americans – all of us from pole to pole in this Western hemisphere.” ⁹⁷

We have the same heritage as pioneers to these virtually undiscovered continents … We worship from South Pole to North Pole the same God … We are all Americans. ⁹⁸

While familial, the relationship between the United States and the nations of Central America was not fraternal; it was vertical not horizontal. The American family, as do all families, had its head. “Just as you work so your children will have a better future,” Reagan intoned, “the United States must work so that the fledgling democracies of this hemisphere will have a better future.” And, as a successful child will eventually have the means to care for an aging parent, so too was the success of Central America vital “so that our own future can be more secure.” In guiding Central American nations into mature democratic states as a parent guides a child into adulthood – in helping them to achieve “what we have achieved in this land – in freedom, in economic progress, in standard of living” – we thus secured our own golden years. ⁹⁹

The “irresponsible” prevarications of Sandinista Nicaragua, however, threatened familial bliss from within. ¹⁰⁰ An “outlaw regime” (there was “no crime to which [they would] not stoop”), the Sandinistas flouted law and order in their pursuit of communist subversion.

The Sandinistas have revoked the civil liberties of the Nicaraguan people, depriving them of any legal right to speak, to publish, to assemble, or to worship freely. Independent newspapers have been shut down. There is no longer any independent labor movement in Nicaragua nor any right to strike. ¹⁰¹

Just as the disorderly tendencies of fatherless youth and unruly student protestors were exploited by domestic communists, moreover, so was Sandinista lawlessness cultivated by nefarious outside influence. For, prior to coming to power in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas “were called to Havana, where Castro cynically instructed them in the ways of successful Communist insurrection.” Having “listened and learned,” the Sandinista regime sought a “communist stronghold on the North American continent – a green light to spread its poison throughout this free and increasingly democratic hemisphere.” ¹⁰² Announcing the Sandinista threat to the American family, Reagan supposed that “surely no issue is more important for peace in our own hemisphere, for the security of our frontiers, for the protection of our vital interests, than to achieve democracy in Nicaragua and to protect Nicaragua’s democratic neighbors.” ¹⁰³

The lawless subversion that the Sandinistas plotted was thus not simply the ordinary communist dream of dominating the world; it was an act of familicide. For, in addition to the usual acts of repression and denial of rights characteristic of communist, totalitarian regimes, the Sandinistas had betrayed their own brethren. Upon coming to power in 1979 after the abdication of the vile Somoza regime, the Sandinistas promised the Organization of American States (which had been instrumental in convincing Somoza to give up power) that they would hold free elections, observe democratic principles, and not use governing authority to enforce and spread the communism that had originally motivated them. But, in spite of substantial financial support and goodwill from many in the American family (including, most prominently, the United States), Sandinista promises turned out to be “the same old” communist lies. For

Just months after taking power, the Communists began doing what they’d planned all along – they ousted their critics … they tightened their military grip on the nation, and they censored the media in Nicaragua and suppressed free speech. ¹⁰⁴

Though the Sandinistas had “put on a façade of democracy … [it] was sheer deceit … When the mask fell … the face of totalitarianism became visible to the world.” ¹⁰⁵ Just as permissive parenting had led to eventual social disorder at home, so too had American goodwill in the waning days of the Carter administration (especially the $75 million in economic assistance that Carter authorized to Nicaragua in spite of reservations about Sandinista support of communist insurgency in El Salvador) simply encouraged further Sandinista attempts to export lawless subversion throughout the hemisphere. ¹⁰⁶

Exposure of the Sandinistas’ sinister goals revealed that, just as student protest on university campuses sought to spread disorder “like a virus” to the American polity, Nicaraguan subversion aimed to go viral. The Sandinistas were “players in a drama whose aim is to spread communism throughout this hemisphere.” ¹⁰⁷ They sought “fratricidal bloodletting.” ¹⁰⁸ Indeed, the “cancer that is Nicaragua” was looking to “infect” the extended American family “through the export of subversion and violence,” with the destruction of U.S. democracy itself as the end goal. ¹⁰⁹ For the Sandinistas would not stop until we “see them at the borders of Arizona and New Mexico.” ¹¹⁰

Confronted with a traitor in the extended American family – a duplicitous, untrustworthy son who spurned paternal and fraternal bonds, usurped the limits of law and order, and sought to seize absolute familial power for himself – Reagan urged Congress and the American people to adopt a stern response. And as the patriarch of the American family, it was up to the United States to lead the rebuke. Thus, in one of its first foreign policy initiatives, the Reagan administration in April 1981 cut off all economic aid to Nicaragua and conditioned the renewal of aid on the halting of Sandinista support for communist insurgency in El Salvador. ¹¹¹ Having refused to curb their subversive inclinations, the Sandinistas were cut loose from U.S. support, as an unruly child who refuses the rules of the household is cast out from familial support. The termination of economic aid was thus an act of tough love, designed to encourage the Sandinistas to abandon their unruly, lawless ways and return to the embrace of the extended American family.

The withdrawal of paternal support did not, however, have its intended effect. Just as provoking confrontation at People’s Park in Berkeley had emboldened student protestors, so too were the Sandinistas invigorated by the revocation of economic aid. Unrepentant, they intensified their already-strong bonds with Cuba; accelerated their now successful attempts to garner financial support from the Soviet Union; and openly proclaimed their support of, and assistance for, communist insurgency in El Salvador and Honduras. ¹¹² And just as Reagan’s provocations laid the ground for coming violence in Berkeley, so too was the exercise of paternal authority against the Sandinistas a harbinger. Indeed, after its aid policy failed the Reagan administration concluded that the Sandinista threat must be aggressively rolled back, not simply contained.

But the Democratic Congress, because of the hesitance for aggressive intervention preached by its “irrational” leader Tip O’Neill, “kept pulling the rug out from under” Reagan. ¹¹³ With such prohibitive measures as 1984’s Boland Amendment, the American family by 1986 was left vulnerable to the growing Sandinista cancer. Desperate to eradicate communist subversion, and the lawlessness that it spread, before it was too late, Reagan took to conflating the Sandinista threat with his own coming presidential mortality.

I have only three years left to serve my country; three years to carry out the responsibilities that you entrusted to me; three years to work for peace. Could there be any greater tragedy than for us to sit back and permit this cancer to spread? ¹¹⁴

Reagan realized that any direct attempts to contain the Sandinista threat would be constrained by the lingering “post-Vietnam syndrome” that affected the morale of the American public and made them wary of fighting communists in developing nations. ¹¹⁵ Indeed, in spite of some support for the option within his administration, Reagan never considered sending American military forces to Nicaragua. ¹¹⁶ Thus the “Contras” – a coalition of disaffected revolutionaries, peasants, and indigenous people led by former members of Somoza’s notorious National Guard and secretly organized and continuously funded and trained by the CIA – were seen by Reagan as an attractive alternative to the application of U.S. force against the Sandinistas. ¹¹⁷

The Contras were, according to Reagan, champions of democratic order in the face of Sandinista subversion. “All they want,” Reagan said of the Contras, “all they’re fighting for is to return to the principles of the revolution that overthrew Somoza – free elections, human rights, free press, all of those things.” ¹¹⁸ Because they were “trying to restore the democratic promises made during the revolution,” the Contras were “patriots who fight for freedom.” ¹¹⁹ The Contras, that is, sought to bring legal principles to an “outlaw” regime; with U.S. military support they would quash the “chaos and anarchy” with which the Sandinista regime threatened the Western hemisphere. ¹²⁰ Surrogates for the direct exercise of American paternal power, these “brave Nicaraguan freedom fighters” were, accordingly, fathers-in-training; already “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers,” U.S. military support would allow the Contras to replace the communist disorder practiced by the Sandinistas with American-style law and order. ¹²¹ Indeed, Reagan identified with the Contras’ paternal mission: they “are against … Communist [subversion] … and so [this] makes me a Contra too.” ¹²²

Yet Reagan was never able to garner more than lukewarm Congressional and public support for the Contras. His inability to convince a skeptical Congress and American public that the Contras were, in fact, reincarnations of the founding fathers was at once Reagan’s (self-diagnosed) greatest failure and a lingering source of incomprehension. Engaged in a “life and death struggle” for the extended American family’s liberty, and for the United States’ place as its patriarch, the Contras were forced by Congressional obstinacy and public wariness to go to war against “helicopters piloted by Cubans with Band-Aids and mosquito nets”; it was a “disgrace.” ¹²³ Still Reagan exhorted:

Will we give the Nicaraguan democratic resistance [the Contras] the means to recapture their betrayed revolution, or will we turn our backs and ignore the malignancy in Managua until it spreads and becomes a mortal threat to the entire New World? ¹²⁴

Although Reagan sourced the wide-spread skepticism of the Contras in the combination of post-Vietnam wariness and a “very sophisticated disinformation campaign that completely bamboozled many,” the harsher truth was that the Contras were simply not believable in the role in which Reagan cast them. ¹²⁵ Numerous dispassionate reports and exposés revealed that the Contras were as likely to brutalize, torture, and murder Nicaraguans as they were to defend them against the supposedly lawless assaults of the Sandinistas. ¹²⁶ Substantial evidence of Contra drug running, moreover, was produced. ¹²⁷ Yet Reagan habitually claimed to the American people that these “so-called” Contra atrocities were actually the duplicitous handiwork of the Sandinistas, who were attempting to deceive international opinion and cast themselves as the true humanitarians. ¹²⁸

The truth is, there are atrocities going on in Nicaragua, but they’re largely the work of the institutionalized cruelty of the Sandinista government. This cruelty is the natural expression of a Communist government, a cruelty that flows naturally from the heart of totalitarianism. The truth is Somoza was bad, but so many of the people of Nicaragua know the Sandinistas are infinitely worse. ¹²⁹

Even when confronted with unassailable, undeniable evidence of Contra atrocities, Reagan insisted that they were representative neither of Contra practice writ large nor of the moral character – the fatherly virtues – of Contras. Instead, such occasional atrocities were the unfortunate consequence of battling the savage communist enemy. Here again Reagan harked back to his experience battling student protestors on California campuses: “Once the dogs of war are unleashed, you must expect that things will happen, and people being human will make mistakes on both sides.” ¹³⁰ Anyway, the occasional Contra mistake – borne of paternal zealousness in the cause of American law and order – paled in comparison to the organized reign of terror practiced by Sandinistas both on the Nicaraguan population and on the extended American family. ¹³¹

Reagan was so exorcised by the Sandinista threat that he and his administration consistently evaded Congressional prohibitions on U.S. support for the Contras. ¹³² For example, 1984’s Boland Amendment (aka Boland II), which outlawed the expenditure of U.S. resources on the Contras, was undermined through the administration’s solicitation (complete with personal cajoling from Reagan himself) of Contra aid from such nations as Saudi Arabia. ¹³³ And the 1986 Congressional refusal to release military aid to the Contras set the stage for the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the proceeds from covert arms sales to Iran were transferred to the Contras. While the scheme was the brainchild of renegade administration officials (Oliver North and John Poindexter, in particular) and most likely proceeded without Reagan’s knowledge, the dedication that it displayed to the Contra effort was consistent with Reagan’s conviction that the Contras must be supported “body and soul.” ¹³⁴ Reagan, concludes his most authoritative biographer, “thought that helping the Contras was ‘the right thing to do.’ He had no interest whatever in the legal restrictions that Congress … had imposed on him and on the executive branch.” ¹³⁵

Having led him to unnecessarily escalate conflict with the Sandinista regime, Reagan’s paternal embrace of law and order led him also to back a murderous, exterminatory guerilla insurgency – one for which he was willing to evade Congressional restrictions and prohibitions. Such evasion was necessary if the Contras were to be allowed to “stand firm” against the Sandinistas, if they were to be allowed to “unleash the dogs of war” and bring the necessary paternal discipline to an unruly, “outlaw” regime. That the exercise of paternal authority by the American president (the prototypical Great Father) might require the evasion of Congressional restrictions was of no concern to Reagan. His conduct of the Contra War thus updated and internationalized the formulation of fellow law-and-order acolyte Richard Nixon: “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.” ¹³⁶

V. Conclusion

Law and society scholars have linked calls for law and order to reactionary politics. A way of opposing egalitarian social change without engaging in explicit apologia for the hierarchies that such change threatened, law and order is typically envisioned as a coded phrase meant to appeal to the anxieties of traditionally-powerful Americans. But “law and order,” one of its foremost practitioners explained, were not (or not only) “code words that really meant a call for racial discrimination.” They pointed instead to “what is all too lacking today … the ability of humans to live together in an orderly society.” A “cry for help,” law and order was preached by those who felt that “permissiveness has played a part in crimes (sic) increase.” ¹³⁷ Treating law and order as the instrumental manipulation of language, Ronald Reagan suggested, obscured the fears of disorder, criminality, and permissiveness that the narrative transmitted.

Taking seriously the counter-subversive underbelly that those fears expose – fears that linked, on one hand, national vulnerability to defective parenting and unruly children and, on the other hand, national strength to stern paternal authority and mature, disciplined citizens – reveals that “law and order” was not only (or even primarily) empty rhetoric meant to reassert privilege. It was, instead, a narrative that, in part, constituted political practice both at home and abroad. The constitutive impacts of the law and order narrative, I have argued, are made clear by examining its use by Ronald Reagan, first, to confront student protestors when he was governor of California and, second, to imagine and act on the subversive threat that emanated from Sandinista Nicaragua when he was president of the United States.

Indeed, Reagan’s conduct of the Contra War reflected in multiple ways his earlier experience of bringing law and order to the unruly hippies that populated California’s university campuses. Convinced that the denial of legitimate forms of inequality marked one as immature and, so invited communist indoctrination, Reagan’s counter-subversive inclinations suggested that the egalitarian politics practiced both by student protestors and the Sandinistas required a stern, paternal response in order to prevent the disorder that they threatened from spreading throughout the American family. Although law and order could not be directly given to the Sandinistas by the Great Father (as it was to student protestors at the Battle of People’s Park a generation earlier), Reagan could direct his surrogates – the Contras – to teach Sandinistas the hard truths of vertical inequality that communist doctrine refused. As such, he could offer the unruly children within the extended American family the tough love that policy makers had long prescribed as necessary for mature, adult practice, and which Reagan had personally offered to student protestors.

Second, Reagan understood that the paternal discipline associated with law and order – while always necessary for the production of morally upright, productive citizens – was sometimes resisted and that, accordingly, it might be necessary, as he had at Berkeley, to take “a club to the money changers in the temple.” ¹³⁸ In such a case, more than the Band-Aids and mosquito nets offered to the Contras by the permissive Democratic Congress were needed. The stern hand of the father, which was akin to unleashing the “dogs of war” on unrepentant children, was thus an ever-present possibility.

But Reagan’s conduct of the Contra War extended law and order, and the paternal violence that it authorized, abroad. In so doing, it affirmed the traditional understanding that American foreign policy required an assertive imperialism that brought the blessings of American liberty, and the training with which to effectively practice it, to the world’s immature, non-white peoples. Channeling the logic of Woodrow Wilson, Reagan would ensure that the United States supported and protected those fledgling, immature democracies that dotted Central America just as a loving father supports and protects his children until they are capable of standing on their own as adults.

Yet the family drama within which Reagan played out the Contra War reveals, finally, a deep irony. In attempting to bring fatherly discipline to the treacherous bad sons within the extended American family, the Reagan administration consistently exceeded the limits that Congress had placed on Contra aid. Such evasion put into motion the events of Iran-Contra, a scandal that exposed Reagan’s presidency to Congressional investigation and oversight. Consumed by anxieties about bad parenting and the need for the Great Father, the tangled familial pathology at the heart of 20th century campaigns for law and order led one of their biggest proponents to pursue a course of action in Nicaragua that eventuated in his own subordination to an “irrational,” permissive Democratic Congress that refused to “stand firm” against the lawless Sandinista regime. Deprived of his capacity to exert paternal authority, Reagan was, ironically, absorbed into the sort of dysfunctional family unit thought to produce the very unruly children against whom he had lived his political life.