Later this month, Dulwich Picture Gallery is mounting an exhibition dedicated to the American painter/illustrator Norman Rockwell. I’ve been a fan for years – the biggest book I’ve ever owned, Thomas S. Buechner’s Norman Rockwell: Artist and Illustrator has been putting a terrible strain on my bookshelves for over three decades. 
Freedom from Fear
Rockwell wanted to be recognized as a great artist – but he wasn’t: he was a great craftsman. If you take away the context and purpose of his work, much of it would barely rate a second glance on aesthetic grounds: some of it is pure kitsch. In terms of technique, Rockwell is sometimes let down by his habit of painting from posed photographs, which results in the various figures in a scene not really gelling . Many of his folksy, “funny” pictures might now strike us as leadenly unfunny. And spending too much time in the company of people who look like they say “Gee Willikers!” a lot can pall.
Saying Grace
But when Rockwell got it right - and he often did - he was brilliant. His true genius was to create a collection of images which, taken together, add up to nothing less than The American Dream.
Speaking of which, the BBC recently ran a documentary series on the subject. I watched a few minutes here and there: the bits I saw consisted of live pigs being fried to death during atom-bomb testing in Nevada, a wearyingly enthusiastic (and possibly deranged) old man remembering the wonders of 1950s suburbia (pure Stepford Wives), and a bunch of whiners who felt they’d been badly let down by “the dream” – in other words, classic, sneering, anti-American propaganda.
Moving In
For Reagan – and for tens of millions of Americans – Norman Rockwell’s version of the American Dream was the real thing. Ronnie once told some aides that he’d love to fly Gorbachev across the United States by helicopter, touching down here and there to meet ordinary Americans leading ordinary American lives – prosperous, happy, productive and free – thereby demonstrating to the Russian Premier that all the anti-American Soviet propaganda he’d swallowed (and was still pumping out) was baloney, and that a country whose people lived this well simply couldn’t be defeated.
Breaking Home Ties
What Reagan really wanted to show Gorbachev, I suspect, was Rockwell’s American Dream – maybe he should just have slipped Gorbie a copy of the book I have downstairs. “Gee Willikers!” the Russian premier might have concluded, “these people are so durned nice and rich and happy, what’s the point of trying to convince them that someone living on cabbage soup in a Stalin-era apartment shared with six other families in Minsk have actually got it better?” (You never know - might have worked.)
As the BBC has yet again demonstrated, sophisticated Europeans – and Americans of a leftist bent – love to sneer at Middle America’s self-image. It’s a mirage, they say: it isn’t really real. Well, of course it isn’t - at least, not entirely. The clue’s in the word “dream”, for heavens’ sake! The dream represents a vision of how most Americans would like their lives to be. It’s a yardstick: it gives them something to aim at, a goal to strive for, a way of measuring what they’ve achieved in their lives. It also gives their existence a structure, a framework – in other words, meaning. And to be fair to believers, their view of reality strikes me as far more accurate than the left-wing vision of America as The Great Satan determined to crush the world’s victims (i.e. everyone who isn’t American or rich) – and far more inspiring.
Arthur Laffer, the inventor of the Laffer curve, which purports to demonstrate that lowering tax rates can raise tax revenues, tells a revealing story about The Gipper. After Reagan had dealt with yet another major crfisis during his presidency, Laffer asked him how he decided which course of action to take when confronted by a fan/ordure interaction episode.
“Well,” Reagan said, “I always ask myself – what would John Wayne have done?”
It’s that kind of remark that earned Reagan his early reputation as a clown. But Europeans and US lefties simply never understood him - just as they never understood Mrs. Thatcher, and for the same reason. What John Wayne (and, of course, his director, John Ford) was doing up there on the screen was creating visions to fuel the American Dream – it wasn’t that Reagan, an actor himself, of course, couldn’t tell the difference between John Wayne the actor and the characters he played: Ronnie just wanted to live up the ideals that John Wayne personified.
Reagan was never a member of a ruling elite thinking up new ways of manipulating the unthinking masses into doing their betters’ bidding – he was one of the masses! (He could be the kid saying grace in the diner, or one of the workmen sharing their table, or the farmer’s son leaving for college, or the boy running away from home being treated to a soda by a big cop). Reagan shared the masses’ instincts and their dreams. (So did Margaret Thatcher.) What they had was the ability to figure out what the majority of people wanted – because that was what they themselves wanted. Like many of us, Reagan and Thatcher instinctively loathed the very idea of a ruling elite: unlike our modern political class, they wanted to enable Mr. and Mrs. Average to live the way they actually, instinctively, truly wanted to live - not how some twerp of a fatuous liberal bureaucrat thought they should live.
Modern politicians are sustained by a variety of dreams – a ghastly, will-sapping, constricting, centrally-controlled international leftism for Obama, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, and most current European leaders - and an elitist, “born to rule”, convictionless centrism for Clegg, Cameron, Osbourne and their ilk. Both approaches are based on contempt for the people. Thatcher and Reagan liked and trusted their masses, because they shared their values. Our current lot think we’re stupid children (consequently, that’s how we often behave).
In 1987, in a televised address on the opening of the Norman Rockwell Museum, Reagan explicitly acknowledged Rockwell’s role as dream-maker in chief to the American people:
“The image of our nation has changed profoundly since the days when Norman Rockwell so skillfully painted us. I can’t help but believe, however, that the American heart and soul, the inner quality that Rockwell so ably captured, has remained constant. As we build America’s future, we will do well to take inspiration from the paintings that Norman Rockwell left us. The values he cherished and celebrated – love of God and Country, hard work, neighbourhood, the family – will continue to give us strength and will continue to shape our dreams for decades to come.”
Normal Rockwell did as much as anyone to foster the American Dream: it was Reagan’s belief in it that allowed him to see the Soviet Union for what it truly was – a disgusting, evil slave state on the verge of collapse.
That’s why I suspect we owe Norman Rockwell a debt of gratitude for the collapse of Soviet Communism.
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