The Very Heart and Soul of Conservatism is Libertarianism
“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.” ~ Ronald Reagan
Read more of Ronald Reagan’s views on Libertarianism from this interview he did in 1975. At that time, Reagan used the term “libertarian-conservative” to describe his political philosophy. Reagan’s record, while generally conservative, was not particularly libertarian, but one’s administrative decisions, constrained as they are by existing laws, institutions, and politics, do not necessarily mirror one’s underlying philosophy (consider Mitt Romney when governing the very liberal state of Massachusetts). This interview gives an interesting glimpse into the real Ronald Reagan.
Another good quote from Ronald Reagan, “I don’t believe in a government that protects us from ourselves.”
Buckley on Reagan
When Character Counted
The importance of Ronald Reagan.
EDITOR’S NOTE: On February 4 and 5, 1999 the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Center for Public Affairs sponsored a two-day symposium at the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. The theme of the event was “Eight Years that Changed the World: The Reagan Legacy in the New Century.” Mark Burson, executive director of the Reagan Foundation, opened the meeting. Speakers and panelists were: Brian Mulroney, Martin Anderson, Sander Vanocur, Edwin Meese, Murray Weidenbaum, Dinesh D’Souza, Stephen Entin, James Miller, Clark Judge, Larry Arnn, Richard McKenzie, William Niskanen, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Maureen Reagan, Ken Adelman, Richard Allen, Howard Baker — and Mrs. Reagan.
The keynote speaker was William F. Buckley Jr. His remarks were published in the March 8, 1999, issue of National Review and are reprinted here.
An excerpt from Mark Burson’s introduction: “With the establishment of National Review, Buckley gave to conservatism what it previously lacked — intellectual firepower, sophisticated and literate reasoning, and, yes, even a sense of humor. These are the weapons with which the long, twilight struggle with liberalism has been waged, and along the way attracted more than a few converts to the root message. And we know that one of the proud Americans who heard the message was a popular movie actor, television personality, and former Democrat who also did a few things in politics.”
Mrs. Reagan, Mr. Mulroney, Mr. Burson, ladies and gentlemen:
I recall that Henry Mencken described an introduction to him on a celebratory occasion as having evoked “a full moon, the setting sun, and the aurora borealis.” In this perspective, if all of that which Mark Burson has said of me really belongs to me, how am I expected even to intimate the achievements of Ronald Reagan? Well, I can do that, really, in one sentence.
He succeeded in getting Nancy Reagan to marry him.
The country is familiar with the legend of Nancy, familiar with her accomplishments as companion, aide, monitor, wife, and lover. There was never anyone who more devotedly served a husband. She has renewed for us all the meaning of the pledge to stand by in sickness and in health.
This being a convocation of friends and admirers, in celebration of his birthday, I propose as keynoter to dwell a while on a longtime friendship. It began in the spring of 1960. Ronald and Nancy Reagan, whom I hadn’t met, were seated at one end of the restaurant, I and my sister-in-law at the other end. We were out of sight of one another. Both parties were headed, after dinner, across the street to an auditorium in a public high school. There I would be introduced, as the evening’s speaker addressing an assembly of doctors and their wives, by Ronald Reagan, a well-known actor and currently the host of a television series sponsored by General Electric; moreover, a public figure who had taken an interest in conservatives and conservative writings.
We bumped into each other going out the door. Ronald Reagan introduced himself and Nancy, and said he had just finished reading my book, Up From Liberalism. He quoted a crack from it, done at the expense of Mrs. Roosevelt, which he relished. I requited his courtesy by relishing him and Nancy for life.
He distinguished himself that night — and dismayed Mrs. Reagan — by what he proceeded to do after discovering that the microphone hadn’t been turned on. He had tried, raising his voice, to tell a few stories. But the audience was progressively impatient. Waiting in vain for the superintendent to unlock the door to the tight little office at the other end of the hall in which the control box lay, he sized up the problem and, having surveyed all possible avenues of approach, climbed out of the window at stage level and, one story above the busy traffic below, cat-walked, Cary Grant-style, twenty or thirty yards to the remote office window of the control room. This he penetrated by breaking the glass window with a thrust of his elbow, climbing in, turning on the light, flipping on the microphone, unlocking the office door, and emerging with that competent, relaxed smile of his, which we came to know after Grenada, Libya, Reykjavik, and Moscow; proceeding with the introduction of the speaker. And all that was thirty years before bringing peace to our time!
In later years I thought his movements that night a nifty allegory of his approach to foreign policy, the calm appraisal of a situation, the willingness to take risks, and then the decisive moment: leading to lights and sound — and music, the music of the spheres.
We stayed friends.
Twenty years later he was running for President of the United States. Early that winter the Soviet military had charged into Afghanistan, beginning a long, costly, brutal exercise. A week or two after he was nominated in Detroit, I wrote him. I told him I thought he would be elected. And told him then that, on the assumption that on reaching the White House he might wish to tender me an office, I wished him to know that I aspired to no government job of any kind.
He wrote back that he was disappointed. “I had in mind,” he said, “to appoint you ambassador to Afghanistan.” Over the next eight years, in all my communications with him, I would report fleetingly on my secret mission in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan where, in our fiction, I lived and worked. In his letters to me he would always address me as Mr. Ambassador. The show must go on, where Ronald Reagan was involved.
Soon after his election I was asked by the Philadelphia Society to speak on the theme, “Is President Reagan doing all that can be done?” It was a coincidence that my wife Pat and I had spent the weekend before the speech as guests of the President and Mrs. Reagan in Barbados. I recalled with delight an exchange I had with my host on the presidential helicopter. We were flying to our villa the first evening, before the two days on Easter weekend reserved for bacchanalian sunning and swimming on the beach in front of Claudette Colbert’s house. I leaned over and told him I had heard the rumor that the Secret Service was going to deny him permission to swim on that beach on the grounds that it was insufficiently secure. I asked him whether that were so, that he wouldn’t be allowed in the water.
Helicopters, even Marine One helicopters, are pretty noisy, but I was able to make out what he said. It was, “Well, Bill, Nancy here tells me I’m the most powerful man in the Free World. If she’s right, then I will swim tomorrow with you.”
Which indeed he did.
I recall also that during one of those swims I said to him, “Mr. President, would you like to earn the National Review Medal of Freedom?” He confessed to being curious as to how he would qualify to do this. I explained, “I will proceed to almost drown, and you will rescue me.” We went through the motions, and that evening I conferred that medal on him, in pectore.
I remember telling the Philadelphia Society that the most powerful man in the Free World is not powerful enough to do everything that needs to be done. Retrospectively, I have speculated on what I continue to believe was the conclusive factor in the matter of American security against any threat of Soviet aggression. It was the character of the occupant of the White House; the character of Ronald Reagan. The reason this is so, I have argued, is that the Soviet Union, for all that from time to time it miscalculated tactically, never miscalculated in respect of matters apocalyptic in dimension. And the policymakers of the Soviet Union knew that the ambiguists with whom they so dearly loved to deal were not in power during those critical years. So that if ever the Soviet leaders were tempted to such suicidal foolishness as to launch a strike against us, suicidal is exactly what it would prove to have been. The primary obstacle to the ultimate act of Soviet imperialism was the resolute U.S. determination to value what we have, over against what they, under Soviet dominion, did not have; value it sufficiently to defend it with all our resources.
TOTAL COMMITMENT
Ronald Reagan, in my judgment, animated his foreign policy by his occasional diplomatic indiscretions: because of course it was a diplomatic indiscretion to label the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” But then, quite correctly, he would switch gears when wearing diplomatic top hat and tails. He did not on those occasions talk the language of John Wayne — or of Thomas Aquinas. But how reassuring it was for us, you remember, every now and then (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!”), to vibrate to the music of the very heartstrings of the leader of the Free World who, to qualify convincingly as such, had after all to feel a total commitment to the free world. When in formal circumstances the President ventured out to exercise conviviality with the leaders of the Soviet Union, the scene was by its nature wonderful, piquant: What would he say that was agreeable, congenial, to the head of the evil empire? The summit conferences brought to mind the Russian who, on discovering that his pet parrot was missing, rushed out to the KGB office to report that his parrot’s political opinions were entirely unrelated to his own.
The ensuing chapter in the life of Russia presents its own problems. They are internal problems, with a surly outer face. You can hear the words framed on the mouth of the few remaining statues of Lenin. His lips are saying, So much for your capitalism! Russia poses no strategic threat to the Free World, to which Russia, de jure, belongs. But the contemporary experience of Russia is a devastating rebuke to facile, universalist ideas about what it is that needs to be done to nurture advances towards prosperity.
One key, of course, an indispensable key, is human freedom. When West Germany was liberated from fascist tyranny, and Japan from imperialist militarism, well-wishers of freedom cheered the results as life began its dramatic turn toward self-rule and a market economy. But in Russia the old brew didn’t mix, did it? It isn’t hard to compile a list of the missing elements. We know now about the profound corruption, and know how corruption conjoined with industrial satrapies can defy the benevolent ministrations of a free market. The causes of the wealth of nations heralded by Adam Smith cannot make their way in the absence of a reasoned mobility of a nation’s resources and a receptive theater for the entrepreneurial energies of its people.
There will be many books written about what happened in Russia in the decade beginning with liberation. The inquests will be various and prolonged, and they will all be sad; but they will make vivid lessons we need to absorb, as we project the economic future of other nations to be sure, but also of our own. The overarching lesson is that the elements of a good society oriented to the improvement of life aren’t all disembodied, inanimate; weight scales at a free-market counter. There is the live component.
And it is not just formal self-rule. Democracy is a mantra, but it isn’t an amulet. We can chant the benefits of democratic arrangements and cheer democratic practices; but these practices do not always lead to enlightened policies. One third of the Duma in Moscow are Communists. The freedom the Russians had, for the first time, to vote, very nearly returned a Communist president in the election of two years ago. The popularity of the democratically elected president of Russia today is given as 1 percent. (He should try poking an intern.) A substantial number of Russians would exchange life as it is today for life as it was yesterday. Thirty million Russians have not been paid for weeks of work, in some cases for months of work. What is a Russian gravedigger supposed to do, if he is not paid? Dig his own grave?
At the other end of the world we have the dismaying spectacle of Japan, recently referred to as the Land of the Setting Sun. “It is quite amazing,” Larry Kudlow recently opined: “They haven’t managed to do anything right.” Eight consecutive years of mismanagement by the second wealthiest country in the world. A democratic society whose people are demoralized, seemingly lost.
A STAMP ON THE NATIONAL MOOD
The lesson for our students of political economy is that we cannot fully depend on autopilots to do what is necessary. The Framers of our own republic said it again and again, that in the absence of virtue, no government could vouchsafe to a people a life of liberty and order. There are technical questions to solve and others that aren’t at all technical. What Japan needs to do its governors are not doing, in part because of ignorance, in part because pride and stubbornness and fear prompt them to preserve decadent enterprises. The Russians despair of reform, and the social festers continue, awaiting what almost inevitably and sadly we think of as another revolution, one that might make dominant a class of leaders willing to adjourn their own fleeting interests today, for prospective gains tomorrow that will endure.
The problem is theirs; our concern is limited to geostrategic questions. At our blessedly immediate geographical remove from Tokyo and Moscow, we have the finite benefit of a little insularity. But the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific are exactly that, finite comforts, only as reassuring as the distance between where mid-range missiles land and where strategic-missiles land, a distance that time is battering away at, progressively diminishing the security we feel in our little snuggery here. To utter the words From sea to shining sea used to evoke an almost infinite distance. It is now a mere stretch of space, traveled by missiles in about 18 minutes.
The Reagan years accustomed us to a mood about life and about government. There were always the interruptions, the potholes of life. But he had strategic visions. He told us that most of our civic problems were problems brought on or exacerbated by government, not problems that could be solved by government. That of course is enduringly true. Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise. On the other hand, it is only a government leader who can affect a national mood or summon up a historical period. One refers not to the period of Shakespeare but to the period of Elizabeth. Reagan’s period was brief, but it put a stamp on the national mood. He did this in part because he was scornful of the claims of omnipotent government, in part because by nature and by the words he spoke, he felt, and expressed, the buoyancy of the American Republic.
We have now the paradoxical situation, a leader whom 75 percent of the American people don’t wish to disturb, and whom 75 percent of the American people do not trust. It is comforting to tell ourselves that what this means is that we live in an age in which the long arm of government is so discredited, it can’t really do us much damage. If Mr. Clinton were indeed powerless, then he would be a threat only to maidens passing by. But leaving aside the power he wields as commander in chief, he has the power, and has exercised it, to cultivate a cynicism whose final effects we cannot appraise, nor even imagine. If what he has done is trivial, then much of what we think of as the infrastructure of civil society is also trivial — our commitments to truth, to the processes of justice, to the sanctity of oaths. It is possible that in future years, if there will be a return to wholesomeness of habits of thought and deed, the cloud that will hang over the last year of the 20th century won’t be the memory of a year spent on impeachment, but the memory of a year in which no action was taken after impeachment.
It is fine that the Ronald Reagan Library, Museum, and Center for Public Affairs, which serves as our host, will collect his papers and ambient literature, permitting generations of students and scholars to explore and linger over those happy years which augured the end of the Soviet threat, the revitalization of our economy, and a great draft of pride in our country. To the library I’ll convey in years ahead my own collection of letters from Ronald Reagan. The very last one written from the White House the day the Soviet Union announced that it would withdraw from Afghanistan was addressed,
“Dear Mr. Ambassador:
“Congratulations! The Soviets are moving out of Afghanistan. I knew you could do it if I only left you there long enough, and you did it without leaving Kabul for a minute.”
He closed by saying, “Nancy sends her love to you and Pat.” That was eleven years ago, and we cherish it today, and through her, convey our own love and gratitude to the President, on his 88th birthday.
http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/buckley200406051743.asp
The New Republican Party – 1977
The New Republican Party
Governor Ronald Reagan (R-CA)
Conservative Political Action Conference
Washington, DC
February 6, 1977
I’m happy to be back with you in this annual event after missing last year’s meeting. I had some business in New Hampshire that wouldn’t wait.
Three weeks ago here in our nation’s capital I told a group of conservative scholars that we are currently in the midst of a re-ordering of the political realities that have shaped our time. We know today that the principles and values that lie at the heart of conservatism are shared by the majority.
Despite what some in the press may say, we who are proud to call ourselves “conservative” are not a minority of a minority party; we are part of the great majority of Americans of both major parties and of most of the independents as well.
A Harris poll released September 7, 1975 showed 18 percent identifying themselves as liberal and 31 percent as conservative, with 41 percent as middle of the road; a few months later, on January 5, 1976, by a 43-19 plurality, those polled by Harris said they would “prefer to see the country move in a more conservative direction than a liberal one.”
Last October 24th, the Gallup organization released the result of a poll taken right in the midst of the presidential campaign.
Respondents were asked to state where they would place themselves on a scale ranging from “right-of-center” (which was defined as “conservative”) to left-of-center (which was defined as “liberal”).
- Thirty-seven percent viewed themselves as left-of-center or liberal
- Twelve percent placed themselves in the middle
- Fifty-one percent said they were right-of-center, that is, conservative.
What I find interesting about this particular poll is that it offered those polled a range of choices on a left-right continuum. This seems to me to be a more realistic approach than dividing the world into strict left and rights. Most of us, I guess, like to think of ourselves as avoiding both extremes, and the fact that a majority of Americans chose one or the other position on the right end of the spectrum is really impressive.
Those polls confirm that most Americans are basically conservative in their outlook. But once we have said this, we conservatives have not solved our problems, we have merely stated them clearly. Yes, conservatism can and does mean different things to those who call themselves conservatives.
You know, as I do, that most commentators make a distinction between [what] they call “social” conservatism and “economic” conservatism. The so-called social issues—law and order, abortion, busing, quota systems—are usually associated with blue-collar, ethnic and religious groups themselves traditionally associated with the Democratic Party. The economic issues—inflation, deficit spending and big government—are usually associated with Republican Party members and independents who concentrate their attention on economic matters.
Now I am willing to accept this view of two major kinds of conservatism—or, better still, two different conservative constituencies. But at the same time let me say that the old lines that once clearly divided these two kinds of conservatism are disappearing.
In fact, the time has come to see if it is possible to present a program of action based on political principle that can attract those interested in the so-called “social” issues and those interested in “economic” issues. In short, isn’t it possible to combine the two major segments of contemporary American conservatism into one politically effective whole?
I believe the answer is: Yes, it is possible to create a political entity that will reflect the views of the great, hitherto [unacknowledged], conservative majority. We went a long way toward doing it in California. We can do it in America. This is not a dream, a wistful hope. It is and has been a reality. I have seen the conservative future and it works.
Let me say again what I said to our conservative friends from the academic world: What I envision is not simply a melding together of the two branches of American conservatism into a temporary uneasy alliance, but the creation of a new, lasting majority.
This will mean compromise. But not a compromise of basic principle. What will emerge will be something new: something open and vital and dynamic, something the great conservative majority will recognize as its own, because at the heart of this undertaking is principled politics.
I have always been puzzled by the inability of some political and media types to understand exactly what is meant by adherence to political principle. All too often in the press and the television evening news it is treated as a call for “ideological purity.” Whatever ideology may mean—and it seems to mean a variety of things, depending upon who is using it—it always conjures up in my mind a picture of a rigid, irrational clinging to abstract theory in the face of reality. We have to recognize that in this country “ideology” is a scare word. And for good reason. Marxist-Leninism is, to give but one example, an ideology. All the facts of the real world have to be fitted to the Procrustean bed of Marx and Lenin. If the facts don’t happen to fit the ideology, the facts are chopped off and discarded.
I consider this to be the complete opposite to principled conservatism. If there is any political viewpoint in this world which is free from slavish adherence to abstraction, it is American conservatism.
When a conservative states that the free market is the best mechanism ever devised by the mind of man to meet material needs, he is merely stating what a careful examination of the real world has told him is the truth.
When a conservative says that totalitarian Communism is an absolute enemy of human freedom he is not theorizing—he is reporting the ugly reality captured so unforgettably in the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
When a conservative says it is bad for the government to spend more than it takes in, he is simply showing the same common sense that tells him to come in out of the rain.
When a conservative says that busing does not work, he is not appealing to some theory of education—he is merely reporting what he has seen down at the local school.
When a conservative quotes Jefferson that government that is closest to the people is best, it is because he knows that Jefferson risked his life, his fortune and his sacred honor to make certain that what he and his fellow patriots learned from experience was not crushed by an ideology of empire.
Conservatism is the antithesis of the kind of ideological fanaticism that has brought so much horror and destruction to the world. The common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women, working out their own lives in their own way—this is the heart of American conservatism today. Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now, but from what has happened before.
The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind. When we conservatives say that we know something about political affairs, and that we know can be stated as principles, we are saying that the principles we hold dear are those that have been found, through experience, to be ultimately beneficial for individuals, for families, for communities and for nations—found through the often bitter testing of pain, or sacrifice and sorrow.
One thing that must be made clear in post-Watergate is this: The American new conservative majority we represent is not based on abstract theorizing of the kind that turns off the American people, but on common sense, intelligence, reason, hard work, faith in God, and the guts to say: “Yes, there are things we do strongly believe in, that we are willing to live for, and yes, if necessary, to die for.” That is not “ideological purity.” It is simply what built this country and kept it great.
Let us lay to rest, once and for all, the myth of a small group of ideological purists trying to capture a majority. Replace it with the reality of a majority trying to assert its rights against the tyranny of powerful academics, fashionable left-revolutionaries, some economic illiterates who happen to hold elective office and the social engineers who dominate the dialogue and set the format in political and social affairs. If there is any ideological fanaticism in American political life, it is to be found among the enemies of freedom on the left or right—those who would sacrifice principle to theory, those who worship only the god of political, social and economic abstractions, ignoring the realities of everyday life. They are not conservatives.
Our first job is to get this message across to those who share most of our principles. If we allow ourselves to be portrayed as ideological shock troops without correcting this error we are doing ourselves and our cause a disservice. Wherever and whenever we can, we should gently but firmly correct our political and media friends who have been perpetuating the myth of conservatism as a narrow ideology. Whatever the word may have meant in the past, today conservatism means principles evolving from experience and a belief in change when necessary, but not just for the sake of change.
Once we have established this, the next question is: What will be the political vehicle by which the majority can assert its rights?
I have to say I cannot agree with some of my friends—perhaps including some of you here tonight—who have answered that question by saying this nation needs a new political party.
I respect that view and I know that those who have reached it have done so after long hours of study. But I believe that political success of the principles we believe in can best be achieved in the Republican Party. I believe the Republican Party can hold and should provide the political mechanism through which the goals of the majority of Americans can be achieved. For one thing, the biggest single grouping of conservatives is to be found in that party. It makes more sense to build on that grouping than to break it up and start over.
Rather than a third party, we can have a new first party made up of people who share our principles. I have said before that if a formal change in name proves desirable, then so be it. But tonight, for purpose of discussion, I’m going to refer to it simply as the New Republican Party.
And let me say so there can be no mistakes as to what I mean: The New Republican Party I envision will not be, and cannot, be one limited to the country club-big business image that, for reasons both fair and unfair, it is burdened with today. The New Republican Party I am speaking about is going to have room for the man and the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism. If we are to attract more working men and women of this country, we will do so not by simply “making room” for them, but by making certain they have a say in what goes on in the party. The Democratic Party turned its back on the majority of social conservatives during the 1960s. The New Republican Party of the late ’70s and ’80s must welcome them, seek them out, enlist them, not only as rank-and-file members but as leaders and as candidates.
The time has come for Republicans to say to black voters: “Look, we offer principles that black Americans can, and do, support.” We believe in jobs, real jobs; we believe in education that is really education; we believe in treating all Americans as individuals and not as stereotypes or voting blocs—and we believe that the long-range interest of black Americans lies in looking at what each major party has to offer, and then deciding on the merits. The Democratic Party takes the black vote for granted. Well, it’s time black America and the New Republican Party move toward each other and create a situation in which no black vote can be taken for granted.
The New Republican Party I envision is one that will energetically seek out the best candidates for every elective office, candidates who not only agree with, but understand, and are willing to fight for a sound, honest economy, for the interests of American families and neighborhoods and communities and a strong national defense. And these candidates must be able to communicate those principles to the American people in language they understand. Inflation isn’t a textbook problem. Unemployment isn’t a textbook problem.
They should be discussed in human terms.
Our candidates must be willing to communicate with every level of society, because the principles we espouse are universal and cut across traditional lines. In every Congressional district there should be a search made for young men and women who share these principles and they should be brought into positions of leadership in the local Republican Party groups. We can find attractive, articulate candidates if we look, and when we find them, we will begin to change the sorry state of affairs that has led to a Democratic-controlled Congress for more than 40 years. I need not remind you that you can have the soundest principles in the world, but if you don’t have candidates who can communicate those principles, candidates who are articulate as well as principled, you are going to lose election after election. I refuse to believe that the good Lord divided this world into Republicans who defend basic values and Democrats who win elections. We have to find tough, bright young men and women who are sick and tired of cliches and the pomposity and the mind-numbing economic idiocy of the liberals in Washington.
It is at this point, however, that we come across a question that is really the essential one: What will be the basis of this New Republican Party? To what set of values and principles can our candidates appeal? Where can Americans who want to know where we stand look for guidance?
Fortunately, we have an answer to that question. That answer was provided last summer by the men and women of the Republican Party—not just the leadership, but the ones who have built the party on local levels all across the country.
The answer was provided in the 1976 platform of the Republican Party.
This was not a document handed down from on high. It was hammered out in free and open debate among all those who care about our party and the principles it stands for.
The Republican platform is unique. Unlike any other party platform I have ever seen, it answers not only programmatic questions for the immediate future of the party but also provides a clear outline of the underlying principles upon which those programs are based.
The New Republican Party can and should use the Republican platform of 1976 as the major source from which a Declaration of Principles can be created and offered to the American people.
Tonight I want to offer to you my own version of what such a declaration might look like. I make no claim to originality. This declaration I propose is relatively short, taken, for most part, word for word from the Republican platform. It concerns itself with basic principles, not with specific solutions.
We, the members of the New Republican Party, believe that the preservation and enhancement of the values that strengthen and protect individual freedom, family life, communities and neighborhoods and the liberty of our beloved nation should be at the heart of any legislative or political program presented to the American people. Toward that end, we, therefore, commit ourselves to the following propositions and offer them to each American believing that the New Republican Party, based on such principles, will serve the interest of all the American people.
We believe that liberty can be measured by how much freedom Americans have to make their own decisions, even their own mistakes. Government must step in when one’s liberties impinge on one’s neighbor’s. Government must protect constitutional rights, deal with other governments, protect citizens from aggressors, assure equal opportunity, and be compassionate in caring for those citizens who are unable to care for themselves.
Our federal system of local-state-national government is designed to sort out on what level these actions should be taken. Those concerns of a national character—such as air and water pollution that do not respect state boundaries, or the national transportation system, or efforts to safeguard your civil liberties—must, of course, be handled on the national level.
As a general rule, however, we believe that government action should be taken first by the government that resides as close to you as possible.
We also believe that Americans, often acting through voluntary organizations, should have the opportunity to solve many of the social problems of their communities. This spirit of freely helping others is uniquely American and should be encouraged in every way by government.
Families must continue to be the foundation of our nation.
Families—not government programs—are the best way to make sure our children are properly nurtured, our elderly are cared for, our cultural and spiritual heritages are perpetuated, our laws are observed and our values are preserved.
Thus it is imperative that our government’s programs, actions, officials and social welfare institutions never be allowed to jeopardize the family. We fear the government may be powerful enough to destroy our families; we know that it is not powerful enough to replace them. The New Republican Party must be committed to working always in the interest of the American family.
Every dollar spent by government is a dollar earned by individuals. Government must always ask: Are your dollars being wisely spent? Can we afford it? Is it not better for the country to leave your dollars in your pocket?
Elected officials, their appointees, and government workers are expected to perform their public acts with honesty, openness, diligence, and special integrity.
Government must work for the goal of justice and the elimination of unfair practices, but no government has yet designed a more productive economic system or one which benefits as many people as the American market system.
The beauty of our land is our legacy to our children. It must be protected by us so that they can pass it on intact to their children.
The United States must always stand for peace and liberty in the world and the rights of the individual. We must form sturdy partnerships with our allies for the preservation of freedom.
We must be ever willing to negotiate differences, but equally mindful that there are
American ideals that cannot be compromised. Given that there are other nations with potentially hostile design, we recognize that we can reach our goals only while maintaining a superior national defense, second to none.
In his inaugural speech President Carter said that he saw the world “dominated by a new spirit.” He said, and I quote: “The passion for freedom is on the rise.”
Well, I don’t know how he knows this, but if it is true, then it is the most unrequited passion in human history. The world is being dominated by a new spirit, all right, but it isn’t the spirit of freedom.
It isn’t very often you see a familiar object that shocks and frightens you. But the other day I came across a map of the world created by Freedom House, an organization monitoring the state of freedom in the world for the past 25 years. It is an ordinary map, with one exception: it shows the world’s nations in white for free, shaded for partly free and black for not free.
Almost all of the great Eurasian land mass is completely colored black, from the western border of East Germany, through middle and eastern Europe, through the awesome spaces of the Soviet Union, on to the Bering Strait in the north, down past the immensity of China, still further down to Vietnam and the South China Sea—in all that huge, sprawling, inconceivably immense area not a single political or personal or religious freedom exists. The entire continent of Africa, from the Mediterranean to the Cape of Good Hope, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, all that vastness is almost totally unfree. In the tiny nation of Tanzania alone, according to a report in the New York Times, there are 3,000 people in detention for political crimes—that is more than the total being held in South Africa! The Mideast has only one free state: Israel. If a visitor from another planet were to approach earth, and if this planet showed free nations in light and unfree nations in darkness, the pitifully small beacons of light would make him wonder what was hidden in that terrifying, enormous blackness.
We know what is hidden: Gulag. Torture. Families—and human beings—broken apart. No free press, no freedom of religion. The ancient forms of tyranny revived and made even more hideous and strong through what Winston Churchill once called “a perverted science.”
Men rotting for years in solitary confinement because they have different political and economic beliefs, solitary confinement that drives the fortunate ones insane and makes the survivors wish for death.
Only now and then do we in the West hear a voice from out of that darkness. Then there is silence—the silence of human slavery. There is no more terrifying sound in human experience, with one possible exception. Look at that map again. The very heart of the darkness is the Soviet Union and from that heart comes a different sound. It is the whirring sound of machinery and the whisper of the computer technology we ourselves have sold them. It is the sound of building, building of the strongest military machine ever devised by man. Our military strategy is designed to hopefully prevent a war. Theirs is designed to win one. A group of eminent scientists, scholars and intelligence experts offer a survey showing that the Soviet Union is driving for military superiority and are derided as hysterically
making, quote, “a worst case,” unquote, concerning Soviet intentions and capabilities.
But is it not precisely the duty of the national government to be prepared for the worst case? Two Senators, after studying the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, have reported to the Armed Forces Committee that Soviet forces in Eastern Europe have the capability to launch, with little warning, a “potentially devastating” attack in Central Europe from what is termed a “standing alert.”
Reading their report, one can almost see the enormous weight of the parts of the earth that are under tyranny shifting in an irresistible tilt toward that tiny portion of land in freedom’s light. Even now in Western Europe we have Communists in the government of Italy, France appeasing terrorists, and England—for centuries the model or the sword of freedom in Western Europe—weak, dispirited, turning inward.
A “worst case”? How could you make a good case out of the facts as they are known? The Soviet Union, poised on the edge of free Europe, capable of striking from a standing start, has modern tanks in far greater numbers than the outmoded vehicles of NATO. We have taken comfort from NATO’s superiority in the air, but now the Soviet Union has made a dramatic swing away from its historic defensive air posture to one capable of supporting offensive action. NATO’s southern flank is described in the Senate report with a single word: shambles.
The report is simply reality as it was, with different names and faces, in Europe in the late 1930s when so many refused to believe and thought if we don’t look the threat will go away.
We don’t want hysteria. We don’t want distortion of Soviet power. We want truth. And above all we want peace. And to have [recognition] that the United States has to immediately re-examine its entire view of the world and develop a strategy of freedom. We cannot be the second-best super-power for the simple reason that he who is second is last.
In this deadly game, there are no silver medals for second.
President Carter, as a candidate, said he would cut five to seven billion dollars from the defense budget. We must let him know that while we agree, there must be no fat in our armed forces. Those armed forces must be capable of coping with the new reality presented to us by the Russians, and cutting seven billion dollars out of our defense budget is not the way to accomplish this. Some years ago, a young President said, we will make any sacrifice, bear any burden, and we will, to preserve our freedom.
Our relationship with mainland China is clouded. The so-called “Gang of Four” are up one day and down the next and we are seeing the pitfalls of making deals with charismatic personalities and living legends. The charisma fades as the living legends die, and those who take their place are interested not in our best wishes but in power. The keyword for China today is turmoil. We should watch and observe and analyze as closely and rationally as we can.
But in our relationships with the mainland of China we should always remember that the conditions and possibilities for and the realities of freedom exist to an infinitely greater degree with our Chinese friends in Taiwan. We can never go wrong if we do what is morally right, and the moral way—the honorable way—is to keep our commitment, our solemn promise to the people of Taiwan. Our liberal friends have made much of the lack of freedom in some Latin American countries. Senator Edward Kennedy and his colleagues here in Washington let no opportunity pass to let us know about horrors in Chile.
Well, I think when the United States of America is considering a deal with a country that hasn’t had an election in almost eight years, where the press is under the thumb of a dictatorship, where ordinary citizens are abducted in the night by secret police, where military domination of the country is known to be harsh on dissenters and when these things are documented, we should reject overtures from those who rule such a country.
But the country I’m describing is not Chile—it is Panama.
We are negotiating with a dictatorship that comes within the portion of that map colored black for no freedom. No civil rights. One-man rule. No free press.
Candidate Carter said he would never relinquish “actual control” of the Panama Canal.
President Carter is negotiating with a dictatorship whose record on civil and human rights is as I have just described and the negotiations concern the rights guaranteed to us by treaty which we will give up under a threat of violence. In only a few weeks we will mark the second anniversary of the death of freedom for the Vietnamese. An estimated 300,000 of them are being “re-educated” in concentration camps to forget about freedom.
There is only one major question on the agenda of national priorities and that is the state of our national security. I refer, of course, to the state of our armed forces—but also to our state of mind, to the way we perceive the world. We cannot maintain the strength we need to survive, no matter how many missiles we have, no matter how many tanks we build, unless we are willing to reverse:
The trend of deteriorating faith in and continuing abuse of our national intelligence agencies. Let’s stop the sniping and the propaganda and the historical revisionism and let
the CIA and the other intelligence agencies do their job!
Let us reverse the trend of public indifference to problems of national security. In every congressional district citizens should join together, enlist and educate neighbors and make certain that congressmen know we care. The front pages of major newspapers on the East Coast recently headlined and told in great detail of a takeover, the takeover of a magazine published in New York—not a nation losing its freedom. You would think, from the attention it received in the media, that it was a matter of blazing national interest whether the magazine lived or died. The tendency of much of the media to ignore the state of our
national security is too well documented for me to go on.
My friends, the time has come to start acting to bring about the great conservative majority party we know is waiting to be created.
And just to set the record straight, let me say this about our friends who are now Republicans but who do not identify themselves as conservatives: I want the record to show that I do not view the new revitalized Republican Party as one based on a principle of exclusion. After all, you do not get to be a majority party by searching for groups you won’t associate or work with. If we truly believe in our principles, we should sit down and talk.
Talk with anyone, anywhere, at any time if it means talking about the principles for the Republican Party. Conservatism is not a narrow ideology, nor is it the exclusive property of conservative activists.
We’ve succeeded better than we know. Little more than a decade ago more than two-thirds of Americans believed the federal government could solve all our problems, and do so
without restricting our freedom or bankrupting the nation.
We warned of things to come, of the danger inherent in unwarranted government involvement in things not its proper province. What we warned against has come to pass.
And today more than two-thirds of our citizens are telling us, and each other, that social engineering by the federal government has failed. The Great Society is great only in power, in size and in cost. And so are the problems it set out to solve. Freedom has been diminished and we stand on the brink of economic ruin.
Our task now is not to sell a philosophy, but to make the majority of Americans, who already share that philosophy, see that modern conservatism offers them a political home.
We are not a cult, we are members of a majority. Let’s act and talk like it.
The job is ours and the job must be done. If not by us, who? If not now, when?
Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society.
Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, galloping inflation, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite.
Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people. Any organization is in actuality only the lengthened shadow of its members. A political party is a mechanical structure created to further a cause. The cause, not the mechanism, brings and holds the members together. And our cause must be to rediscover, reassert and reapply America’s spiritual heritage to our national affairs.
Then with God’s help we shall indeed be as a city upon a hill with the eyes of all people upon us.
