The Opportunity Presented by Catastrophe

In 1975 Ronald Reagan addressed CPAC, the annual conference for conservative activists. His speech followed the Watergate scandal, President Nixon’s resignation, President Ford’s highly unpopular pardon of the former President, and the resulting disastrous Congressional elections of 1974. In those elections Republicans lost 49 seats in the House of Representatives, giving Democrats more than two-thirds of all seats. In the Senate, Republicans lost four seats, giving Democrats a 61 to 38 margin. It was, like our own day, a dark hour for the Republican Party. But the advice President Reagan gave was the key to his own triumph and a conservative resurgence.

I don‘t know about you, but I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, “We must broaden the base of our party”—when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents.

Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?

President Reagan understood that when the Republican Party runs a Democrat-Lite candidate, promising less of the same, against a Democrat, the Democrat invariably wins. In a dangerous era, where the Constitution, individual liberty, and free enterprise will be challenged as never before, Republicans can champion the highest ideals of our republic and her people, not by offering less of the wrong prescription, but by rejecting it outright.

If we are to defend the principles and institutions of our republic, Republicans need to understand what it means to be a conservative Republican. We need to find leaders who have read Burke, Kirk, de Tocqueville and Hayek, who have thought deeply about the great philosophical issues of our time. We need to return to the true, Republican ideals of strict Constitutionalism and the conservative nationalism of leaders like Senator Robert Taft. We need leaders who have read the farewell addresses of Presidents Washington and Eisenhower and who understand the dangers of ever growing international entanglements and the threat of the military industrial complex.

We need to find leaders who, like President Reagan, not only believe with all their heart that conservative principles are the greatest guarantee to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but who can also communicate those sublime ideals in powerful, positive and winning ways.

We have endured catastrophe at the hands of a leader who pretended to be a conservative, while growing the size of the federal government by 60%, who believes that American exceptionalism means preemptive war and attempting to democratize Mesopotamia, who involved the federal government in areas such as education, expressly reserved by our Constitution to the states, who has nationalized banks, left our economy in shambles, and left the nation with the largest deficits in our history. Is it any wonder that Americans have rejected such “conservatism?”

Americans have consistently rejected moderate Republicans promising less of the same. They rejected President Ford, they rejected President George H. W. Bush after he squandered all that President Reagan had built, they rejected Bob Dole, and now they have rejected the Republican most inclined to “reach across the aisle” to cosponsor some of the most wrong-headed legislation with the Senate’s leading liberals.

The establishment Republicans who opposed President Reagan and are now attempting to destroy Governor Palin, will not go quietly. But one thing we can do to ensure no more Democrat-Lite presidential nominees, is to change party rules to allow only enrolled Republicans to vote in Republican primaries. Senator McCain would not have been the Republican nominee without winning the crucial South Carolina primary. But it was Democrat votes that provided his margin of victory. Governor Huckabee was the choice of Republican voters.

The years ahead should give Republicans an extraordinary opportunity to rediscover forgotten principles and to clarify what our party truly stands for. The differences are stark and fundamental. Do we preserve the old republic and its constitution, or yield to those who believe it is “defective?” Do we stand for individual liberty and free enterprise, or differ on the details of a new, socialist model? Do we stand boldly for life, from conception to natural death, or accommodate those who would even let those babies surviving abortion die? Do we uphold God’s natural law regarding marriage, or allow it to be “redefined?” Do we fight for the free speech of talk radio, or allow it to be silenced?

If Republicans reject the “pastel colors” and fight for the Constitution and the old republic, the heavy keel of public opinion will guide our way and ensure our ultimate victory.