At the 1960 Republican National Convention in Chicago, Barry
Goldwater famously told conservatives to “grow up.” It’s time we
hear that message again.
As in 1960, the conservative movement seems grumbling,
disaffected, even downright angry — and, most importantly, it
sometimes seems more interested in complaining and moaning than in
uniting, constructively, to achieve political success.
What’s worse is that we seem to be fighting among ourselves.
Every chance we get, we take shots at other conservatives. Nobody,
it seems, is good enough. We moan that nobody is another Reagan.
Nobody is another Churchill. Nobody is another Washington.
To which we ought to say, so what? There’s only one
Second Coming, and He isn’t running for anything.
It’s time we look at the good things we’ve got — and the good
people, and the good times. Take stock of those goods, and
celebrate them, and consolidate them in an attractive way, and
build, build, build upon them.
Before going further with this argument, let’s try a little
exercise. Let’s consider the major Republican presidential
candidates, and recognize just how solid they are by saying
something good about each of them:
Fred Thompson has built a career as a reformer
with a solidly mainstream-conservative record. He did the legal
work that helped imprison Ray Blanton, a corrupt, Democratic
governor of Tennessee. And Thompson is a very good
communicator.
Rudy Giuliani was quite arguably the best
big-city mayor in the history of mankind. And his record in New
York was conservative on just about every count.
Mitt Romney is a superb businessman; he rescued
the Winter Olympics in Utah; and he figured out how to get elected
statewide as a Republican in Massachusetts and, once there,
governed more conservatively than he campaigned.
John McCain is an American hero. And he has the
political courage to stick to his guns in foul weather. He’s
terrific in support of the military, and against wasteful
spending.
Not to belabor the point, but the same could be said for some of
the lesser-known GOP presidential contenders. For instance,
Duncan Hunter has spent 25 years as a wise,
stalwart and effective supporter of our military, and he is a kind
and palpably decent human being who sticks with friends through
thick and thin.
And Tommy Thompson, in his three-plus terms as
Wisconsin’s chief executive, easily proved he ranks with
Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, Florida’s Jeb Bush, and Alabama’s Bob
Riley as the best governors of the past half-century.
And so on.
Okay, this game is fun. How about noting that the two Republican
congressional leaders have some serious bona fides as well?
Mitch McConnell is running rings around Harry
Reid in the Senate, and John Boehner was an
essential and crafty leader of the back-bench movement that
culminated in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994.
Finally, of course, there is President George W.
Bush. He rallied the country in inspirational fashion
after 9/11; inspired effective pro-democracy movements in places
such as Ukraine and formerly Soviet Georgia; helped bring an end to
Moammar Ghadafi’s nuclear program; toppled the Taliban in
Afghanistan, cut just the right taxes domestically to spur a huge
economic boom; and appointed a host of excellent appellate judges
(e.g. Bill Pryor, Brett Kavanaugh, Janice Rogers Brown, Diane
Sykes, Jeff Sutton…) and two absolutely superb Supreme Court
justices in John Roberts and Sam Alito.
Meanwhile, when some of the Democrats come over to our side,
they too are invaluable. Joe Lieberman has been
superb in battling the Communists, in fighting terrorists and,
domestically, opposing the smut that plagues our culture.
NOBODY WOULD CONTEND THAT all of these people, and other leaders,
always have made the right calls. But it’s not as if the
conservative cupboard is bare. Indeed, compared to 1960, our
cupboard is packed. Conservative think tanks, publications, and
websites proliferate and do fantastic work. Thousands upon
thousands upon thousands of conservatives have been credentialed in
congressional and executive staff positions, and in the legal
field. Conservative newspapers and clubs abound on college campuses
nationwide, and organizations such as the Leadership Institute,
Young America’s Foundation, and the Intercollegiate Studies
Institute have trained tens of thousands of conservatives to
venture successfully into the worlds of politics, media and
academia.
The importance of marshaling these resources against myriad
challenges and overcoming them will be magnified in 2008. Our
enemies, the terrorists, are evil; and our domestic adversaries,
the left, are so terribly misguided that they don’t recognize that
the terrorists are a serious, ever-present, imminent threat. A
United States government run by Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama
alongside Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, and Chuck Schumer
would likely be more ruthless in extirpating conservative
influences at home than in battling international jihadists. It’s a
dangerous proposition.
The left flat-out doesn’t understand, much less value, the key
facets of the American Experiment. And the left will undermine that
experiment if we conservatives don’t grow up and buckle down for a
fight. Any one of the Republican contenders for president will do
an exponentially better job of safeguarding and promoting the
American Experiment than any one of the Democratic contenders would
do — because every one of the GOP candidates has shown at least a
decent grasp of the principles involved.
If we conservatives do a decent job of explaining those
principles, then the principles continue to earn the public’s
support. The American people still favor, and conservatives still
advocate, limited government. The populace joins with
conservatives in favoring a muscular military. Together,
we favor judges who are deferential to the actual text of the
Constitution and of statutes passed pursuant to its rules.
Together, we favor a communal respect for timeless standards of
conduct — not “hidebound tradition” but enlightened
tradition. We favor strict, clear, and consistent standards of
law and order. We favor maximum liberty within the
law (but not libertinism, although we would rely on private
communities rather than on government to uphold the distinctions
between one and the other).
We oppose abortion-on-demand and partial-birth abortion. We
believe that the public square should not be utterly hostile to
expressions of faith. We believe private property deserves strong
legal protections. We believe in free markets. We believe that
governmental power in most cases should remain as localized as
possible. We believe that the U.S. national interest is, by its
very nature, a moral interest, and that we are the “good guys” on
the world stage. And we believe that private citizens almost
inevitably make better decisions, and achieve more effective
and humane results in almost every sphere of life, than
does the bureaucratic state.
Those are principles that the majority of the American people
still support in their very souls, and they are principles on which
we can and must win. Let’s stop moaning, grow up, and get to
work.
