Together, President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were supposed to usher in a
new era of liberal dominance. The defeated conservative remnant,
it was predicted, would then turn against each other, bereft of
ideas and reduced to cannibalizing their own movement.
Election results in places as varied as Virginia, New Jersey, and
Massachusetts have complicated the first part of this storyline.
This week, a meeting of the nation's leading conservative
activists, intellectuals, and political leaders hopes to disprove
the second.
On Wednesday, more than 80 conservative thinkers and organization
heads will come together to ratify a joint manifesto ahead of the
2010 elections. Dubbed the Mount Vernon Statement, its goal is to
unite the right -- economic, social, and national security
conservatives -- under a set of shared principles. The idea is to
make different conservative groups feel part of the same team and
also to bind them in a common intellectual enterprise.
Participants read like a virtual who's who of conservative
movement heavyweights: former Attorney General Edwin Meese,
American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene, Heritage
Foundation President Edwin Feulner, Family Research Council
President Tony Perkins, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax
Reform, among many others. But the final product will be short on
policy wonkery.
Unlike the Contract With America, the Mount Vernon Statement is not a
detailed legislative agenda. Instead, it intended as a set of
philosophical principles that can serve as the foundation for
policy formulation later. It is less Frank Luntz than Frank
Meyer.
In fact, parts read like Meyer's "fusionist" conception of
conservatism. The document reminds "economic conservatives that
morality is essential to limited government, social conservatives
that unlimited government is a threat to moral self-government,
and national security conservatives that energetic but
responsible government is the key to Americas safety and
leadership role in the world."
The Mount Vernon Statement
specifically calls for a new "fusion provided by American
principles" through "constitutional conservatism." "In recent
decades, America's principles have been undermined and redefined
in our culture, our universities and our politics," the document
reads. "The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by
the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government
today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is
increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant."
"Some insist that America must change, cast off the old and put
on the new," the statement continues. "But where would this lead
-- forward or backward, up or down? Isn't this idea of change an
empty promise or even a dangerous deception?" The Mount Vernon
conservatives assert "we need a restatement of Constitutional
conservatism grounded in the priceless principle of ordered
liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution."
"The conservatism of the Declaration asserts self-evident truths
based on the laws of nature and nature's God," the platform
reads. "It defends life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It
traces authority to the consent of the governed. It recognizes
man's self-interest but also his capacity for virtue."
"I think it's an excellent statement of conservative first
principles," former Congressman David McIntosh, a leading
participant in the Conservative Action Project, told
TAS. "The objective was to unify various people who were
conservatives who care about different aspects of conservatism.
It unites all of those principles under kind of a stronghold of
constitutional government."
But it is not a litmus test, McIntosh says, and a careful reading
of excerpts obtained by TAS show efforts were made to
accommodate different conservative perspectives. On foreign
policy, this constitutional conservatism "supports America's
national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in
the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to
that end." The framework also "honors the central place of
individual liberty in American politics and life" and "informs
conservatism's firm defense of family, neighborhood, community,
and faith."
Writing in the Washington Times, Ralph Hallow compared
the Mount Vernon Statement to the Sharon Statement adopted by
Young Americans for Freedom in 1960 at the Connecticut home of
William F. Buckley Jr. That earlier statement said, "The
Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet
devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role,
while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power."
The Mount Vernon Statement will be issued the day before the
opening of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC),
the nation's largest gathering of conservative political
activists, and at a critical point in a midterm election year.
The conservatives putting the statement together hope it will
guide the right in power as well as in opposition.
"I think it is always good for people who identify themselves as
conservatives to sit back and think of these principles," says
McIntosh. "When the economic crisis came, some in the last
administration seemed to say, 'Well, we tried free-market
economics, let's try something different.' When a party is in
power that has a lot of conservatives in it, we tend sometimes to
focus on our own issues and not the larger principles at stake."
The conservative leaders planning to sign the Mount Vernon
Statement tomorrow afternoon say they hope to bring those
larger principles back into focus. "We're hoping this will be
picked up by the Tea Party activists as a framework," says
McIntosh. "To have an impact, it must come from the people."
Click here to add your name to
the Mount Vernon Statement.
topics:
Mount Vernon Statement
