Edwin J. Feulner
Conservatives believe that America is an exceptional nation because, unlike any other nation, it is founded on an idea—the idea that “all Men are created equal” and are endowed by their creator with “certain unalienable Rights,” among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these rights, a government is given “just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.”
In these few words in our Declaration of Independence, we find the first principles that have guided America for nearly two and a half centuries—liberty and equality, individual rights and limited government. The idea that political power ultimately rests with the people and not with any monarch or parliament was truly revolutionary.
The Constitution builds on the idea that the people are sovereign by beginning with the words “We the People”—and in bold letters. The people, the preamble states, have established a constitution to do six things: form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty “to ourselves and our posterity.” These are monumental goals never attained before or even conceived in recorded history.
And yet the authors of the Constitution, meeting in hot humid Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, believed they could be achieved. They had faith in the ideas that had inspired a tiny country of four million scattered along the coastline of a new world to challenge and defeat the most powerful nation in the world. And they had faith in the people who now sought a new and exceptional kind of political governance.
Who were the “people” in whom the Founders had such confidence? John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Our form of republican government, he was saying, requires not merely the consent of the governed but their ability to govern themselves.
So the first responsibility—the first duty—of the “people” is to ensure that they remain a moral people.
The Founders placed great hopes in the Constitution, but they knew that no piece of paper could ensure liberty. Only a people, steeped in the principles that animated the Declaration, could do that. Further, liberty depended not upon individuals living in isolation but on what the Anglo-Irish parliamentarian Edmund Burke called the “little platoons” of society.
Social virtues are nurtured in families, sustained in religious congregations, and fostered in the everyday flow of work, hobbies, and life. Long before the Declaration, foreign observers noted the number and the vigor of America’s social institutions—what Alexis de Tocqueville called “voluntary associations”—and the everyday democracy of marriage, vocation, and community.
The Founders believed that if the institutions of civic virtue remained free and strong, the American people would remain self-governing and free. But freedom was not guaranteed. As Ronald Reagan said in his historic speech about the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” So the second duty of the people is to pass the torch of freedom to the next generation.
Many on the Left claim they favor civil society. But Progressives see the maintenance of civil society as the primary responsibility of government—giving it the right to speak for the people and to assert a moral authority greater than that of the people. Progressives argue that only the state can produce good works, an assertion roundly rejected by conservatives, who point, for example, to the trillion-dollar failure of the “Great Society” to end poverty.
Big Government invariably weakens and even impoverishes the people in body and spirit. In sharp contrast, the little platoons of society—our families, our churches, our communities—strengthen and enrich all our lives. The lesson is clear: government must encourage not discourage these social institutions if it wishes to foster a civil society based on a free, independent, and patriotic people.
The third duty of the people, then, is to remain faithful to the first principles of liberty and equality, individual rights and limited government, to nourish the family and the other little platoons of society, and to encourage a love of country.
In his Farewell Address in January 1989, President Ronald Reagan called on the nation to foster what he called “informed patriotism.” The president believed that with the end of the Cold War there was a renewed spirit of patriotism, but that was not enough. Patriotism, he said, had to be “well grounded” in popular culture and to recognize that “America is freedom . . . and freedom is special and rare.” American freedom, he declared, began with the American memory, and if that was not preserved, Reagan warned, the result would be the erosion of the American spirit.
Where does the preservation begin? he asked. In the home and around the kitchen table. If parents have not been teaching their children what it means to be an American, Reagan said, they have failed in their obligation to be good parents.
It is critical that we know and study the Constitution so that we can defend what we have achieved under it—a government of, by, and for the people. We must pass along our history to the next generation so as to preserve the ordered liberty bequeathed to us by the Founders.
THE CONSERVATIVE CONTRIBUTION
And this is what conservatives have been doing for the past six decades, although it has been no easy task. Especially in the beginning, conservatism was ignored, dismissed, and derided.
In the introduction to The Liberal Imagination, published in 1950, the reigning liberal critic Lionel Trilling wrote that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in the United States. What he called the “conservative impulse” was not thoughtful at all but made up of at best “irritable mental gestures which seem to resemble ideas.”
When Russell Kirk wrote the magisterial The Conservative Mind three years later—offering Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall as eminent conservative thinkers—the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said in his review that this “great scurrying about” for respectability produced only “an odd and often contradictory collection of figures” that did not rise “to the dignity of a conservative tradition.” We should be grateful to Professor Schlesinger for providing so clear an example of ideological denial.
In The Liberal Tradition in America, the liberal historian Louis Hartz explained that by conservatism, what was really meant was European feudalism, which was not only absent from but altogether foreign to the American experience. Meaning, I suppose, that Hartz considered American revolutionaries such as John Adams and Thomas Paine to be European “feudalists.”
In Conservatism in America, the historian Clinton Rossiter concluded that because America was “a progressive country with a liberal tradition,” conservatism in the United States was simply “irrelevant.” If so, we may ask, why did Kirk’s The Conservative Mind and Whittaker Chambers’s Witness stay on the New York Times best seller list for weeks?
As my Heritage colleague Matthew Spalding has written, the leading minds of the American academy have invariably misunderstood conservatism, the conservative movement’s role in American politics, and the relationship of conservative thought to the American political tradition. For example, a team of professors from the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of Maryland argued in a leading psychology journal that conservatism is a pathology stemming from fear, aggression, uncertainty avoidance, irrational nostalgia, and the need for “cognitive closure.”
Thankfully, the picture today is far different from when Lionel Trilling and other liberals dominated the intellectual scene. Those “irritable mental gestures” are widely recognized as a legitimate and influential set of conservative ideas, enunciated by popularizers like columnist George Will and editor William Kristol; defended by prominent scholars such as Princeton’s Robert George, Stanford’s John Taylor, and the Hudson Institute’s Yuval Levin; and embodied in powerful think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.
The stirrings of modern American conservatism began with a trio of books and the creation of a journal. First in 1944 came Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, providing an ethical defense of free markets and a classical liberal critique of planned economies. A liberal Harvard historian called publication of that book “a major event in the intellectual history of the United States.” Whittaker Chambers revealed his story and his soul in 1952 in Witness, presenting the contest between communism and democracy as a life-and-death struggle between good and evil.
Perhaps the most influential conservative book appeared the following year—Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, which provided American conservatism with an impressive patrimony reaching back to Edmund Burke and John Adams. Time called it a “wonder of conservative intuition and prophecy.” With one book, Kirk made conservatism intellectually acceptable. As publisher Henry Regnery and conservative strategist William Rusher both pointed out, he gave the conservative movement its name.
The new journal of opinion was National Review. Its editor in chief was William F. Buckley Jr., who for the next fifty years inspired conservatives, young and old, with his wit, his élan, and his willingness to take on any and all challengers in debate. The historian George Nash has written that in many ways the rise of the modern conservative movement is parallel to the prominence of National Review.
Through its philosophers and popularizers, conservatism influenced a generation of political leaders in both major parties. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal Democratic senator from New York, conceded reluctantly that “something momentous has happened in American life; the Republican Party has become the party of ideas.”
No greater proof of this intellectual shift can be found than the 1964 elections. In July, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona won the Republican nomination for president and changed the landscape of American politics. In the fall campaign and against the longest of odds, he insisted on offering a conservative choice, not a liberal echo.
Like a stern prophet of the Old Testament, Goldwater warned the people to repent of their wasteful ways or reap a bitter harvest of debt and decline. Anti-communist to the core, he urged a strategy of victory over communism by a combination of means, including military superiority over the Soviets and the encouragement of the peoples behind the Iron Curtain to “overthrow their captors.”
In the field of domestic policy, he talked about the partial privatization of Social Security, a flat tax, the phasing out of farm subsidies, and the need for morality in government. Denounced as extremist in 1964, such proposals have since entered the mainstream of America’s national policy debate.
Goldwater laid the political and philosophical foundation for a political revolution that culminated in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as president and the 1994 Republican capture of the U.S. House of Representatives under Speaker Newt Gingrich. In his memoirs, Goldwater insists that he did not start a revolution, that all he did was to begin “to tap . . . a deep reservoir that already existed in the American people.” That is like Thomas Paine saying he did not ignite the American Revolution with his fiery pamphlet Common Sense.
Barry Goldwater carried only six states in his run for the presidency and was consigned, along with his radical ideas, to the ash heap of history by most political observers. But just sixteen years later, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan carried forty-four states, campaigning on conservative ideas and conservative solutions for an America suffering economically at home and unable to block communist gains in country after country. Once described as the “forbidden faith,” conservatism was now the chosen political label of 40 percent of Americans.
The Reagan administration brought a generation of ambitious young conservatives to Washington, D.C., to fill congressional staffs, serve in the executive branch, edit publications, and join think tanks—with, I am pleased to say, many passing through the doors of the Heritage Foundation. The new conservative administration exposed the ineptitude of an overblown government, cut high tax rates, and stopped the appointment of activist judges. It refused to accept the permanent division of the world into slave and free, calling for victory in the Cold War.
The congressional elections of 1994, producing a Republican House of Representatives for the first time in forty years, confirmed that conservatism was not an aberration based on the engaging personality and persuasive rhetoric of Ronald Reagan but the most serious, sustained political movement in America since the early twentieth century.
Conservatism’s intellectual, political, and institutional success might tempt one to think that it was somehow ordained. Not so: the gains were won by the courage and perseverance of men and women who risked reputations, careers, and sometimes their very lives to break with convention.
The story of the modern conservative movement is the story of film actor Ronald Reagan, who carried a revolver after being threatened by pro-communist goons in Hollywood; humanitarian Barry Goldwater, who flew desperately needed food and supplies to starving snowbound Navajo in northern Arizona; backbencher Newt Gingrich, who waged an often lonely fourteen-year struggle to bring about a GOP House majority.
American conservatism, it needs to be emphasized, is far different from the aristocratic conservatism of Europe or the authoritarian conservatism of Latin America. Here are some of its canons:
Conservatives are highly suspicious of promised utopia and earthly salvation. The purpose of politics is not to gain redemption but to carve out a system of justice under the rule of law, a moral order, and freedom, recognizing that human beings are neither perfect nor perfectible. When governments seek utopia, they end in oppression because man and society are infinitely complex and cannot be reshaped by any institution of experts. To think otherwise, as Hayek wrote, is a fatal conceit.
Conservatives—whether traditionalist, libertarian, neocon, or any other kind of conservative—understand that power is a zero-sum game. When power is assumed by government, it is lost by individuals. There must be a stopping point in every program and plan beyond which no government should be allowed to go, not merely because of budgetary concerns but because of the inevitable loss of freedom.
Conservatives believe there is an intimate connection between private property and freedom—economic freedom is an essential part of human freedom. As the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom has documented for two decades, when given the chance, freedom works everywhere, producing more prosperity and more freedom for more people than any other economic system.
Conservatives believe in the necessity of change but not in radical change based on abstract theories and the passions of the moment. They prefer settled institutions, values, and traditions, reflecting what G. K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead.” They decline to follow the lead of any arrogant oligarchy who happen to be walking about. Such prudence, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote, produces “the politics of repair” rather than “the politics of destruction.”
Many conservatives share a sense of reverence, a belief in two worlds—one physical and one spiritual—that stand in judgment of our own. When the author Ralph de Toledano was sent proof sheets of a novel he had written, he noticed that his New York publisher had removed the capital letters from Heaven and Hell. Toledano corrected each and sent back the proofs. His publisher called and said, “Ralph, we have a set of style rules over here we must observe. Why do you insist on capitalizing Heaven and Hell?” “Because,” replied Toledano, “they’re places. You know, like Scarsdale.”
According to George Santayana, there is a sentiment of gratitude and duty in the human spirit that we may call piety. That piety is common among almost all conservatives and sustains our respect for the living, the dead, and the yet-unborn.
These are some of the themes of American conservatism. I find all of them compelling and none of them contradictory. The danger comes when one conservative value—whether freedom or moral order or piety—becomes an absolute, something to which everything else is sacrificed. Conservatives have usually avoided that danger because of a great conservative virtue—prudence—that balances valid and competing truths.
Near the end of his life, Whittaker Chambers wrote that escapism is laudable perhaps for “humane men,” but only for them. Those who remain in the world, he said, must not surrender to the world but maneuver within its terms. Conservatives must decide, Chambers wrote, “how much to give in order to survive at all; how much to give in order not to give up basic principles.”
All great conservatives have been practitioners of prudence who sought a golden mean, a balance between competing truths, in their politics and in their philosophy.
Friedrich Hayek was more than a Nobel Prize winner in economics—he was a philosopher and a prophet. He was intrigued by the mind of man, the markets he has made, and the way those markets have made man and society what they are. He used economic precepts to unveil the totalitarian nature of socialism and explain how it leads to serfdom. Using meticulous scholarship and powerful logic, he stopped the advocates of economic planning in their tracks, leaving them without a theoretical leg to stand on.
Russell Kirk was never a liberal and always a conservative from the hour he began to reason. He committed his life to conserving “the three great bodies of principle . . . that tie together modern civilization”—Christian faith, humane letters, and the social and political institutions that define our culture. In one of his many Heritage lectures, Kirk urged all of us to defend our culture and preserve what the poet T. S. Eliot called “the permanent things.”
Despite the incivility, materialism, irreverence, and immorality all around us, Kirk was not discouraged about the future. He predicted that if conservatives “take up the weapons of reason and imagination,” they have every reason to anticipate victory. He drew his optimism in part from Edmund Burke, who reminds us that the goodness of one person, the courage of one man, the strength of one individual, can turn the course of history and renew a civilization. Among the conservative individuals who changed history were George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ronald Reagan.
The history of Great Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century is the biography of one woman and a conservative—Margaret Thatcher. Committed to the ideas of limited government and the free market, Prime Minister Thatcher transformed Britain during her eleven and a half years at No. 10 Downing Street.
She tamed the trade unions despite a violent miners’ strike in 1984, refusing to cave in to radical demands. Her government sold off British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, and British Steel, producing vastly improved service and profits. She assumed control of the money supply, reduced the government’s budget deficit, trimmed state spending, cut taxes, and reduced government regulations. Freed of the nanny state, Britain embarked on its longest economic expansion in the postwar period. It produced more new jobs in the 1980s than the other members of the European Community combined. Her successful application of conservative principles is a lesson for everyone, including our own leaders.
Most elected officials come and go in Washington, making only the faintest of impressions. Only rarely does a politician advance an idea that changes the path of the nation—such a political leader was former congressman Jack Kemp of New York. Following discussions with economist Arthur Laffer and Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, Jack became convinced that supply-side economics with its focus on tax cuts was the key to national prosperity—and political success for whichever party promoted it.
Presidential candidate Reagan agreed and made the Kemp-Roth tax cuts (the latter sponsor being Senator William Roth of Delaware) a central initiative of his campaign. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 sparked the longest period of peacetime economic growth in U.S. history, lasting more than two decades.
In an address to members of Heritage’s President’s Club in November 1994, Jack Kemp offered a vision of the American idea rooted in the thinking of the Founders:
We must return to people their resources so that they will accept their responsibility.
We must return to people power so that they will rebuild the institutions of a free society.
We must return to people authority so that they will create the moral capital to help renew our nation.
Last, I turn to President Reagan, who transformed conservatism from a middling intellectual movement into a powerful political movement. He exposed the bankruptcy of modern liberalism and proved that true liberty is the motivating force of a just and prosperous society. Through the power of his words and the impact of his deeds, he buried Leninism and ended the Cold War without firing a shot.
He was called the “great communicator,” but substance not style was critically important to him. “I wasn’t a great communicator,” he insisted, “but I communicated great things, and they didn’t spring full blown from my brow. They came from the heart of a great nation—from our experience, our wisdom and our belief in the principles that [have] guided us for two centuries.”
Reagan had the gift of reducing politics to a fundamental level and speaking a plain language that touched mind and heart. At the center of our conservative message, he said, echoing Edmund Burke, “should be five simple familiar words . . . family, work, neighborhood, freedom, peace.”
Throughout his presidency, Reagan turned again and again to the wisdom and philosophy of the Founders. Indeed, more than once, he sounded like one of them, never more than in his Farewell Address to the American people. “Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind,” he said, “that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: ‘We the people.’ ‘We the people’ tell the government what to do,” the president said, “it doesn’t tell us.”
The idea of “we the people” underlined everything that Ronald Reagan tried to do as president. That same idea underlines the modern conservative movement, inspired by the great documents of our republic—the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.