When my wife (then fiancée), Julia, and I heard that Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) would be coming to Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in April 2009 to give an address about the ongoing financial crisis, we immediately made plans to attend.
We were both in our final year at Harvard—she at the college, I at the law school—and busy enough with our search for jobs without spending yet another evening on politics. Yet we jumped at the chance to challenge the congressman who had blocked attempts to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, chief culprits in the subprime mortgage crisis.
My wife, who studied economics, had prepared a question about financial markets. I wanted to challenge the hypocrisy of Rep. Frank’s attack on corporate bonuses, when congressional staffers had just earned a bonus for 2008. As I listened to his speech and heard his response to the first few questions from the floor, I was struck at how breezily he blamed everyone else for the crisis. Not content with blaming George W. Bush, Rep. Frank tried to implicate every conservative from Ronald Reagan in the 1980s all the way back to Robert Taft in the 1930s. A new question formed in my mind as I stepped to the microphone.
“How much responsibility, if any, do you have for the financial crisis?” I asked.
Rep. Frank lost his temper, labeling me as part of a “Right-wing attack” and avoiding an answer. So I do what young lawyers are taught to do when facing a hostile witness: repeat the question.
That outraged him even more, but I kept my cool. My wife did not. “Stop labeling him!” she yelled at Rep. Frank. “I like labels,” he snapped back.
Our exchange continued for a few more minutes before the dean of the school called proceedings to an abrupt and early end. I went back to the library, expecting that my standoff with Rep. Frank might merit a mention in the next morning’s Harvard Crimson, if that. Little did I know that the local Fox News affiliate had taped the debate and posted it online. Soon it was on YouTube, being watched by thousands. It was featured by both Fox and MSNBC, the Right- and Left-wing networks finding rare agreement in their judgment that Rep. Frank had behaved boorishly. I was on several television and radio shows, and received e-mails and letters from around the country. Soon afterward, several Republicans back home in Illinois encouraged me to run for Congress in my home district.
Five months later, I decided to go for it.
I had traveled a long political journey since I first arrived at Harvard as a college freshman in 1995, a public-school kid nurtured on romantic histories of the civil rights movement and the antiwar protests of the 1960s. I believed that the role of government was to rearrange society in order to help the poor and disadvantaged. My classmates and professors tended to hold similar views, which reinforced mine.
I felt a sense of restless impatience about the world, which reflected my beliefs. I studied with Cornel West, then Harvard’s superstar in Afro-American studies. My final paper was titled “Communitarianism and the Redress of Racial and Class Injustice.” In it, I proposed “a system of communal, public boarding schools,” and “creating new jobs in federally subsidized industries,” among other radical ideas. I chose to enter the Social Studies program, an application-only concentration in which students were drilled in the basics of social and political theory, most of it Left-wing. I took more Cornel West, this time writing about “transformative communication” and suggesting “public or cooperative ownership of the communicative media.” I helped organize a campus “teach-in.” I interned for Left-wing politicians and organizations.
In 1996, I cast my first-ever presidential vote for Ralph Nader, writing his name in on my Illinois ballot. I grew my hair long, into a giant blond “Jewfro” —the way many of my classmates at Harvard still remember me. I was a radical—albeit an increasingly frustrated one, as I wrestled with the obvious contradictions between what I was being taught in class and what I observed in the “real world.”
In my junior year, I added Environmental Science & Public Policy as a second concentration—much to the frustration of the Harvard administration, since no one had combined my two fields before. It was then that my first conservative impulses began. I was alarmed at the degree to which environmental scientists aspired to change—and control—individual choices in order to achieve ecological utopia. Our professors would admit, for example, that we did not quite understand how the warming effect of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” might be offset by the cooling effect of aerosols in the atmosphere, or that our most sophisticated computer models still could not tell us the precise effects on climate of increased average surface temperatures. Yet they had no problem supporting sweeping changes to our economy, whose costs were certain and whose benefits were unclear.
I remember writing—without much sense of irony—a term paper about how Galileo might have approached the climate-change debate. My suggestion was that contemporary scientists write dramatic dialogues to convince the public of the reality of climate change, much as Galileo had written dialogues about the earth revolving around the sun. It somehow escaped me that Galileo was persecuted precisely because his views stood apart from the “consensus” of the day.
Eventually, the restlessness provoked by these contradictions began to overtake me. It was the hypocrisy of many Left-wing icons that first inspired me to shake loose. When Michael Moore gave a lecture at the Kennedy School in the fall of 1997 about his film The Big One, which focused on the plight of low-wage workers, I asked him—in front of a packed audience—whether he had paid the interns who had worked on the film. He admitted, to murmurs of disapproval from a hitherto adoring crowd, that he had not.
I began to attend conservative lectures—not because I agreed with the speakers but because I enjoyed asking tough questions without being told I was motivated by unconscious prejudicial assumptions. I did thesis research in northern Alaska, and discovered indigenous communities that regarded oil development as a boon, not a threat. I still identified as “Left-wing,” but felt increasingly ill at ease with what I was supposed to believe.
In 2000, I headed to South Africa as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar. I was born in Johannesburg in 1977, then carried to the USA a few weeks later—so the fellowship was, in a sense, a return to my roots. But it was also a chance for me to study South Africa’s democratic experiment closely. I was enthralled not only by its transition to democracy but also by the new government’s avowedly Left-wing policies and ethos.
As I arrived, President Thabo Mbeki launched his campaign against the theory that HIV causes AIDS. I began tutoring high school students in Khayelitsha, one of the poorest areas in Cape Town, and learned that schools in black communities were worse after apartheid than before. Centralized planning by the national government and redistribution of resources from rich to poor districts had not improved results.
The few people I met who were managing to prosper in the midst of extreme poverty were those who had started their own businesses. Typically, they had done so with no help from the government. They saw politicians and police as obstacles to their success. Poverty continued to fester all around, with the national government claiming sole power to change circumstances and then failing utterly to do so.
What had the most profound effect on me, however, was a confrontation that I had with South African cabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils. Kasrils had launched a petition in October 2001, in the name of “South Africans of Jewish Descent,” which blamed Israel for the second intifada. In the wake of 9/11 and the awful World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South African Jews reacted angrily to Kasrils’s effort.
I found myself caught in the middle. I had rented a room with a Muslim family in a Muslim area—partly out of economic necessity, party out of cultural curiosity. I was also involved with the Jewish community, leading Orthodox services at a local congregation. I tried to convince Kasrils to change his declaration, then feuded with him publicly as he persisted with his attacks on Israel and the Jewish community.
What alarmed me most about the debate was the willful ignorance of the facts among Kasrils and his supporters. To the far Left, truth and right did not matter. What defined morality was the perceived position of each side within a global system. Though outnumbered by its enemies, Israel was a strong military ally of the United States and therefore could do no right, just as the Palestinians could do no wrong.
I was contemplating a return to the USA or a new adventure elsewhere when I received a call from the office of the leader of South Africa’s “official” opposition party, Tony Leon. Tony had seen a few of my articles in local papers—notably, an op-ed in which I applied two months of research to explaining the differences between South Africa’s negotiated democracy and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
I was offered a job as Tony’s speechwriter, and I accepted immediately. What better way to learn about South Africa’s fascinating new democracy than to experience it firsthand? As I churned out speeches and articles from my small office in the South African parliament, and watched the battle of ideas and tactics on the floor of the National Assembly, my views on politics and public policy began to crystallize.
Tony’s party, the Democratic Alliance, stood for free markets, civil liberties, and the rule of law and the constitution. In American terms, it would be roughly equivalent to Bill Clinton’s New Democrats or to Reagan’s Republicans without the component of social conservatism (though the party’s base was predominantly Christian, it did not take formal positions on abortion, gay marriage, or the death penalty).
Tony believed strongly in two ideas in particular. One was opposition to collective guilt. It was true that whites in general had benefited from apartheid at the expense of blacks. But not every white South African had been a perpetrator, and not every black South African had been a victim. Without a strong notion of individual justice, there would be no end to collective retribution, no forgiveness, and no progress. The other idea was constitutionalism—or, more precisely, the checks on majority power that South Africa’s constitution provided. In principle, South Africa’s constitution created several institutions intended to restrain the power of the ruling majority in parliament. In practice, the ruling majority simply appointed its own members to head those institutions. Watching Tony defend his ideas against overwhelming political odds was an inspiration.
When I returned to the United States, I still thought of myself as a Democrat. I had never voted Republican, though I had been strongly tempted to do so in 2004 and I knew that my views on the economy and the war on terror more closely matched those of the GOP. I enrolled in Harvard Law School and was elected in my first year to be my section’s representative to the school’s Democrat-affiliated organization.
I realized right away that I had little in common with my fellow Democrats. Either I had changed during my time abroad, or the party had shifted radically Leftward in the time I was away—or both. Regardless, we were often at odds. On one occasion, when I was arguing against a hasty withdrawal from Iraq and for the need to send more troops, a friend looked at me and asked: “Are you sure you’re a Democrat?”
I can remember the moment I knew that I wasn’t. I was in my civil procedure class, sitting in the back row, watching my classmates watch late results from the 2006 midterm elections on their laptops as we all pretended to take notes. I remember the excitement that swept the room when the New York Times Web site announced that the Democrats had, in fact, won control of the Senate. I was dismayed. Nancy Pelosi and her crew, I felt, stood for nothing. They had no ideas, no policy alternatives, except rabid hostility to George W. Bush. My father, a man of staunchly independent temperament, advised me to wait and see what the new Democrat majority would accomplish. I predicted they would accomplish exactly nothing—not even for their most devoted followers, seeking merely to score political points for two years.
I wandered in the wilderness of political independence for a year or so. I entertained the idea of writing speeches for Barack Obama, whom I imagined as an independent political spirit from my home state. I began to question such thoughts after reading his second book, The Audacity of Hope, and finding it a profound disappointment. He could articulate both sides of every issue, but invariably chose the wrong one. Meanwhile, I marveled at the popularity of Left-wing ideas at the law school. People were less interested in the law itself than in what the law could be used to do, in an activist sense. Few were skeptical about the role of government—partly because many planned to run it. I took comfort in the classics, which I studied with Harvey Mansfield at the College—making up for what I had missed as an undergraduate.
I did not take the final step of becoming a Republican for quite some time. I was hampered by my Democrat past and by the stigma that haunts any party that champions the right of individuals to succeed, and the right of successful individuals to keep more of what they have. To be Republican, in the imagination of urban popular culture, is to be rich, white, and male—and to be suspected of the concomitant sins of greed, racism, and sexism.
I found an unlikely figure leading me to the GOP: John McCain. I had long admired him, even when I was a Democrat, for what I perceived as his political courage, his ability to say and do what was right even when it was not what was popular. After the election, it seemed clear to many Republicans that McCain’s potential to attract Democrats, as a moderate, had been an illusion. I suppose I was one of the few, then.
But it wasn’t McCain’s moderation that drew me to him as a candidate, and to the Republican Party as a new political home. It was his support for the surge in Iraq, the additional twenty thousand troops deployed in 2007 to reinforce coalition forces and ultimately to rout al-Qaeda. McCain defended his views when even Republicans who had supported the war were backing away from it. I respected that, and agreed.
Once I decided to support McCain, and to volunteer for him—lending my efforts as a volunteer speechwriter for the national campaign and going door-to-door in New Hampshire—I allowed myself to embrace openly the Republican Party itself. The feeling was one of relief. Once I got over the reaction of my peers— “You’re the first Republican I’ve ever met,” was a typical response at Harvard—the rest was easy. Gone were the restlessness and self-doubt I had felt as a Democrat, and which I believe many of my friends on the Left still feel. My political beliefs no longer felt at odds with the realities of the world around me. And I did away with the nagging, debilitating sense of guilt that accompanies Left-wing politics in general, which, in my experience, functions as more of a faith movement than the supposedly religious Right.
My wife traveled the same road with me. We had met in Tony Leon’s office, where she had been working for a few months before enrolling as a Harvard undergraduate—an intern romance with a happy ending! Her mother, Rhoda Kadalie, had been one of South Africa’s foremost antiapartheid activists and had been appointed by Nelson Mandela to the country’s Human Rights Commission. She later resigned in protest against the ruling party’s refusal to investigate its own shortcomings. Julia’s great-grandfather, Clements Kadalie, had been the first black trade-unionist in Africa. It was a long legacy of activism whose enduring theme was the importance of principle over partisanship. I followed Julia back to Harvard, where we cultivated a romance that was also an intertwining of political ideas and religious faith. We went door-to-door together for the McCain-Palin ticket in the countryside of New Hampshire, where we were greeted with relief by residents hitherto besieged by Obama canvassers. Our work together in that lost but worthy cause cemented our shared political commitments.
Once I became open about my political loyalties in that 2008 election—Sarah Palin button and all—I found myself becoming more open about other beliefs as well. I had long been keeping the Jewish Sabbath, keeping a kosher home, and putting on tefillin in the mornings when I could manage the time. I began wearing a yarmulke as well, an outward sign of faith and identity. I felt at peace with myself in general.
What I was not happy about was the result of the 2008 election and its aftermath. I saw in Barack Obama’s presidency the roots of a cult of personality. I recognized in the Democrats’ eager rush to consolidate political power, and to expand rapidly the role of the federal government in the American economy—a dangerous majoritarian impulse that our Constitution, and my experience in South Africa, warned against. Immediately after the election ended, I began writing down my thoughts about what had happened, and what it meant for the future of the United States and the world. The result of my efforts, which continued throughout the bitterly cold winter, was a book called Don’t Tell Me Words Don’t Matter: How Rhetoric Won the 2008 Presidential Election.
In the summer of 2009, I took the book on a tour around the country, just as town hall meetings were erupting in protest at the Democrats’ health care reform bill. The legislation sought to overhaul one-sixth of the nation’s economy, at a cost of well over a trillion dollars, accompanied by a new federal bureaucracy that would intrude into life-and-death decisions made between doctors and their patients. Americans suspected—quite rightly—that the bill was a “Trojan horse” to impose a “single-payer” system of socialized medicine. That, in turn, would be the gateway to other radical changes, designed to maximize Democrat control of the levers of power under the guise of social justice. In the wake of a bloated “stimulus” bill and a cap-and-trade bill that would damage American industry, it sparked an uprising.
In my travels, I spoke to hundreds of people who were outraged at the direction the country was moving in, and who shared a sense of urgency about the need to restore a balance in American politics. As the health care battle dragged on, and the deficit grew larger, and the White House insisted on unraveling the nation’s defenses against radical Islamic terror, more and more Americans began to feel the same.
When I returned home to Chicago, I attended the health care town hall meeting of my own congressional representative, Jan Schakowsky. She had stacked the event in advance with bused-in union members and activists from a group called Health Care for America Now (HCAN), who gathered outside the meeting long before the doors opened and filled the room before many local residents had begun to arrive.
A friend and I had brought a video camera, and taped HCAN organizers instructing their followers to block questions and to drown out opposing views. One of the organizers was HCAN’s state director, who also worked for Citizen Action Illinois, a Left-wing group in which Rep. Schakowsky served in an official advisory capacity. It seemed likely that she knew of and approved of the suppression of her constituents’ views. Citizen Action had, in fact, been founded by Rep. Schakowsky’s husband, Robert Creamer. He resigned in 1997 after being investigated for check-kiting at Citizen Action’s predecessor, Public Action. In 2006, he was convicted and sent to federal prison. There, he wrote a book that called for health care reform in 2009, and sketched a ten-point plan for carrying it out, which Democrats followed to the letter. The plan included creating an artificial sense of crisis about the health care system, demonizing private insurance, and rolling out a nationwide network of “grassroots” organizations to control public opinion.
After watching that plan unfold in my own hometown, I finally made the decision to run for Congress. I felt that our district deserved a representative who listened to the residents instead of lecturing us. It was a long-shot race in a district that hadn’t elected a Republican in decades. But I knew that the people of Chicago and Cook County were tired of being abused by the corrupt Democrat machine, now running the country as well as the city. More than that, I knew people wanted a fresh start, a reassurance that we could put old battles aside and return to the common-sense principles that built our city and our nation.
These were principles I had explored at Harvard, where at times I had felt I was expected to “unlearn” such notions. They were also principles I had explored through the test of experience and the heat of debate. And each new experience and debate—with Barney Frank, Jan Schakowsky, and beyond—has affirmed them.