Defeating Big Government Socialism will be a daunting task. It has been developing and gaining power as a political theology within the American left since the 1960s. At this point its disciples make up the majority of our elite, media, and academic classes. They are accustomed to power, and they won’t give it up quietly.
However, the American experience has been one of endless persistence. Opening up the wilderness was a constant process of learning by trial and error. Creating the wealthiest, most technologically advanced country in history was the result of constant persistence. Without persistence, nothing important can be achieved.
I may be biased about the importance of persistence because I had to run three times for Congress before I got elected. I lost in 1974 during Watergate and in 1976 when Georgia governor Jimmy Carter headed the Democratic ticket. I finally won in 1978. That was a five-year project (about the same length of time it took me to earn a PhD in European history from Tulane University).
When I got to Congress, I suggested to the House GOP leadership that since House Republicans had been in the minority for twenty-four years, it would be good to have a plan to become a majority. They thought that was a good idea and created a planning committee for a majority as part of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Then they asked me to chair the committee even though I had not yet been sworn in (it was December 1978). Little did I know that we would wage seven losing campaigns from 1980 to 1992 before finally winning in 1994 with the Contract with America.
That sixteen-year effort led us to teach all our activist members the concept of cheerful persistence—which we still uphold as an operating principle at Gingrich 360. We asserted that winning the majority was going to take a long, persistent effort—and that being cheerful during the persistence was the only way to attract more people to the party and minimize anger and conflict during periods of defeat or frustration.
Persistence is not a new trait for Americans. To win their independence, Americans persisted in an eight-year war against the most powerful empire in the world. When you consider that as many as one-third of the colonists were loyalists favoring the British government, and that another one-third tried to remain neutral and avoid involvement, the determination and force of will of the one-third who rebelled and fought for independence and freedom becomes even more impressive.
Lincoln had to endure a terrible civil war with more dead than all other American wars combined up through Korea. He initially had weak (or even bad) generals—some of whom did not want the Union to win. He had to keep the North unified and determined to save the union even though every town and village was losing young men in horrifying numbers.
Lincoln had to endure hostile, sometimes vicious newspaper attacks, congressional attacks on his wife’s spending for furniture for the White House, and days of anti-draft riots in New York City (troops who had just won the Battle of Gettysburg were sent into our largest city to suppress the riots).
Through all this, he not only persisted but he retained a spirit of reconciliation strong enough to lead to the amazingly generous and spiritual second inaugural address. And then he was assassinated.
No persistence, no free America. No persistence, no saved American Union. The same principle of persistence applies to other aspects of American life.
As I previously mentioned, Thomas Edison had more than one thousand efforts to find the right material for the electric lightbulb. He once said to an assistant, “We have not had failures. We have successfully eliminated thousands of potential materials.”
Henry Ford labored for years to build a mass-produced car that could lower the price and make automobiles available to virtually every American—a full generation before the same opportunity was developed in Europe.
The Wright Brothers kept going back to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, year after year and undertook five hundred attempts to fly (at about one dollar per experiment). Then, on December 17, 1903, they flew for the first time. They had tinkered with and modified the plane repeatedly. They had studied birds. They went to Kitty Hawk because it had the most consistent updraft coming off the ocean of any place in the United States (courtesy of information from the U.S. Weather Service, which was the government’s only contribution to their success).
The Wright Brothers’ first flight was shorter than the wingspan of a Boeing 747. It was downhill and slow enough that one brother ran alongside the plane to make sure it did not flip over and kill the pilot. Four years later, the Wright Brothers flew around the island of Manhattan and more than a million people saw an airplane for the first time. That was how fast the technology was progressing once the initial flight had proven that the concept worked.
Whether you want to be a professional golfer, a great ballerina, a first-class surgeon, a first-generation success at business, or a full-time writer, persistence is necessary and unavoidable. It is also necessary to save our country from Big Government Socialism.
No matter what you do for a living, remind yourself and your team every day that anything worth accomplishing requires persistence. Teach your team to think of challenges and opportunities rather than problems. Grow an acceptance in your team and yourself that work and persistence are the heart of success. Teach everyone to respond to suggestions with “yes, we could do that if” rather than “no, we can’t do that because.” The difference in creativity and productivity will be amazing. Recognize, encourage, and reward those who persist.
The second vital constant in the American experience is patriotism.
Surviving in a dangerous world requires a strong sense of identity and a willingness to support the group whose success and safety is the necessary requirement for your success and safety. Since America is an invented country—with opportunities for everyone from every culture to become an American—the need to develop a patriotic spirit is especially strong.
The Founding Fathers knew that the new country on the edge of the Atlantic seaboard had to build a strong sense of identity and patriotism if it was going to survive in a dangerous world. Countries such as Britain, France, and Spain were much richer and more powerful than the new American republic.
Furthermore, the powerful European countries all worried about the danger a successful American republic of freedom posed to their own aristocratic systems of power. Even when the French revolutionaries overthrew their king, they saw America as a pawn in the struggle for power in Europe.
Benjamin Franklin captured this spirit of the importance of patriotism when he said, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Throughout America’s first decades, there were constant efforts to manipulate the new republic and subvert its government so it would be an ally to one side or the other. It was in response to these constant efforts at subversion that President George Washington in his Farewell Address warned against foreign entanglements. He knew that the new nation had to be careful not to get caught up in European wars.
The need to identify as Americans was made even greater by history and geography. Historically, Americans had thought of themselves as colonists. When they began to think about independence, they tended to identify with their states. Westerners were not sure they had any great common interest with the East. That led early in Washington’s first term to the Whiskey Rebellion, as farmers in western Pennsylvania refused to pay the new tax on whiskey. Washington imposed national unity by calling out a large army of militia and planning to lead it himself until the farmers backed down.
The third vice president of the United States, Aaron Burr, was engaged in treason that would have dismembered the western part of the then United States (the western part being the Mississippi River valley, since Jefferson had not yet bought the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon). Westerners worried about British backing for Native Americans engaged in constant warfare against the encroaching settlers. New Englanders worried about trade with England and the Caribbean. Southerners worried about protecting slavery and ensuring that their cotton could be sold overseas. The middle states worried about manufacturing and banking. There were a lot of good reasons to be concerned about national unity and making sure America was not pulled apart by various competing interests.
In our three major wars (the Civil War, World War I, and World War II) there was a deep, determined effort by each of the respective presidents (Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt) to ensure that the American people (in Lincoln’s case the Union) were unified and behind the war. In all three cases, the presidents moved slowly and cautiously until opponents made the war unavoidable and convinced the large majority of Americans we had to fight.
The depth of patriotism in the North growing out of the crucible of bloodletting that was the Civil War was captured in the December 1863 short story by Edward Everett Hale, “The Man Without a Country.” It is the story of a man who was tried for treason along with former vice president Burr. In a moment of self-righteous anger, the man shouts in court, “I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” When he is convicted, the judge sentences him to spend the rest of his life on American naval vessels, with everyone instructed to never mention the United States to him. Over the course of a long life aboard a variety of ships, he becomes a total patriot and gathers up all the news he can about America. “The Man Without a Country” hit the mood of the moment and became wildly popular. Given the brutal human cost of preserving the Union, millions wanted to believe in patriotism and to condemn those who were not patriotic.
In the 1930s, the House Un-American Activities Committee was created to stop the Nazi effort to undermine American unity. It would become famous after World War II for its concern about communism, but the committee originated to deal with the real subversive efforts that came from Nazi Germany. During the Cold War, there was a continuous effort to maximize American patriotism and make it difficult for the Soviet Union and its communist allies to penetrate and undermine American patriotism.
One of the most worrying things about the current era is the eruption against patriotism (taking a knee rather than standing during the playing of the national anthem, refusing to say the pledge of allegiance, and athletes refusing to carry the American flag at the Olympics). Perhaps more distressing is the open preference of many big businesses and billionaires for Chinese profits over American patriotism.
If the United States loses its patriotic commitment to being one nation, there is a real danger our enemies will manipulate and subsidize the radical Marxist factions to tear our country apart and leave us helpless to defend ourselves.
President Reagan had been in the last U.S. Army Reserve cavalry unit in the 1930s, and then served in World War II. He was deeply involved in fighting against communism and the Soviet Union from 1947 until the Soviet Union collapsed and disappeared. He felt deeply the importance of informed, educated patriotism.
In Reagan’s 1989 Farewell Address, he focused on patriotic education:
Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in Presidential farewells, and I’ve got one that’s been on my mind for some time. But oddly enough it starts with one of the things I’m proudest of in the past eight years: the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism. This national feeling is good, but it won’t count for much, and it won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.
An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea, or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.
But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs production [protection].
So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, 4 years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, “We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.1
Reagan was right, and a generation later the challenge of sustaining an informed and wise patriotism is greater than ever.
In our daily life we have an absolute obligation to nourish and foster patriotism. We should stand for the national anthem, and we should encourage it being played at every symbolic moment. We should encourage saying the pledge of allegiance. We should insist that schools teach American history accurately, without editorializing political motives. We should honor and encourage those who risk their lives to protect our country from abroad and here at home. We should encourage a spirit of patriotic community from the family and neighborhood through the school board and the local government to the state and federal government.
We should take on those in the news media and academia who denigrate, undermine, and repudiate patriotism. We should hold government to account at all levels and eliminate rules and regulations that are unpatriotic. When necessary, we should remove government officials—appointed and elected—who are determined to undermine and weaken patriotism.
In this book, I tried to illustrate that Big Government Socialism is a threat to our future as a country that must be defeated for our survival. I tried to give the examples we can take from history and apply them to this effort. But before any of these ideas can be put into place, we must commit to remaining persistent and patriotic.
If we do not love our country and lack the commitment to nurture and strengthen it, there will be no American future worth saving.