Malcom Wallop Tells Conference of Conservatives:- "Republican Party in Default on Principles" Frontiers of Freedom Institute - An Address by Malcolm Wallop at 1997 Conservative Political Action ConferenceBefore this audience of conservatives, most of whom are Republicans, I would enjoy setting forth a conservative agenda for the Republican party. I would like to think that you could then put whatever insights I might give you to work for the Republican party. But I'm afraid that the most useful insight I can give you is that the Republican party seems well on the way to denying its conservative birthright, and that with every passing day you and I are becoming strangers to it.
The party's leadership seems determined to follow the disastrous example ofthe Canadian conservative party, which became afraid to challenge the socialists except with empty rhetoric, and which was entirely wiped out at the polls. But that's all right. Parties are born when they take up important tasks, and die when they let them drop. We cannot control the destiny of the Republican party. We can control the destiny of the American conservative movement - And conservatism is a permanent fixture of American life, because the American people always need some shield against overweening government. That is the kind of task around which we can build our lives.
But I want to impress upon you that the character of conservatism is not written in the stars. It is subject to change for the better or the worse. It could just as easily come to resemble more the small and mean minded thing we see nowadays in Europe than the conservatism of Reagan, Coldwater, Coolidge, Lincoln, Clay, the Adamses, and Washington. My task here today is to help clarify the difference between the kind of conservatism that made this country great and a Republican party so fearful of the shadow of principle that it is cowering before Bill Clinton. I suggest to you that Bill Clinton and all his works are examples of the difference between government as it has been practiced since the New Deal and the way of life established by the Founding fathers. The exposure of President Clinton's conversion of power into money is giving the conservative movement an historic opportunity to instruct itself and the country about the consequences of discretionary government power. The conservative movement dare not let it pass because it makes our point: Big government is corrupting America. It makes us poorer, deprives us of freedom and self-rule, sows strife among us, undermines our families, and debases our souls.
Let's first address the Republican default, then turn to the practical, everyday mission of American conservatism: to cut back the extent and power of government.
From the time of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican party has been a party of principle. The Democratic party lives now as it has lived for most of its history as a brokerage house for government favors. Lots of people make a living out of being Democrats. The teachers' unions, the government workers' unions, the abortion industry, and a host of well connected businesses, the kind who get the U.S. government to set up deals for them abroad or to tailor regulations for them - they make a living out of being Democrats. Very few people make a living out of being Republicans. Today, many of our party's leaders envy the Democrats' vast network of patronage, and they have begun using Republican presidential victories in the 80s and congressional victories in the 90s to try to set up shop like the Democrats.
In front of us all during the last campaign and now with the new Congress, Republican leaders are running away from the issues.
Nowhere was this clearer than in California, where the California Civil Rights Initiative, a reaffirmation of equality before the law, withstood a titanic campaign against it. It won by ten points, yet our Republican candidate, down by double digits, waited till the final week to associate himself with the issue, and then weakly. The Republican leadership's unwillingness to ride a horse that was obviously heading for victory, a horse that was so rightly its own, indicts its elementary political competence, as well as its commitment to conservative principles. Adding symbolic insult to injury, the speaker decided to have as his guest to the State ofthe Union not Ward Connerly but Jesse Jackson - someone who stands for group rights over individual rights, who heads a federally financed patronage network, and who is supporting the proposition that the judiciary can overturn the result of the California referendum.
After the election it became clear that Senate Republicans would not do what they had in their power to do: refuse to seat Mary Landrieu, elected in Louisiana with the votes ofpeople long dead. Would it have been unpopular to say, "Senate Republicans will have nothing to do with electoral fraud. No one denies that Landrieu got graveyard votes. The argument that it's "only a little corruption," stinks. We will honor only the results of clean elections. If the state of Louisiana wants two Senators, let it run a clean runoff." The American people would have applauded. And how delightful it would have been to hear the Democratic party defend a little corruption!
Our leaders seem tacitly to accept the liberals' premise that the voters disapprove of the conservative vision of American society, that piety, propriety, responsibility, standing for the rights of citizens and families against bureaucratic encroachment amount to extremism. So the Republican leadership now presses upon us an agenda best characterized as Rockefeller Republicanism - fiscal stringency combined with claims of superior competence in management, and guilty protestations of moderation.
On top of this they timidly set a veneer of procedural, contentless conservatism: The balanced budget amendment instead of a commitment to cut taxes; the line item veto instead of commitments to cut entitlements, and de-fund leftist advocacy groups; propping up a ponzi scheme going broke instead of real efforts to privatize social security; a declaratory Defend America act instead of a bill to build real missile defenses; Republican concern for the environment instead of reforming environmental laws so that they don't steal people's property; term limits, instead of vigorous campaigns on issues. And then they wonder why Republican voters have lost their enthusiasm and why Bill Clinton, that thinly veiled blob of fraud, was able to cast himself as the defender of families, religion, indeed of "our values" and was able to cast the Republicans as dark forces threatening America.
On election day, according to exit polls, some 25% of self-described conservatives and a big majority of self-described moderates, most of whom share the cultural premises of conservatism, voted for Clinton. I stress that Clinton was able to occupy this conservative ground only because the Republicans vacated it. The cynicallly counterfeit character of Clinton's appeal to cultural conservatism could have been blasted away by a single picture of a partial birth abortion, or by a pointed reference to Romer V. Evans, or by a real commitment to tax reduction. But the Republican candidate and party seemed afraid of their own issues. The reason why leaders flock to contentless issues is precisely that they spare them the trouble of taking on real interests and changing real habits.
The American conservative tradition, which began with Washington and Adams, is founded on human dignity and a concern for character. No phrase came from Washington more often than "We have a national character to establish." Following Aristotle, Cato the elder, Livy, and Montesquieu, George Washington repeated that the Republic could only be built on the firm foundations of private morality. John Adams surveyed the world's peoples and found that only in America were there the habits that under girded freedom in a few ancient republics. The Founding Fathers crafted our institutions, and limited the power of government to encourage those habits. The government established by the Founders did not make us moral. But it took pains to be on the right side of the great moral questions.
Now let me say a few words about our historic opportunity to make clear which way of life we want to foster and what way of life we abhor.
Republicans did themselves and the country a disservice in 1996 by talking about the "Character Issue" without ever mentioning Bill Clinton's specific misdeeds and above all without explaining what about them is wrong. They failed to make the essential political point: The conversion of power into money, or sex, in a word, corruption, is the inevitable result of big government. Corruptionn can be fought only by restricting the opportunities to profit from it. The late Christopher Lasch wrote that whereas the American dream once was that any person, no matter his circumstances, could make his way without having to curry anyone's favor, now that dream consists of the opportunity to rise out of the class of the ruled, into the class of the rulers. We conservatives want to do away with Bill Clinton's America, where people must wheedle and pay for privileges and to stay out of trouble with the government. We want to bring back the Founders' America of freedom, responsibility, and, yes, virtue.
Today government at all levels taxes, spends, and regulates roughly twice as much as when I grew up. It touches every aspect of our lives, and harms just about everything it touches. It will fine you for not wearing a seat belt, but will not protect your life from criminals. It will deliver contraceptives to your children, but cannot deliver the mail. It prohibits a Jewish community in New York from having a school district--who knows what politically incorrect things their kids might learn from reading the Bible-while it forces the culture of abortion on the whole country. In the name of racial equality, the government forces us to discriminate on the basis of race. Once upon a time our government was a bulwark against domestic enemies. Now big government has become our chief domestic enemy.
That is why there is really only one issue, of which all others are subsets. Who will stand on the side of the American people against their government gone bad? Make no mistake that this country is rapidly dividing into two sets of people with two distinctive ways of life. One set has behind it the full power of Bill Clinton's corrupt state of clients and patrons. The other set that tries to live virtuously and by their own hard work is looking for political leadership. It is up to us to protect the vast majority of the American people against a government that is undermining our capacity for self government, our prosperity, our families, our spiritual lives, and even our capacity for self defense.
With each passing year, America resembles less and less what the Founders bequeathed us and looks more and more like the countries our immigrant forefathers tried to get away from. This is happening in large part because the ruling classes who run our government, the universities, the media, the entertainment industry, the arts, have gathered unto themselves enormously powerful means of governance.
They detest our patriotism. They dislike our people's prosperity. It is their policy that we consume too much of the World's resources.
But whether the excuse is environmentalism or poverty or crime, the recipe is always the same. Take money away from independent working people and give it to the favorites of the ruling class.
Of course, this is a recipe for economic decline. Nowhere in the writings of the Founding Fathers is there anything about managing the economy. Our Founders wanted to promote prosperity. So they set about ensuring that government would be small, frugal, impartial, and moral. We became rich because government, in Jefferson's words, would not "take from the mouth of labor the bread it had earned." If we abandon the Founders' mores, no economic policy can keep us out of the poorhouse.
The ruling class dislikes our tradition of self-government. They equate local control of crime with brutality and racism. Local zoning is racism. Local control of schools is racist. We are all racists---except they. They have turned laws that prohibit racial discrimination into mandates for racial preferences in everything from school admissions to hiring and firing. A whole industry has grown up to administer this American form of apartheid.
The ruling class doesn't care about public safety. Having made it very difficult for states and localities to police themselves, having left ordinary citizens with no choice but to protect themselves as best they can, they now try to take our guns away. In fact they blame us and our guns for crime. This is so wrong that it cannot be an honest mistake.
The ruling class does not care that our children are being diseducated, that schools are becoming factories of ignorance and decay. Every proposal regarding education that has come out of the establishment calls for more money and more union control. Over the past thirty years we have tripled the amount of money that we pay to the public schools per pupil, but not only has educational performance dropped like a rock everywhere, it has dropped the most where we spent most.
Above all, the people who run this country have deep contempt for the culture on which it rests. They tell us we are zealots if we talk about social issues like abortion, education, homosexuality, race relations, and the role of religion in public life. Because liberals have failed the country on these issues, they would rather we not talk about these important matters. I say we must.
It is all too easy to list the ways in which the government is providing incentives to break up families, to put generations and races at war with one another, to devalue honest work, to dumb-down and coarsen children, for bureaucrats to seek their own interest, for businesses to court regulators, to seek protection, and the public be damned.
In this period of capitulation and bewilderment, it would be easy to wring our hands and say that it's all too difficult to know what to do. But it isn't. It's easy. The tools and policies are right in front of us.
We can and should end welfare---not "as we know it." Just end it, period. Charity for those who deserve it is something with a long and honorable history. But the short history of welfare tells us that it does no good, only harm, and that the current touted reform bill has enough loopholes that administrators and recipients will be able to do business pretty much as before.
We can and should privatize Social Security---obviously people who are already retired should get every penny already promised. But just imagine if every penny deducted from us henceforth went into individual retirement accounts of our choosing. We could all look forward to a lot more money, and the government would have a lot less to spend from day to day.
For the monsters of Medicare and Medicaid, we can and should substitute individual medical savings accounts, backed up by vouchers.
We can and should be rid of the monstrous educational establishment by giving parents vouchers for whatever amount any level of government taxes them to educate their children.
We can and should re-establish the line between what is your or my property and what is the Government's property by replacing the failed Endangered Species Act with conservation programs that work because they do not create total economic conflict between species and owners.
We can and should be rid of the most noxious parts of the university world by cutting all direct aid to higher education and substituting tuition scholarships to individual students, which they must repay. Where this scheme has been tried, in Chile, students deserted rotten professors in droves.
We can be rid of the terrible bureaucracy of the IRS, and of all the distortive inequities of the current system just by instituting a flat tax.
We can restore self-government by reducing the power of the federal courts to review the acts of state courts and the enactments of citizens. The Founding Fathers wrote Article 3 Section 2 of the Constitution precisely to make sure that the judiciary would be, in Alexander Hamilton's words, "the least dangerous branch." Now that the courts have become a clear and present danger to our democracy, it is time to use the Founders' remedy.
We can and we should thwart the administration's devilish and dangerous Chemical Weapons Convention and just say no to dishonest diplomacy that makes our citizens feel secure while their danger increases.
Shrinking the government would yield many specific benefits. But these are not the main reasons why we should cut government.
We want to cut taxes not primarily because doing so will put more money in our pockets, but because it will put the means of freedom in our hands. We want to cut the government's power to grant privilege not primarily because privilege is economically inefficient, but because we don't want to be a nation of favor-seekers. We want to keep and bear our guns not because we want to shoot somebody, but because we have a right and duty to take care of ourselves. Moral leadership, today as in 1789, does not mean that the President of the United States forces anyone to go to church or synagogue. But it does mean that by word and deed he leads the country in giving unto God the things that are God's.
The dignity of citizenship has been co-opted by laws and rules. These confine and direct the lives of Americans away from liberty, faith, and prosperity, into behavior defined by the ruling classes as acceptable to them. Thus denied the gifts endowed by our Creator, we become sheep to be shepherded.
My friends and colleagues, we cannot succeed by proposing to take over management of the redistributionist state from the Democrats and pat ourselves on the back for doing it more efficiently. We must attack it root and branch. We cannot prevail by continuing to hand out the favors and the goodies, only not so many as the Democrats hand out.
At this time when all too many Republican leaders have lost their way and don't know what to do except capitulate to forces of big government, it is up to conservative activists in this room to provide the nerve and backbone that the leadership so noticeably lacks.
I do not say this casually. The organization I founded when I retired from the Senate in 1995, Frontiers of Freedom, supported any number of conservative initiatives in the last Congress. But when the Republican leadership strayed, we did not hesitate in crossing swords, even with the Speaker of the House.
And so I say to you, where does the strength come from to be a vigilant conservative? From:
The dignity of citizenship
the passion of patriotism
the honor of freedom
the security of property
the joy of opportunity in a free society
the nurture of family
and the love of God
These things belong to tomorrow no less than the past. Rise up my friends and demand that if they will not lead us THERE...Then get out of the way because that is our destination.
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