June 2005

The Future of Conservatism

For fifty years, the conservative movement has slowly but successfully changed the terms of debate within American politics by articulating a clear and compelling vision for America's government and civic culture. National Review, the Goldwater movement, Ronald Reagan's presidency, the Contract with America, and the 2004 elections have helped give conservatives even greater representation within Washington and the state capitals. But the question now is: how does conservatism move forward? What needs to be done? How can the conservative movement continue its fifty-year record of encouraging greater freedom at home and abroad? These and other questions were the topic of a June 28th AEI panel discussion with former Speaker of the House and current AEI senior fellow Newt Gingrich and Congressman Mike Pence (R-Ind.), chairman of the Republican Study Committee.

The Honorable Mike Pence (R-Ind.)
U.S. House of Representatives

The conservative movement is at a crossroads in America. As the Republican Party did forty years ago, as was then said by Ronald Reagan, we have come to another time for choosing whether we are committed to the ideals of limited government, fiscal discipline, and traditional moral values, or whether we will continue to sacrifice those principles on the altar of preserving our governing majority.

The 2004 election was a referendum on conservative principles. The president was supposed to lose, but his reelection was an endorsement of the conservative agenda on the national level. Today in Congress there is a new generation of men and women who aspire to do the work that the American people elect conservatives to do, to lead this country on behalf of limited government and traditional moral values. But, there is still work to be done.

Despite the enormous conservative achievements of the past four years, I see troubling signs that the ship of conservative governance is off course and veering into the dangerous and uncharted waters of big government Republicanism. Ronald Reagan said famously, "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem." But many Republicans today see government increasingly as the solution to every social ill.

Our party and its rising generation of new leaders face an age-old choice between the belief in limited government and tradition and the siren song of the central planner who says big government is good government if it is our government.

So how do we find our way forward in this new governing majority? I believe that conservatives in the twenty-first must start from what we know to be true about the nature of government, and then we will not lose our way. Conservatives know that government that governs least governs best. Conservatives know as government expands, freedom contracts. Conservatives know that government should never do for a person what they can and should do for themselves. And conservatives know that societies are judged by how they deal with the most vulnerable--the unborn, the aged, the infirmed, and the disabled.

First, conservatives must be a movement dedicated to the principles of freedom and liberty, and conservatives must restore freedom to our campaign finance reform laws. Congress must recognize that the only proper answer to inequities in the political economy of a free society is more freedom, not less freedom.

Second, conservatives must again embrace the principles of limited government by undoing the entitlement aspects of the Medicare prescription drug bill. It should not be a one-size-fits-all program that provides free prescription benefits for every senior regardless of their income.

Third, conservatives must undo the fundamental expansion of the federal government's role in our local schools by reforming the No Child Left Behind Act and embracing the principle that education is and should always should be a state and local function.

Fourth, conservatives must be prepared to rally support in Congress and throughout the country for the president's agenda, where it conforms with the ideals of limited government. Modernizing Social Security, overhauling the Internal Revenue Code, and reforming the legal system all reflect a conservative commitment to limited government.
 
Fifth, House conservatives must put our fiscal house in order. That means passing additional tax cuts to ensure continued economic growth, passing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, achieving fundamental budget process reform, and being prepared to uphold a presidential veto on a spending bill that exceeds the budget.

Lastly, Congress must take action to free the American people from the cultural consequences of an activist federal court that would impose their view of morality, patriotism, and the recognition of our most cherished institutions and symbols on our communities and our families. We must lay the groundwork to defend a strict constructionist nominee to the Supreme Court. We must pass the Federal Marriage Amendment by sufficient majorities to send it to the states, and we must pass additional legislative limitations on abortion, human cloning, and destructive embryonic research.

So these are some suggestions, and I simply believe that they represent the very core elements of how the conservative movement can find its way back to those energetic days of early 1995 or even 1988, when it was in its ascendancy.

Newt Gingrich
AEI

It is important for conservatives to have a sense of where you are operating from because there is an underlying, perennial sort of pessimism at the core of conservatism, some of which is valid; that is, evil is always apparently available. People are always capable of being stupid. Those who would like control over your life are always trying to get it. It is not irrational to have some sense of concern.

We are starting a discussion from a base of enormous strength. This president has great strengths in many areas, and in some areas he has weaknesses. That was also true of Ronald Reagan. Some of the things President Bush has done are equal to anything Ronald Reagan did. The moral strength he has had in saying terrorism is an act of war was a fundamental change from the liberals who spent a decade trying to deal with terrorism through the FBI, the courts, and really good psychologists. They wanted to understand our opponents. Bush just wants to defeat them.
 
Despite the current doldrums over Social Security, the Democratic Party and liberalism in general are running an enormous risk of losing an entire generation if they continue to be stubbornly opposed to personal Social Security savings accounts. I think the cost to them in 2008 will be incalculable, because they are becoming the anti-young party.
 
We have three huge challenges: a challenge of performance; a challenge of production; and a challenge of style.

We under perform politically; that is, there is a huge gap between our natural ideological majority and our partisan majority, and we under perform in terms of change. The performance challenge is a very simple test for Republicans. People have only one question for a governing majority: are you delivering? They do not want to hear about ideology or about Senate rules. If you are in the majority, you should deliver.

Therefore, the first job for us to recognize is that we have to continually meet a performance test. Now, it does not have to be 100 percent. But people have to have a general notion that things are better off because of our performance than they would be from somebody else's performance or they will fire incumbents, and they will fire them in September and October, even if all of the incumbent consultants will be happy in July and August. That was the 1994 election, as well as the 1980 election.

Second, production. The Left has had a very long tradition going back to the late nineteenth century of offering a free lunch. Somebody somewhere is rich. You should have their money. Governing majorities create lunches that are worth working for. We have to go back to being what we were as a governing majority between 1860 and 1929. It is a majority that said our job is to craft public policy in such a way that you will end up thinking this is a contract worth enforcing because you are better off with that contract, so you get the right to buy a house. You get the right to have your own pension. You have the right to control your own health care. You get to make choices about your life. You know that if you are dissatisfied with your child's education, you can actually change it as opposed to being told by the school board, state superintendent, and state legislature why they are helpless, and by the secretary of education in Washington who does not even know where your town is but issued the regulations that control your school board. I mean see you really want to get back to a system where you are in control of your life to a remarkable degree within a framework which protects you.

The last is style. People are sick of a style in which both parties behave like they are in the minority. The Democrats are fighting as they should. They are the minority. We are fighting as though we are still in the minority and are out of sync with the country right now, because stylistically what the country wants is a governing majority that is comfortable, relaxed, and says we are doing the right thing for these four reasons.
 
Governing is many orders of magnitude more complex than campaigning. Campaigning is simple. People want leaders who govern to feel different, because they should govern the whole country are leading the entire system. It is a different style. The key to governing is about habits. And here is my simple model: You can design a bridge or you can design an airplane. Do not confuse the two. Bridges almost never fly. Airplanes cannot carry heavy vehicles across a river for very long. They break.

Two examples of confusion on the Right: First, having an American administration in Baghdad was an airplane that was never going to fly. The minute you wake up and hear somebody in a foreign language speaking to you on television, do you say “thank God I am liberated,” or do you complain about the occupation? It was a profound strategic mistake, and we have to be honest about it. And now, we are recovering from it.

Second, the current Social Security effort is a bridge. The president is perfectly correct morally. It is an act of great courage, but you cannot simultaneously have a debate about benefit cuts, argue about solvency in thirty years, and get personal Social Security accounts. It is more than the system can bear. We must back off of every debate except personal accounts. Go straight for personal accounts, and we can win a very substantial victory.

We have inherited from the Left a bureaucracy, regulations, culture, and personnel that are antithetical to where we want to go. But now we preside over them. Where we want to go is a very different world. We want a world where local parents engage with the local system, and make real decisions about education with real authority.
 
The longer it takes us to start figuring out how to create the earned lunch, the more likely we are to raise taxes and cut benefits and end up in European-style mess.

AEI intern Peter Oppenheim prepared this summary.