Reagan’s December Declaration: GOP "Not a Fraternal Order"
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Ronald Reagan would have loved Marco Rubio.
Not to mention Pat Toomey.
Rubio, the current State House Speaker is the conservative
challenger to liberal Republican Governor Charlie Crist’s U.S.
Senate bid in next year’s Florida GOP primary. Toomey, famously,
came within a whisker of beating Republican U.S. Senator Arlen
Specter in the 2004 Pennsylvania primary when Toomey was serving
as a Republican Congressman from Allentown. The challenge was
renewed for 2010. Taking a look at polls that showed Pennsylvania
Republicans finally fed up with his liberal views, the final
straw being a vote in favor of the Obama stimulus package,
Specter chose to switch to the Democrats — guaranteeing Toomey
the GOP Senate nomination.
The challenge to GOP liberals by GOP conservatives has set off
the usual teeth-grinding about demands for party “purity.”
Snapped Michigan Republican Congressman Thaddeus
McCotter to The
American
Spectator’s Jim
Antle recently: “I’ve seen the game of trying to purge
Republicans of those who are ‘RINOs’ or not pure enough…I have
one question: How’d that work out for us?”
Well, now that you mention it, pretty well, actually.
But let’s go back to if not to the beginning but the middle of
the beginning on this old chestnut of an argument.
The time? December, 1976. As the story opens on this fifteenth
day of the month, ten days before Christmas, the Republican Party
is at a crossroads. The dominant force in American politics for
generations since its beginning in the 1850’s when it came into
being around the premiere social issue of the day, the “right” to
own another human being — slavery — the GOP of 1976 is in
trouble.
How did it get here?
Up until 1932, as the late Jack Kemp loved to note, the
Republican Party was “the home of black Americans, the party of
Lincoln, of economic growth, of equal opportunity.” The so-called
“progressive movement” — really a rallying cry for economic
redistribution and the politics of envy — swept through the
nation in the form of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. While
liberal historians love to ignore the fact, Republican Herbert
Hoover was enamored of progressives and, unlike his conservative
predecessor Calvin Coolidge, considered himself to be one of
them. Coolidge took a dim view of Hoover, whom he had kept on as
Commerce Secretary in order to preserve a sense of stability
following the sudden death of President Harding. Later, Coolidge
would gripe that Hoover had spent their entire time together in
government giving Coolidge advice “all of it bad.”
In fact, Hoover was one of the first of what would become known
as the “me-too” Republicans, picking up on progressive movement
ideas of the late 1920s and early 1930s and saying “me too” –
only a little less so. Whether the issue was the historic Lincoln
beliefs in economic growth and equal opportunity, best expressed
in the 1920s by Coolidge’s Secretary of the Treasury Andrew
Mellon, or the idea of a permanent “gift tax” — Hoover was as
one with progressives, believing that there was only so much
wealth to go around and a bigger government had a distinct and
ever growing role in managing this wealth. In what would become a
familiar pattern with Republican liberals, he was Franklin
Roosevelt only less so.
As Amity Shlaes records in The Forgotten
Man:
Both preferred to control events and people. Both
underestimated the strength of the American economy. Both
doubted its ability to right itself in a storm. Hoover
mistrusted the stock market. Roosevelt mistrusted it more.
Roosevelt offered rhetorical optimism, but pessimism underlay
his policies. Though Americans associated Roosevelt with
bounty, his insistent emphasis on sharing — rationing, almost
— betrayed a conviction that the country had entered a
permanent era of scarcity. Both presidents overestimated the
value of government planning. Hoover, the Quaker, favored the
community over the individual. Roosevelt, the Episcopalian,
found laissez-faire economics immoral and disturbingly
un-Christian.
In one fashion or another, through Hoover’s election in
1928 on through to the mid-December of 1976, some variation of
this argument had gripped the Republican Party. A string of
me-too GOP presidential nominees had faced off against Democrats
using this argument to persuade the electorate — and failed
repeatedly. From Hoover himself in 1932 to Wendell Willkie in
1940, Thomas E. Dewey in 1944 and 1948, on through Eisenhower and
the Richard Nixon of 1960, only Eisenhower the World War II hero
had managed a win — a win for heroism, not moderation. Scores of
self-described “moderate Republicans” had won state and
congressional elections in this period, managing with a liberal
national press to give the impression that “me-tooism” was the
wave of the future in terms of building the GOP.
The argument finally sundered the GOP in 1964, with Arizona
conservative Barry Goldwater’s victory over GOP liberal New York
Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Reagan himself was launched
politically during this particular battle, his October, 1964
speech for nominee Goldwater electrifying the blossoming
conservative movement.
Nixon appeared to momentarily bridge the gap in 1968 –
presenting himself as a middle road between the views of now
Governor Reagan and Governor Rockefeller. Governing as a
moderate, Nixon still campaigned relentlessly as a red-meat
conservative, the Nixon campaign winning a landslide over liberal
Senator George McGovern in 1972 in part on charges the Democrat
was representing the party of “acid, abortion and amnesty.”
With the resignations of both Nixon and Vice President Agnew as
the 1976 campaign season loomed, Reagan, newly retired after two
successful terms as Governor of California, watched, appalled, as
the new GOP President Gerald Ford nominated Rockefeller as his
vice president and started marching the GOP along the same weary
and worn-out road to me-tooism. The gauntlet had been thrown, and
Reagan picked it up.
On one side in this showdown of the 1976 primary and convention
season were Ford and the moderates — epitomized by Rockefeller
and his fellow New Yorker, liberal Republican Senator Jacob
Javits — versus the conservatives as led by Reagan. Once again
the “conservatives can’t win” argument was trotted out. Once
again — although this time narrowly — the moderate candidate
(Ford, in this case) triumphed. And once again, the moderate
Republican nominee lost, this time to Democrat and liberal Jimmy
Carter.
By December 15, Reagan had more than had enough. Ford had
summoned Reagan, Rockefeller and Democrat-turned Republican John
Connally — the ex-Texas governor who had served Nixon as
Treasury Secretary — to the White House for a chat on the future
of the GOP. As liberals were gleefully planning the Carter
administration inaugural for the following month, President Ford
was trying his best to mend the internal fences of the GOP in
true moderate style. Who should be the new GOP chair, he wanted
to know? What changes in the party structure should be made.
Reagan quietly seethed. To him, the problem was not party
structure. It wasn’t this or that person sitting in the
chairman’s job. It was something else altogether. A handful of
days later, sitting in his Los Angeles office, Reagan sat down
with a reporter from the New York Times and gave
his answer to Ford, Rockefeller, and the party moderates who had
by now produced one losing presidential campaign after another
for 44 years.
The headline the next day was stark:
REAGAN URGES HIS PARTY TO SAVE ITSELF BY DECLARING ITS
CONSERVATIVE BELIEFS
With an accompanying picture of a relaxed and smiling Reagan, the
former governor made plain his answer to the question most
recently posed in The American Spectator
article
featuring Congressman McCotter. He answered by rejecting
the McCotter premise entirely, in fact turning it around. The way
to the future was not by catering to what we now call RINOs –
“Republicans in Name Only” like a Charlie Crist or Arlen Specter
today — or a Jacob Javits of yesterday. Reagan proposed
something else.
Instead of appealing to Democrats by becoming more liberal,
Reagan saw the answer as “courting conservatives who now call
themselves Democrats and independents.” Said Reagan, in words
that surely astonished the Times reporter:
“The former California Governor said that Republicans could be
saved from extinction only by acting quickly to assert the
party’s ideological identity. A declaration of conservative
beliefs, he said in an interview in his Los Angeles office, might
drive a number of Northern liberals out of the party, but that
loss would be more than offset by potential gains in the South
and West.”
Did this mean Reagan would support a third party, the reporter
asked?
“No!” was Reagan’s emphatic answer:
“The largest grouping of a common philosophy is to be found in
the Republican Party. Now, if that’s true, why do you risk
breaking it up to start all over again, because if a third
party is started, you know there are people who have a sense of
loyalty to the party who would not leave it.”“The Republican Party would not say 100 percent we are going to
move over to the new party. You would then break the single
biggest grouping of people with the common philosophy that you
have in the country. So we should take that as our starting
point and build upon it.”
So what would this Reagan-approach mean for RINOs? In December of
1976 that specifically meant New York’s liberal Republican
Senator and Rockefeller ally Jacob Javits, a leading “RINO” of
the day — the Arlen Specter or Charlie Crist, if you will.
Reagan was clear — and firm:
Senator Javits might have some problems staying within the
party. Again, however, we are not ushering anyone out of the
party. We are simply saying, “What does our party stand for?”
If the great majority agrees with the philosophy, and some say
it’s a philosophy they can’t go along with, that’s a decision
for every individual to make. A political party is not a
fraternal order. A party is something where people are bound
together by a shared philosophy.
On January 20, 1977, Jimmy Carter took the oath of office as the
39th president, settling down to the nitty-gritty of a liberal
administration whose guiding lights were economic scarcity,
cutting defense spending and a belief that Americans and the
world had an “inordinate fear” of Communism that could best be
resolved by accepting the permanent presence of the Soviet Union
and a Communist Eastern Europe.
Eleven days after Carter’s swearing-in, Reagan announced the
formation of what the Times called a “permanent
political group to back conservative Republican causes and
candidates.” Citizens for the Republic — which in 1976 had been
Citizens for Reagan — was an early precursor of the idea that is
now personified by groups like the Club for Growth.
Five days after that, Reagan appeared in person to give the main
address to a fledgling group of activists called the Conservative
Political Action Committee. Said the former Governor:
Our task now is not to sell a philosophy but to make the
majority of Americans, who already share that philosophy, see
that modern conservatism offers them a political home. We are
not a cult. We are members of a majority. Let’s act and talk
like it.
Ronald Reagan’s December declaration in 1976 is as relevant today
as it was then.
Reagan was not about “purging” anyone. He was about inclusivity
— understanding that conservatism was not a cult but rather the
majority philosophy of the American people. It was a philosophy
that, boldly identified and presented, was more than capable of
both winning elections and governing the country.
As it turned out, of course, Reagan was right. In 1980 Senator
Javits was defeated in the New York Republican primary by a
little-known conservative named Alfonse D’Amato. Stung, Javits
clung to the ballot as the Liberal Party nominee. He lost his
seat to D’Amato in the Reagan landslide — the same conservative
landslide that brought an end to some of liberalism’s most
celebrated names like McGovern, Birch Bayh of Indiana and Frank
Church of Idaho.
Reagan didn’t have to “purge” RINOs, as Congressman McCotter’s
remark might suggest. He simply brought the party back to its
philosophical roots of economic growth, equal opportunity,
colorblindness, and support for social issues that had begun the
party and led it to repeated victories up until 1932. Those who
turned their backs on this historically rooted party philosophy,
like Javits, not only left the party in defeat but had their
careers ended for good. In doing this Reagan ushered in another
era of conservative philosophical inclusiveness and clarity,
which in turn led to revolutionary changes in the modern world.
How’d that work out for us?
Again, contrary to the McCotter thought, it worked out pretty
well. Scratch that. Very well. And having cast that Reagan
approach aside in 2008, and in 2006 before that, the results of
RINOism — the approach of Willkie and Dewey and Dole and McCain
— should say something to Republicans if they are willing to
listen.
Ronald Reagan was right all those many Decembers ago. A recent
Gallup poll
demonstrates yet again that he would still be right today.
Today’s RINOs, today’s Javits, are free to go, like Arlen Specter
— or free to stay, like Charlie Crist. But conservatism is not a
fraternal order. As Marco Rubio and Pat Toomey understand along
with Ronald Reagan, it’s a political philosophy. And a winning
one.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize President Reagan
would know exactly what conservatives should be doing today in
the Obama era. Actually, he already said it.
“We are members of a majority. Let’s act and talk like it.”
Which is exactly what Marco Rubio and Pat Toomey are doing.
