Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571) (10 page)

But perhaps the concern that hit me the hardest back then was the urgent need to protect the family and family values. During the 1976 campaign, Carter had promised to hold a White House conference on the family. I believe he might have meant well when he made that campaign pledge; perhaps he thought that a conference on the family would generate policies that would, in fact, help the family, such as school reform or tax relief. But if so, he was naive. He couldn't control the liberals and the bureaucrats in his own administration. So instead of examining pro-family policies, the Carter administration got bogged down in avant-garde discussions of new kinds of family, seeking to appease liberal-left constituencies that had little or no interest in preserving traditional values and norms.

And so the idea of a White House conference on the
family
morphed into a conference on
families
—that is, a politicized gathering that expressed agnosticism and bewilderment as to what a family should be. In 1980, after years of wrangling, the Carter administration's White House Conference on Families was finally held and, needless to say, was a festival of liberal relativism. For his part, Carter just went along with what the activists said.

Out in the Midwest, watching all this foolishness on TV, I said to Marcus: “The president can't define what a family is? Any three-year-old knows what a family is! So why are we spending millions of taxpayer dollars on such foolishness?” As I studied the whole sorry saga more carefully, I learned an important lesson: Inside the government, personnel is policy. Carter himself might have had some good Georgia values, especially on social issues, but he couldn't, or wouldn't, ride herd over the radicals who had burrowed into his own executive branch.

So yes, I was disappointed and disillusioned by Jimmy Carter. And yes, we could see that in regard to the three major components of modern American conservatism—economics, foreign policy, and social issues—Carter was wrong on all three.

But I still thought of myself as a Democrat. I don't make big changes suddenly.

Then one day while I was still in college, I was taking the train from Minneapolis to Winona, and I had with me a copy of
Burr
, Gore Vidal's 1973 novel about the Founding Fathers. In the novel, Aaron Burr—the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel—was portrayed basically as the hero. This portrayal seemed strange to me, because the historical truth is that after killing Hamilton, Burr fled the United States—then consisting of just seventeen states—and headed for the Louisiana Territory, where he attempted to raise an illegal army for the purpose of conquering Mexico. These misadventures, of course, were gravely serious, violating the Neutrality Act of 1794; Burr was subsequently tried for treason. And although he was acquitted, he spent the rest of his life in disgrace. This man was a villain, not a hero.

Moreover, America's legendary Founding Fathers, according to Vidal, were all seriously flawed. George Washington was a hopeless bumbler, and Thomas Jefferson was nothing but a hypocrite. In fact, none of the founders were much good. So I could only conclude that the author of
Burr
was, well, snotty. At best, the book was jaded, and at worst, it lacked truthfulness. The book horrified me.
What it says isn't true,
I told myself, and I put it down. Then, looking out the train window, I saw instead the green fields and trees of the midwestern landscape, dotted with pleasant houses and welcoming little towns.
Here, truly,
I thought,
is our wonderful nation—the nation that the founders fought for two centuries ago.
These immortals had no idea that there would ever be a state called Minnesota, or that people with names such as Amble and Bachmann would be coming to the United States to find a better life. Nevertheless, the founders had been willing to put everything—their lives, liberty, and sacred honor—on the line for us, for all of us. Indeed, the nation had prospered, just as they had envisioned. And this was the thanks they got?

The idea that Vidal—at the time a major figure in American literature, as well as a regular guest on TV talk shows—would write such a book was disgusting to me. And the fact that critics would love that book was even more disgusting. Indeed, I realized, a snide dismissiveness toward American history and American institutions had become the essence and thinking of the chattering-class gatekeepers of the culture. Then I pondered:
So who has the greatest influence today in the Democratic Party? Who is now setting the party's attitudes and policies?
The answer was obvious:
It's the same liberals who have given us policies of scarcity on energy regulation, government spending, and high taxes. It's the same liberals who have given us a weak-kneed policy toward Iran—and also, of course, the Soviet Union. It's the same liberals who have given us abortion, racial quotas, school busing, and that ridiculous waste of time and money White House Conference on Families. And now, as the last straw, it's these liberals who are smearing our own history, and doing a hit job on the founders.

These trendy-left people spoke as though they had no understanding of, or connection to—and only contempt for—my own working-class folks back in Waterloo. Nor did they evidence any connection to or affinity for the working-class folks who were once the backbone of the Democratic Party as a whole. You know, the kind of Democrats, like my mother's mother, who loved Franklin D. Roosevelt because they believed he had put people back to work, or the kind of Democrats who supported Harry Truman because he gave 'em hell and stood up to Stalin, even as he stood up for Israel. These old-line Democrats, I concluded, had no real place in the new-left Democratic Party. Everything had flipped. And so at that moment, I became a Republican and never looked back. I was through. I realized I wasn't in line with the new antifamily, antistrong national defense, antifiscal sanity Democratic Party. I was now a Republican.

As Ronald Reagan always liked to say, he didn't leave the Democratic Party—the Democratic Party left him. Now I too knew the feeling.

Indeed, during the late seventies, Marcus and I grew increasingly attracted to Reagan and his conservative philosophy. We loved it when he said that Americans wanted a conservatism of bright colors, not pale pastels—we sure did. That is, we wanted someone who would unabashedly take the fight directly to the economic declinists, the foreign-policy defeatists, and the antifamily relativists who seemed at the time to dominate both parties. Indeed, Republicans of the “me too” persuasion—that is, Republicans supporting everything the Democrats wanted to do, although maybe for a little less money—held no appeal to us. We wanted a GOP that would fight to make real change. So we liked Reagan, and also a newcomer, a charismatic congressman named Jack Kemp, who had been highlighting new and better approaches to economics, such as marginal-rate tax cuts.

All the things I remember hearing from my Republican grandmother, Anna, began now to make sense to me. I started reading more: The weekly magazines,
Time, Newsweek
, and
US News & World Report
. And yes, the
Wall Street Journal—
I was truly becoming my grandmother's granddaughter. And another publication,
National Review
, became a must-read; I needed to know more about the intellectual, ethical, and theological origins of the conservative movement. Indeed, I learned a few new words from
National Review
's fearless—and fearlessly polysyllabic—founding editor in chief, William F. Buckley.

I had been a reader my entire life, but mostly I read biographies and especially mysteries. I loved solving puzzles, but now that I was in my twenties, I saw that I had new mysteries to solve—the mysteries of history and economics. I never finished
Burr—and never, of course, read another Gore Vidal novel.
Instead, I began consuming books on American history that told the real story—that George Washington, for instance, was not only a military hero but also a good and honorable man. I felt convinced, with patriotic certitude, that the founders were great men, and great women, who bequeathed to us a great country.

I also read a lot of economics. Keynesian economics made absolutely no sense to me; I rejected the notion that you could “spend yourself rich.” Just the opposite was true, as far as I was concerned; if you spent too much, you spent yourself poor. Keynesianism proved bankrupt in the seventies, when both Republicans and Democrats tried it, and it has been proved even more bankrupt in the last few years, when Barack Obama tried to revive it. The truth is that basic economic realities never change in any era. The economy is not propelled by Keynesian fine-tuners calculating and recalculating their arcane equations about “multipliers” and “money velocity”; the economy is propelled instead by actual, real-world doers. It is animated by “human action,” in the phrase of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who titled his famous 1949 book
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
.

Indeed, it's pure folly to think that someone in a marble palace somewhere can dictate the economic activity of people far away, all of them pursuing their own individual wants and needs. Instead, von Mises argued, the force that creates economic activity and growth is, simply, people getting up in the morning and making something—that is, free enterprise. The ideas of von Mises were thrilling to me; he put a rigorous intellectual framework around the commonsense observations that we all make. It is, indeed, hard work—a very basic “human action”—that creates wealth and prosperity. So yes, absolutely, the work of von Mises—as I told Steve Moore of the
Wall Street Journal
—makes for great beach reading.

Applying von Mises's wisdom, we Americans can all remember a basic truth: No bureaucrat ever put the idea of the lightbulb into the head of Thomas Edison. As Edison said, his inventions were 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Similarly, no economic planner ever put the idea of the assembly line into the head of Henry Ford; it was Ford himself, using his talents, plus his education, plus his sheer hard work. God gave Edison and Ford and all the other business heroes their first sacred spark of life; then those go-getters did the rest.

And just as important as free enterprise is the free market, the place where producers meet consumers. The empowered and informed consumer is the crown jewel not only of the free market but also of freedom itself. That was the message of Milton Friedman in his classic work
Capitalism and Freedom
. In the free market, I get to decide “Coke” or “Pepsi,” and the market then responds to me. In fact, we
all
get to decide on one or the other—or decide on none of the above—and always, the market responds. And if we decide we want something completely different, the marketers will again come running, offering any other beverage we might desire. Capitalism: It's a beautiful thing. Indeed, as I think about all these great economists, I am reminded again: Freedom is inspiring, and liberty is beautiful.

Another eye-opening book for me during those years was William Simon's 1978 best seller,
A Time for Truth
. After a successful career on Wall Street, Simon, in the 1970s, worked for the federal government, first as “energy czar” under President Richard Nixon, then as Treasury secretary under Nixon and President Gerald Ford. As energy czar, Simon was tasked with making sense of all the idiotic price-control regulations that the government was using to straitjacket the energy market. All that red tape had been a failure, of course: It had decreased energy production, caused those unending gas lines that I had sat in with my Rambler idling, and ultimately raised prices, allowing the OPEC nations to maintain a stranglehold on the American consumer, holding us up for even more billions. Simon, having been inside the belly of the federal regulatory beast, emerged from those depths warning Americans that they were headed toward ruin—that is, if current trends of taxing, spending, and regulating were allowed to continue. And he was right: We had reached a grim point of reckoning. Yet thanks to Ronald Reagan, those negative trends were finally reversed in the eighties. The late Bill Simon's status as an economic truth teller is thus enshrined forever, even as we realize now that we must take up his fight once again.

Warning against runaway statism, the Gipper liked to quip, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take it all away.” And that truism reminds me yet again that the ultimate point of free enterprise and free markets can be summed up in just one word: freedom. The bigger the government, the smaller the freedom. And if the government controls the economy, it also controls the media and the right to free speech. As they say, the only way to be guaranteed a free press is to own one—private ownership is a vital check against state power.

Moreover, when governments grow big enough, they develop an oppressive sameness, relying on common characteristics of regimentation and control. As the great libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek explained in his 1944 book
The Road to Serfdom
, the communists and
fascists of the era might have hated each other, but in the end, the reds and the browns were similar. That is, totalitarians are all united in their belief that personal autonomy is the enemy. In a later work,
The Constitution of Liberty,
Hayek further laid out his argument for simultaneously structuring a system of freedom and limiting the power of the state.

The emphasis on personal freedom and free will took me back to my own biblical thinking. As we are told in Second Corinthians 3:17, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” Liberty is a gift of God. We must not misuse it, and we must always treasure it. We are each made in His image, and when He made us, he wrote a series of truths on our hearts. That's what natural law tells us—that we each have a soul, that God loves each of us in our uniqueness, and that each of us is born with inherent dignity. The Bible tells us that each one of us, no matter what our surface imperfections, is in fact made in the perfect image of God. This essential equality of all souls, graced by the Almighty, is the ultimate redoubt of our individual freedom.