by Henry Olsen
The problem with that formula, however, was that not every self-described conservative wanted the same things. Reagan acknowledged this up front, saying, “Conservatism can and does mean different things to those who call themselves conservatives.” If some conservatives viewed others as insufficiently conservative, and hence people with whom they could not work, then the whole project of “creat[ing] a political entity that will reflect the view of the great, hitherto [unacknowledged], conservative majority” would fail.
The enemy of that vitally important undertaking was ideology. Building this new party “will mean compromise,” Reagan said, “but not a compromise of basic principle.” Principle did not, however, mean “ideology.” He said ideology “always conjures up in my mind a picture of a rigid, irrational clinging to abstract theory in the face of reality.” Ideology in America was “a scare word.” Marxist-Leninism, which “chopped off and discarded” facts if they “don’t happen to fit the ideology,” was a prime example of what was to be avoided. American conservatism was “free from slavish adherence to abstraction” and was “derived from willingness to learn” from present and prior experience.
The American conservatism Reagan believed in was not ideological. “The common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women, working out their own lives in their own way—this is the heart of American conservatism today.” It supported ideas like a free market, balanced budgets, and moving government closer to the people because it was based on learned experience and example, not because some great theory told conservatives these ideas were right.
Reagan subtly told his audience of conservative activists that they must adopt these views if they were to win. “Our first job,” he said, “is to get this message across to those who share most of our principles.”
Let us lay to rest, once and for all the myth of a small group of ideological purists trying to capture a majority. . . . If we allow ourselves to be portrayed as ideological shock troops without correcting this error we are doing ourselves and our cause a disservice. Wherever and whenever we can, we should gently but firmly correct our political and media friends who have been perpetuating the myth of conservatism as a narrow ideology. Whatever the word might have meant in the past, today conservatism means principles evolving from experience and a belief in change when necessary, but not just for the sake of change.
Lest anyone mistake his words, Reagan noted that “ideological fanaticism” could be found on the left or right. Ideological fanatics were “the enemies of freedom” and were people “who would sacrifice principle to theory, those who worship only the god of political, social and economic abstractions, ignoring the realities of everyday life. They are not conservatives.” (Emphasis added.)
Ever the politician, Reagan did not give his audience examples of who might qualify as “ideological fanatics” of the Right. But it should be clear from his words who he might have had in mind. The sort of libertarian for whom every political question was a matter of high principle, who would rest only when virtually every political program enacted in the past half century was repealed—that person would be a fanatic who sacrificed principle for abstraction. The sort of “ultra” whom Reagan had met in California, the type who would oppose a reasonable compromise given the circumstances to fight a hopeless battle—that person was a fanatic who sacrificed principle for abstraction. One might even say that the Goldwater of Conscience rather than the Goldwater Reagan knew personally was such a fanatic, as the entire book started from first principles and reasoned backward from them irrespective of “the realities of everyday life.”
Recall that Reagan’s arguments in his pre–“Time for Choosing” speeches were always based on facts, not theory. He was opposed to federal aid for education because no need had been shown, not because such aid was inherently opposed to liberty. He was for the Kerr-Mills Act because it met a legitimate need, helping poor senior citizens pay for needed medical care. He was against Medicare because in light of Kerr-Mills there was no need for it, unless the real purpose was to fit American life to preconceived ideological notions. Nothing Reagan said in his CPAC speech was any different from what he had been saying for years, before political office was even a glimmer in his inner eye.
We should therefore read his words here as ones of principle, not political pragmatism. Reagan was not advising conservatives to take this course solely because failure to do so would keep the divergent parts of American conservatism split from one another. He was subtly teaching his wards of the very roots of conservatism itself, roots found in the love of actual, ordinary people living actual, ordinary lives. “Most of us,” he told his fellow conservatives, “like to think of ourselves as avoiding both extremes.” It was these nonextreme conservatives who above all Reagan sought to bring into the New Republican Party.
These people were not businessmen, “makers,” or strivers. These were ordinary people, “the man and the woman in the factories, the farmer, the cop on the beat.” The current Republican Party was, “for reasons both fair and unfair” burdened with a “country club–big business image.” These potential new Republicans were less interested in issues of big government and deficit spending; those concerned with that were already in the Republican Party. The new Republicans were called by some “social conservatives,” people concerned with “law and order, abortion, busing, quota systems.” The New Republican Party needed to address these people too if it wanted to unite the conservative majority into one political entity.
Reagan made clear that more than lip service was needed to address these people’s concerns. “If we are to attract more working men and women of this country, we will do so not by simply ‘making room’ for them, but by making certain they have a say in what goes on in the party.” Left unsaid was what that meant for the concerns of small-government conservatives for whom the New Deal and the “big government” it had created were at best problematic; their concerns would need to be soft-pedaled to make room for the new converts.
The true believers in small government for its own sake would always feel dismayed or betrayed when they came to realize that this was what was being asked of them. Those who were dismayed would grumble; those who felt betrayed would scream with outrage that their hero was not who they thought he was. The same cycle that arose in California with Schmitz and Steffgen would repeat itself throughout Reagan’s 1980 run and his presidency.
But this sense of betrayal merely showed that such people had never listened carefully enough to Reagan’s own words. This middle ground, this definition of American conservatism as an interpretation of the Roosevelt legacy rather than its repudiation, is where Reagan himself always stood. A limited but effective government that provided a robust defense of American freedom in the world and a hand up for American citizens as they confronted “the realities of everyday life” was what Reagan had offered America from the moment he launched his career as a political speaker. He had told the press in 1966 that if John Birchers voted for him, they were endorsing his views, not he theirs. In effect, he offered both discontented Democrats and conservative Republicans the same new deal: If you support me, you’re backing my agenda; I am not necessarily backing yours.
Reagan gave listeners a sense of his agenda when he provided “my own version” of a “Declaration of Principles” for this New Republican Party. Largely quoting from the 1976 Republican Party platform, which many in the room had helped draft, it was exactly what he had proclaimed it should be, principled but not ideological and broad enough to include the concerns of all members of the conservative family. It stood for individual freedom, but not to the exclusion of government action that “assure[d] equal opportunity,” and was “compassionate in caring for those citizens who are unable to care for themselves.” It envisioned national governmental action to address environmental protection, a national transportation system, and for the safeguarding of civil liberties. It preferred “as a general rule . . . that government action should be taken first by the go
vernment” closest to the people, but did not establish federalism as a hard and inviolable barrier to action. The same balance was struck with regards to the actions of “voluntary organizations”; they “should have the opportunity to solve many of the social problems of their communities,” but there would be no strict line between private and public action regarding social and economic issues.
A similar sense of balance pervaded his other principles. Family preservation was essential to America’s future. Government must always ask “is it not better for the country to leave your dollars in your pocket,” but no strict barrier would be imposed on how much or for what purposes it could take that money. “The American market system” was the most productive economic system imaginable, but the government still had the role to pursue “the elimination of unfair practices.” In foreign policy, negotiation with adversaries was acceptable, but only within the framework of “maintaining a superior national defense, second to none.”
Some conservatives might read this and conclude that Reagan offered conservatives “pale pastels” rather than “bold colors.” But such conservatives, by defining conservatism too narrowly either in terms of principles or policies, were and are acting more as ideologues than as principled citizens. Purging conservatism of this tendency was the core of Reagan’s message, and it was to this subject that he turned as he concluded his talk.
Reagan’s New Republican Party, he said, would not be “based on a principle of exclusion.” What followed should be read by today’s conservative leaders and activists, for in so many ways they have failed to follow the guidance of the man whom they claim to revere:
You do not get to be a majority party by searching for groups you won’t associate or work with. If we truly believe in our principles, we should sit down and talk. Talk with anyone, anywhere, at any time if it means talking about the principles of the Republican Party. Conservatism is not a narrow ideology, nor is it the exclusive property of conservative activists. [Emphasis added.]
That last sentence bears repeating and reexamination. Reagan told a roomful of conservative activists that they did not and could not define conservatism. If they wanted to act like they did, if they thought of themselves like some sort of supreme soviet that could define what was and was not conservative, then they would never be a majority party. Indeed, they would not even be conservative, for they would have abandoned principle for ideology, and in doing so would have ceased to be conservative at all.
For ultimately the enemy for Reagan was ideology, not big government. Big government could be the enemy, especially an ever-growing government that made itself the arbiter of all things great and small. That government exalted “centralized bureaucracy” and “government by a self-anointed elite.” That government created “extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business” (emphases added). That government, especially as found in the totalitarian and ideological Communist states, could threaten the most precious principle of all, “that each one of us maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society.”
Living through the Great Depression, however, Reagan had learned that an ideology insisting that government should do nothing could rob people of their dignity and identity as easily as one that said government should do everything. By ignoring the realities of everyday life in unregulated factories, by ignoring the realities of everyday life of people who despite their best efforts could not support themselves, the conservative and libertarian ideologies that hold liberty alone as a holy and inviolable principle also sacrifice the realities of everyday life on the altar of slavish devotion to abstraction. To that extent, the old Republican Party had fairly earned its image as the country club–big business party. Such a party and such an ideology no less than communism was abhorrent to Reagan.
Reagan spent the next three years applying his principles to the political problems of his time. His did so through a medium of his youth: radio. He started broadcasting short, two-minute radio messages, a modern version of FDR’s fireside chats, to a nationwide audience. We now know that he wrote many of these messages himself in longhand, demonstrating again that he was literally the author of his own success. These hundreds of messages together comprise the largest source of his precise views on a variety of subjects. They are a treasure trove of conclusions that when sifted show exactly what his principles were.
It should not be surprising that even the most careful examination of these short talks finds that Reagan’s principles were the same as they had been decades earlier. Recall what Nancy Reagan said: Reagan had formed his principles years before he became governor.41 What’s noteworthy about his radio addresses is not his conservatism, it’s how well his clear but simple principles allowed him to formulate specific answers to questions that were entirely different from those facing America in the 1950s.
The realm of foreign policy was perhaps the least changed of any policy realm over Reagan’s active lifetime. He had started adult life an ardent foe of one ideological, totalitarian state bent on world domination (Nazi Germany) and quickly moved on to become an even more vociferous foe of the Soviet Union. By the 1970s, however, the Soviet Union was on the march in ways not seen since the early days after World War II, when it had gobbled up state after state in Eastern Europe. Marxist terrorist groups were active in Western Europe, even kidnapping and murdering a former Italian premier.42 Soviet-sponsored “liberation movements” were actively destabilizing many countries throughout the world, and Soviet client states like Cuba and Vietnam had sent their militaries to support other new Soviet client states in places like Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Cambodia. The USSR meanwhile was building its nuclear and conventional armed forces to numbers hitherto unknown, threatening America and its allies across the globe.
Some quailed before this might, counseling negotiation and nonconfrontation. Not Reagan. He had opposed such temporizing since the early 1960s, and increased Russian might had merely confirmed him in his faith that communism was both inherently evil and inalterably expansionist. As adamantly opposed to war as he was, he was even more adamantly opposed to the idea that peace purchased at the price of freedom was worthwhile.
It is not surprising, therefore, that 30 percent of all his radio messages addressed foreign policy.43 The vast majority was concerned with the threat from the Soviet Union, a nation Reagan called a “Godless tyranny” years before he famously labeled it an “evil empire.”44 In talk after talk he told listeners how America and its allies had fallen behind the Russians in conventional armaments.45 Negotiations with the USSR over the limitation of nuclear weapons (SALT II) would result only in granting the Soviets the same sort of superiority in nuclear weapons.46 He repeatedly quoted a speech given by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in which he called the USSR’s policy of détente a ruse and that by 1985 the Soviet Union would be able to work its will anywhere in the world.47 “Only by mustering a superiority, beginning with a superiority of the spirit, can we stop the thunder of hobnailed boots on their march to world empire.”48
This type of talk might seem unbelievable today, but it was not back then. We have now lived over a quarter of a century since the collapse of the Soviet Union. One needs to be nearly forty years old to have even the dimmest memories of a time when the Cold War was very real. President Jimmy Carter may have proclaimed an end to the “inordinate fear of Communism” in May 1977, but even he was proposing increased defense budgets after the Soviet Union’s December 1979 invasion of its own client state, Afghanistan. Many intelligent and patriotic Americans thought Reagan was wrong and his rhetoric overheated, but few failed to see that the conflict with the Soviet Union was the most dangerous and important international issue of the age.
That was certainly my view when I met Ronald Reagan for the only time in my life. I had spent my high school years actively involved in my local Republican Party. When I went to Claremont McKenna College in the fall of 1979, I immediately joined the school
’s College Republican chapter and joined them for the trek south to the state party’s mid-September convention in San Diego.49 The man then known as Governor Reagan gave a question-and-answer session for attendees and delegates prior to his speech to the entire convention. Since current and former students of my school were in charge of the Q&A, I was a shoo-in to get to talk with the man himself.
My moment came toward the end of the session. Standing in my blue polyester Sears suit to the candidate’s right, I saw Jay Rosenlieb point at me to go ahead. My question was quick and to the point: “Governor Reagan, what do you think of the Non-Aligned Movement?” I was referring to a group of mainly Third World nations that purported to be unaligned between the two superpowers but whose criticisms were usually directed at America. As a staunch anti-Communist, I was hoping Reagan shared my views that this allegedly neutral group was in fact not our friend.
Reagan’s reply was equally quick and to the point: “I don’t believe there is such a thing as the Non-Aligned Movement. You’re either for us or against us.” Then and there I became a fan for life.
Reagan’s clarity and courage attracted many more than died-in-the-wool conservative Republicans like me. Staunch anti-communism had also been a hallmark of the post-Roosevelt Democratic Party. Once Truman had defeated Wallace in the intramural fight over the immediate legacy of the New Deal, Democrats as well as Republicans lined up to mount a muscular defense against the Soviet Union. Truman himself organized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to combat Soviet expansion into Europe, and John F. Kennedy ran against Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, in 1960 in part by alleging that Ike’s frugality had created a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union that imperiled American security.
