by Ted Cruz
Reagan won by offering a hopeful message, an aspirational message. He told us to “always remember that you are Americans, and it is your birthright to dream great dreams in this sweet and blessed land, truly the greatest, freest, strongest nation on earth.” He explained what it meant to be a conservative and how those policies could help more people become part of the American dream—regardless of their race or religion or political affiliation. As a result, he built a coalition of voters, many of them blue-collar workers who usually voted for the other party, and in the process coined a new term: Reagan Democrats. The conservative Reagan is the only president in modern history who has a group from the other party named after him.
If the consultants were right, that running to the middle earns you crossovers, then there would be Ford Democrats, Dole Democrats, McCain Democrats, and Romney Democrats. There are not. And it’s easy to see why: If you’re a Democrat, and the two candidates are close ideologically, what are you going to do? You’ll stick to your team and vote for the Democrat. But, in 1980, the choice was stark: Reagan drew a line in the sand, and millions of voters who had been FDR Democrats said, “Those are my values.” That’s how you win crossovers.
Why do I look to the example of Reagan so often? Many reasons. One is simply admiration and respect; his leadership transformed the world. But two, the times are very similar. The situation today is very much like the late 1970s. Indeed, the parallels between Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama are uncanny. Same failed economic policies, same stagnation and malaise. Same feckless and naïve foreign policy; indeed, the very same countries—Russia and Iran—openly laughing at and mocking the president of the United States.
I believe 2016 will be an election very much like 1980. To win, we have to paint in bold colors, not pale pastels.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan was seen as a remarkably divisive figure—within the Republican Party; indeed, he had just challenged, and nearly beaten, Gerald Ford, the sitting Republican president in the Republican primary. Within Washington, Reagan was despised. That’s because Reagan fundamentally rejected the accepted establishment wisdom of how to win an election. He didn’t abandon his beliefs and run to the middle. He explained his beliefs and brought the middle to him.
When you paint in bold colors, two big things happen: You turn out the base, by the millions; and you earn more crossover votes. The latter consequence seems counterintuitive, and it’s directly contrary to the narrative of the Washington consultants.
In 2012, the Obama campaign very shrewdly understood their circumstances. They knew that the Reagan Democrats—the Ohio steelworkers—would not be voting for the president’s reelection. An Ohio steelworker’s life has been made incredibly difficult under the Obama economy. So their goal was to keep as many of them home as possible. The Obama team launched saturation attack ads to paint Mitt Romney as a rich, out-of-touch elitist—and the 47 percent line fit their strategy perfectly. The Ohio steelworkers (and Reagan Democrats nationally) stayed home. Evangelical Christians, whom the Romney campaign apparently just assumed would vote for him, stayed home, too.
This point bears underscoring. If we want to win, we need to be clear-eyed and data driven. And if you look to the data, if you compare 2004 (the last race that Republicans won nationwide) to 2008 and 2012, the biggest difference is the millions of conservatives who stayed home. They fall primarily into two categories—evangelical Christians and Reagan Democrats. Millions of them stayed home in 2008, and even more did so in 2012.
The only way to win in 2016 is to bring back the conservatives who are staying home. And if we nominate another candidate like Bob Dole or John McCain or Mitt Romney—all good, honorable men, but all lost—then the same voters who stayed home in 2008 and 2012 . . . will stay home again in 2016. And Hillary Clinton will be the next president.
That cannot happen.
Instead, we must reassemble the Reagan coalition. Conservatives, libertarians, evangelicals, young people, Hispanics, African-Americans, women, Jewish voters, Reagan Democrats—we need to unite behind our shared values.
Part of uniting that coalition is just telling the truth, not just telling one group what they want to hear, and another group what they want to hear. There are values and principles that stitch us together. Every one of us believes in the American dream, in growth and jobs and opportunity and in individual liberty and constitutional freedoms. Those are themes and principles that cut across race and class and gender. Those were the themes that are at the heart of any true grassroots campaign.
Let’s dispense with divisive, interest group politics, and ignore the empty happy talk that consultants tell us we need to reach the middle.
There is an alternate course, what I’ve labeled “opportunity conservatism.” The fact is that conservative policies and beliefs are aspirational. We should look with the single-minded focus of easing people’s ascent up the economic ladder. And that applies to everyone. In other words, Republicans shouldn’t disparage the 47 percent. We should embrace them. It is the Republican Party that is and should be the party of the 47 percent, of the poor, the up-and-coming, the struggling middle class, and those who want a better circumstance for themselves and a better one than that for their children.
To the hardworking men and women who want to believe again in the promise of America, our movement must give bold voice and action to reigniting the unlimited potential of every American.
The simplest principle behind opportunity conservatism is the aphorism we all know: “Give a man a fish, it feeds him for a day; teach a man to fish, it will feed him for a lifetime.” We need to be defending the opportunity to take responsibility for our own lives because that is what has consistently led to extraordinary prosperity and achievement.
Opportunity conservatism rejects the wealth-redistribution policies of the left as a means for upward mobility. Among other problems, collectivist approaches—punitive tax policies on corporations or upper-income families—simply do not work. They fail to produce economic prosperity or to improve the material conditions of the populace. And they lead to bankruptcy and economic collapse, as Europe demonstrates daily. Widespread economic redistribution places enormous burdens on small businesses, kills jobs, and rarely helps the recipients of government largesse. Even now in the United States, such high-tax, collectivist approaches are failing to produce results for the people these policies are ostensibly trying to help. Under the Obama administration, for example, the unemployment rate climbed above 10 percent among Hispanics in 2012 and to 14 percent among African-Americans.
Whenever entrepreneurs and small businesses suffer, those struggling to improve their economic conditions are hurt the worst. Yet Republicans rarely talk about this. It is as if we’ve read too much of the opposition’s talking points, as if we are too afraid to make the simple, unarguable point that free-market policies expand opportunity, produce prosperity, and improve lives—especially for those working to climb the economic ladder.
For centuries, our free enterprise system has been the path to the American dream. I know this is not an abstract, academic theory. Like all of us, I’ve seen it in my own family. When my dad earned fifty cents an hour, he was filled with hope for a better life. Better than imprisonment and torture in Cuba, better than struggling for food each day. He believed, as Ronald Reagan once said, that “in America, our origins matter less than our destinations.”
I am a conservative today because I firmly believe that free-market policies—which produce a robust and growing small business environment—are the best policies to lift every American, including teenage immigrants like my dad was, up to prosperity.
My family’s story is like the stories of countless other families who have the same hopes and dreams for their children that my mom and dad had for me. This is in a sense every family’s love story with America. Today, for example, 2.3 million Hispanics—roughly one in every eight Hispanic households—own small businesses, trying to get their piece of the American dream. The reason tha
t so many millions have come from all over the world to America is that they recognize that no other nation on earth offers such opportunity. No other nation allows a citizen to come here with nothing and achieve anything.
This is the advantage that the Republican Party has over its opposition. The Democrats are the party of government; of dependency. They have no choice in the matter. Their constituencies are big labor union bosses that depend on government largesse and special interest organizations that survive by encouraging a victim mentality among their supporters.
Republicans, by contrast, can champion policies of self-sufficiency, responsibility, and economic mobility. We believe our potential should never be limited by our government, but only by our talent and imagination. As Reagan said at his first inauguration, our mission is to make government “work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back . . . provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.” Every issue we debate and discuss on the nation level should be framed this way—as issues of whether government is facilitating dependence or self-reliance; enslavement to the state or individual freedom.
Conservatives are against excessive governmental regulations, but rarely explain why. The reason is that these regulations kill jobs and restrict Americans’ ability to achieve, earn a living, build a business, and buy a first home.
Conservatives support lower taxes and a fundamental reform of the tax code so that it is fairer and simpler. But we need to explain why: because when we lower taxes, we give more money to entrepreneurs and business owners to build their businesses and create jobs. We give more money to heads of households so that they can make their own financial decisions for their children and grandchildren. When we reform the tax code, we give more power to families and less power to accountants and lawyers who are enriched by a tax code that only they, and their buddies in Congress, can understand.
Conservatives are wary of big union bosses. We need to explain why: because unions confiscate wages to fill their own coffers and pursue their own agenda. By demanding costly regulations on growing businesses, the union bosses make it harder for low-skilled workers to get jobs.
Conservatives favor educational reform, such as vouchers and scholarships and charter schools. Again we need to explain why: because education reform empowers parents and expands opportunities for kids struggling to get ahead in schools that have failed them. It is at its core a civil rights issue, and it is fundamentally unfair to trap kids in bad schools because of their race, ethnicity, income level, or simply because they live in the wrong zip codes.
Conservatives favor Social Security reform and personal retirement accounts. This allows low-income Americans to accumulate wealth on their own and pass it on to their children and grandchildren. Giving more power, more money, and more control to Americans allows them to make their own decisions and realize the American dream. As Reagan said, “individual freedom and the profit motive were the engines of progress which transformed an American wilderness into an economic dynamo that provided the American people with a standard of living that is still the envy of the world.”
When we make such commonsense arguments, critics in the media and on the left—as if those were two separate entities—invariably attack us for advocating “selfishness.” Self-responsibility is somehow morphed into self-interest. That’s how distorted the thinking in Washington is—giving people more of their own money is considered selfish. Allowing people to have more responsibility and more control over their own lives is considered reckless.
There is perhaps no better response to these arguments than those once famously uttered by one of my heroes, Milton Friedman. Confronted in the 1970s by a liberal talk-show host about the “greed” behind capitalism, he responded with a smile, saying:
“Well first of all, tell me: Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.”
One of the things that encourages me is the new generation of leaders in the Republican Party who are stepping forward. Virtually all of them are clustered within just a few years of each other: Mike Lee (43), Marco Rubio (43), Paul Ryan (45), Nikki Haley (43), Tim Scott (49), Rand Paul (52), Bobby Jindal (45), Joni Ernst (44), Tom Cotton (37), and Mia Love (39).
All of us were kids when Ronald Reagan was president. I’ll go to my grave with Ronald Wilson Reagan defining what it means to be president. The World War II generation referred to FDR as “our” president. Reagan, I believe, made an indelible mark on this new generation of leaders. In fact, I’ve called this generation the “children of Reagan.” If you listen to Marco or Tim or Nikki, the language they use is positive, optimistic, unifying, appealing to our better angels. It’s not the mean, nasty, divisive, wedge issues that have characterized so many Republicans. It echoes Morning in America. The way we win is to stand for principle, but to do so in a way that paints a brighter future for our nation.
Finally, reigniting the promise of America requires courage. Just as it took courage for Margaret Thatcher to challenge the “good old boys” of her party’s establishment, and just as it took courage for Reagan to run against an incumbent president of his own party in 1976, conservatives must stand up to the establishment impulses of our own party, and it will take courage for all of us to do so. Is there a political risk to doing everything possible to repeal Obamacare? Yes. Are there political dangers involved in fighting to stop the president’s unconstitutional, lawless amnesty? You bet. But if standing up for conservative values were easy, we wouldn’t have needed a tea party movement of millions of men and women standing up to Washington politicians in both parties.
I believe in the promise of our nation, and if you’re reading this, I suspect you do, too. It is our turn to step up and defend it, because as my father always used to say to me, “If we lose our freedom here, where will we go?”
We have great friends and allies around the world, but if the last seven years have taught us anything it is that an absent America, an America that thinks global leadership means voting “present” at the United Nations, leads to chaos. Our promise is powerful, but it requires vigilance to defend it.
This is our fight. And it’s not enough for conservative leaders to just say they’re leading. They need to show it with action, not with words. They need to stand with you, rather than only asking you to stand with them. And they need to listen to you, rather than lecturing you—because only when elected representatives in Washington start listening to the American people will we reignite the promise of America.
* The Conservative Party went on that year to win the first of four consecutive elections, with the country seeing the largest swing in votes from the Labour Party to the Conservatives since 1945.
PHOTOGRAPHS
My father, Rafael; my Tía Sonia; and my grandmother on the beach in Cuba, circa 1950. It looked idyllic, but reality on the island was anything but.
My father’s mugshot, after he was picked up by Batista’s thugs. His nose was already broken.
Abuelo and Abuela (my grandparents); my Tía Sonia; and my cousin Bibi after our family had emigrated to the United States—and freedom.
My mother, Eleanor,
circa 1955. She was the first woman in her family to go to college. She attended Rice University and went on to become a computer programmer for Shell.
My mother with her parents, Edward and Elizabeth Darragh, and her sister, Carol. They were a typical working-class Irish-Italian family from Wilmington, Delaware.
Rafael Cruz married Eleanor Darragh on March 14, 1969.
My parents and I in the 1970s, after we moved back to Houston and they started their own company in the energy business.
My early aspirations to be a Hollywood actor would not come to pass, but my parents always taught me that in America, anything is possible—dream big.
With my half sisters, Miriam and Roxana. Growing up, I was an only child during the school year and a little brother over the summer, when my sisters lived with us.
Reagan’s 1980 campaign was my first taste of politics. Here was his last major public address, at the 1992 Republican National Convention. I was near the front row, cheering with hundreds of other college students . . . including my future wife, Heidi. But she and I didn’t meet until eight years later.
I learned about free-market economics and constitutional principles—not to mention the basics of public speaking—participating in the Free Enterprise Institute and its spin-off, the Constitutional Corroborators. (I’m second from the right.)
