We’re happy to feature remarks delivered at the Hudson Institute’s 2009 Bradley Symposium today, in which Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin addresses the topic of “Making Conservatism Credible Again.” These remarks continue the Comeback Conversations, a series of interviews and articles from The New Ledger and leading figures on the center-right on the subject of a free market conservative political comeback. No less an authority than David Plouffe maintains that American politics is inherently cyclical, and the GOP will eventually return to power. The question is whether that return will be measured in cycles or in generations, and the degree to which the Republican Party that emerges from the wilderness will look like the fractured GOP as it exists today — whether it will represent an as-yet hypothetical resurgence of four-pillared Reaganesque conservatism, or something very different.
I am not going to spend my time picking over the ashes of recent elections. Republicans lost. “Conservatives” and Republicans are not exact equivalents, but “conservatism,” as that idea came to be understood lately, lost too.
This is not to say that Americans have become liberals, if by “liberal” you mean the desire for a bigger federal government that erects more hurdles on entrepreneurship, work, savings, and capital, and blinds the vision of risk-takers with a wall of directives. There was a financial failure under a conservative Republican Administration. In the time honored tradition, voters repudiated the President’s party and went elsewhere for help. President Bush himself admitted that when the meltdown began, he departed from capitalism in order to save it. Let’s just leave it at that for now.
Throughout our history, Americans established world standing as a people of exceptional character. In the 1830s Tocqueville wondered about the heedlessness of frail Yankee clippers that sailed the world for two years so they could sell Chinese tea in Boston for a penny a pound less than English merchants. “Americans put a sort of heroism into their manner of doing commerce,” he said. A French observer around 1890 said that Americans succeed because of their “character, personal energy, energy in action, creative energy,” and another in 1908 praised “the greatness of the United States…ready for any kind of enterprise.” Consider the five Sullivan brothers who volunteered to serve our country in the Navy and died together on the Juneau, torpedoed in 1942…or the passengers who took down United Flight 93, and the hundreds of first responders who saved strangers and then died when the World Trade towers fell on September 11, 2001…or the millions young and old who have offered their sweat, time, money, and homes to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina four years ago.
At a labor union dinner in Washington, the late Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn assessed the American character this way:
The United States has helped Europe to win the First and the Second World Wars. It twice raised Europe from postwar destruction—twice—for ten, twenty, thirty years it has stood as a shield protecting Europe while European countries counted their nickels to avoid paying for their armies (better yet, to have none at all), to avoid paying for armaments, thinking about how to leave NATO, knowing that in any case America will protect them…The United States has long shown itself to be the most magnanimous, the most generous country in the world. Wherever there is a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a natural disaster, an epidemic, who is the first to help? The United States. Who helps the most and unselfishly? The United States.
What does it mean to be “people of character”? It means a people who uphold unchanging standards of good beyond politics, and practice great or noble virtues, in season and out of season, in every field of endeavor from household and economy to culture and the political order.
“Conservatism” at its best, defends the standards and qualities which define “people of character.” The original source for these standards is the Western tradition of civilization, rooted in reason and faith, stretching back thousands of years. The tradition as a whole affirms the high dignity, rights, and obligations of the individual human person. One of the glories of Western civilization was to break out of the mythological past which saw only groups and classes, ranked and organized by collectivist governments. Before the Western tradition began in ancient Israel and classical Greece, the individual person as a subject of rights was simply unknown.
Nowhere was the Western tradition epitomized more memorably than in the Declaration of Independence. By “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” all human beings are created equal…not in height, or skills, or knowledge, or color, or other nonessentials…but equal in certain inalienable rights – to live, to be free, and to fulfill their best individual potential, including the right to the “material” such as property needed to do this. Each individual is unique and possesses rights and dignity. There are no group or collective rights in the Declaration. Nor does basic human equality imply “equal result.” It means “equal opportunity”: every person has a right not to be prevented from pursuing happiness, from developing his or her potential. The results should differ from one to another because “justice” or “fairness” gives each individual what each has earned or merited.
The great conservative purpose of government is to secure these natural rights under popular consent. Protecting every person’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness should be the great and only mission of legitimate government.
Whenever Republicans lose an election, a factional dispute arises about “economic issues” versus “moral or social issues.” “Traditionalists” and “libertarians” blame each other, each claiming Republicans would do better without the other. I remember this intraparty conflict vividly as a staffer for Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett in the mid-90s when we worked to “keep it all together.” Since November 2008 this argument has been rejoined. Why anyone would think a minority party can grow into a majority by splitting itself in half is a political and a mathematical mystery to me.
After Gerald Ford lost the White House, Ronald Reagan insistently refused to read either group out of the conservative movement or the Republican Party. He won in 1980 by uniting both groups in a coalition that held into the Presidency of George W. Bush.
Ronald Reagan thought with the mind of the Founders, who did not separate economic freedom from moral character. The Founders believed that to endure, freedom and self-government demanded a people of upstanding character.
In the nation’s first inaugural speech, President Washington said:
[T]he foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality … there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness … the smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained …
Speaking for the entire Senate, Vice President John Adams replied: “If individuals be not influenced by moral principles, it is in vain to look for public virtue…”
State constitutions enshrined popular virtues in law. Today’s Virginia’s constitution still includes this language from its 1776 version: “no free government, nor the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”
The American character was not a private matter. It was the central problem of the common good and had to be cared for by those who represented the people. How we should do this was the problem and capitalism was a crucial part of the answer.
The year 1776 saw not only the Declaration of Independence but Adam Smith’s treatise on The Wealth of Nations. Smith explained that what he called the “system of natural liberty,” or capitalism, would vastly increase national wealth. The Framers of our Constitution knew Smith not only as an economic thinker but as a moral philosopher whose other great book was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. They were just as committed to an American economics of freedom as they were to American moral greatness. Hamilton in Federalist 12 wrote that “The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of their political cares.”
The authors of the Constitution surrounded economic freedom with a multitude of guarantees: freedom of contract against government interference… private property rights… patents and copyrights…standard weights, measures, and monetary values…punishment of counterfeits…freedom under law for interstate and foreign commerce…enforcement of agreements in law courts… uniform bankruptcy laws, and other protections.
They promoted Smithian free markets to produce resources for strong military defenses and to keep America free of economic dependency on other nations. But they also expected commercial life to encourage certain moral qualities: personal responsibility to work, save, create businesses, hire employees, pay off their debts, earn the rewards of merited effort, moderate appetites, practice honesty and justice in business dealings, self-discipline, industriousness, timeliness, plus trust and confidence in other persons.
The hope to succeed, grow wealthier, and leave a better life to your children is a powerful incentive to work effort. A free and open economy is the stimulus for that incentive. To transform that hope into reality, the habits that help make success possible must be practiced and honored. A free market will fail if workers, owners, and managers lack basic moral character.
At some level, most people know this. In the current financial crisis, we hear complaints about widespread greed, dishonesty, fraud, financial irresponsibility, and cheating. Whether specific charges are true or not, they show that Americans see that vices imperil economic freedom and prosperity.
Now please do not suppose that I – or the Founders – advocate that the federal government should “make men moral.” Washington DC could not do this even if it wanted to, and goodness knows I don’t want it to! The authentic source of moral education is the mediating institutions of a free society, principally families, churches, and schools.
A “libertarian” who wants limited government should embrace the means to his freedom: thriving mediating institutions that create the moral preconditions for economic markets and choice. A “social issues” conservative with a zeal for righteousness should insist on a free market economy to supply the material needs for families, schools, and churches that inspire moral and spiritual life. In a nutshell, the notion of separating the social from the economic issues is a false choice. They stem from the same root.
Since America’s first political principles establish a high but limited mission of securing the natural rights of all, conservatives should expect government to fulfill that entire mission…by enforcing every human being’s natural right to life, which is the first clause of the social compact that formed America, the Declaration of Independence.
A credible conservatism will also seek to secure the privileged legal status of marriage. The traditional family must be protected as the indispensable mediating institution for developing the moral qualities of a free people.
A credible conservatism will resist the purging of faith from the public square. It will make public space for the practice of faith because belief is a central pillar of a free and prosperous society. Nor can government welfare programs substitute for the faith-based love that unites citizens in free bonds of charity and compassion.
A credible conservatism will also be attentive to the education of future generations across the spectrum of our nation’s schools and higher institutions of learning. The success of self-government requires citizens having knowledge of truth. And the prosperity of our economy depends on advances in unbiased research in college libraries and university labs.
A credible conservatism will recognize that the very culture of capitalism is under assault. We need to fight the new “crony capitalism,” not simply because it won’t work but because it destroys the moral foundation of human achievement.
Our nation’s interests and perhaps our survival are at risk in the economic choices our government is making. A credible conservatism will offer viable alternatives in these economic areas.
The federal budgetary framework passed by the Congressional majority doubles the federal debt in 5 years and nearly triples it in 10. Congress added new layers of entitlement spending on top of over $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities. This threatens to collapse Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Not to mention the level of taxes and debt coming due.
The course of this liberal Congress has been imprudent and irresponsible, violating moral as much as economic norms. We can’t sustain our commitments or keep stacking up liabilities and burying ourselves and our children in debt. We can’t expect to sell our bonds on global credit markets, given that many other governments around the world are following the reckless course of our own Congress.
I have offered an alternative, conservative budget that fosters prosperity by bringing spending under control, and lifting the crushing burden of debt and taxes. I have also offered entitlement reform legislation, called “A Roadmap for America’s Future.” Rather than depending on government for your retirement and health security, I propose to empower people to become much more self-dependent for such things in life.
Right now, the key priority of the left, which they hope to enact by this fall, is a government-run health care ‘option’ that will soon become a government-run monopoly. Do most Americans really want to effectively nationalize 17% of our economy? The American people must take up this debate. Serving the nation’s medical needs is no different from serving any other public need. Free markets can provide affordable and effective services of every kind, and conservatives must propose better ways to achieve our shared goals in tackling health care reform.
I – along with Tom Coburn, Richard Burr, and Devin Nunes – recently introduced a comprehensive health care bill called the Patients’ Choice Act. Americans can have universal access to quality, affordable health care without the government taking it over, and without adding trillions in new taxes and new spending. Our bill starts with and revolves around the individual, not the government. It reforms health care by strengthening the relationship between patient and doctor and relies on choice and competition rather than rationing and restrictions to contain costs.
Conservatives must also expand opportunities for international trade, and ensure a level playing field for American products and American workers. After all, 97 percent of the world’s consumers live outside the US borders, an enormous potential market for goods made in the USA.
Our tax code is a job-killer. Reforming it is an obvious place to improve our global competitiveness by leveling the international playing field for American-made goods and services. I have proposed to replace the corporate income tax – which is now the second highest in the industrialized world – with a globally competitive consumption tax. It removes taxes from American-made exports and puts an equal tax on foreign imports, and firms write off 100% of their investments immediately.
A final issue about which there is near total silence from both parties today is monetary policy. It’s a root cause of our current financial crisis, and a key to recovery and sustained growth is to restore the value and stability of our money.
For most of our history, the dollar was accepted everywhere. Its stability was guaranteed in gold by the Federal Reserve. But the late 1970s Humphrey-Hawkins Act ordered the government to follow a dual mandate: long-term price stability and short-term economic growth. These goals conflict. No matter how knowledgeable or well intentioned, the Fed can’t meet either goal very well. I am not one to blame Chairman Bernanke for this because it’s Congress that set up these conflicting targets 30 years ago.
It is imperative that we get off of the Fed-induced boom-and bust, inflationary-deflationary roller coaster, such as the one we are living through now, and restore sound money. When it comes to managing the national currency, virtue has a central role. At the end of the day, the central bank cannot cheat or paper over problems. There is no free lunch. Sooner or later, such decisions will catch up with us, and the people will be the victims. Long-term economic growth and rising living standards are major purposes of government, and they require a currency that holds predictable value.
There are a number of ways to do this, but it’s time conservatives broke through the wall of silence and started a national dialogue aimed at ending the cycles of instability and restoring the dollar’s standard of value.
The course of our current liberal leaders is entirely different. They have implicitly if not explicitly abandoned the first principles that made America a free nation and inspired our people with a character for greatness.
Their alternative to the unchanging rights of persons is a culture of change, or “relativism.” Their alternative to individual freedom is the European collectivist state. They claim the label “progressive,” but nothing is more unprogressive than government ownership of financial institutions such as banks and the means of production, such as auto manufacturers. The twentieth century’s most conspicuous failure was socialism everywhere it was tried.
“Relativism” claims there are no objective or self-evident truths. Every living being, culture, and nation is its own “truth.” Your freedom is someone else’s slavery. Well, the European elite have almost entirely succumbed to “relativism,” and the American elite—who I’m sorry to say populate our government—are quickly catching up. Can anything be more dispiriting? Why would anyone defend freedom when it has no more value than a personal taste, like preferring the color pink or Limburger cheese?
Laws shape the habits of the human soul. As Charles Murray recently argued, government unlimited by individual natural rights expands to eliminate every risk, meet every need, and satisfy every pleasure. It substitutes security for liberty and ends up destroying happiness, the natural end of the human soul. “Relativism” leads to soulless government. Freedom rooted in natural rights leads to government that honors and respects true human dignity.
In other words, the struggle between market freedom and a European welfare state socialism is a moral struggle. My friends in this room, our only real problem is getting the people to hear the facts and explaining the consequences. You and I must engage ourselves in the saving of Western civilization, the principles of human individuality and greatness. It falls to the honor of the American people to make this decision for mankind: either recover human freedom or sink into centuries of darkness only made worse by the pretensions of “progress.”
If you think the views I’ve expressed are pessimistic, you’d be mistaken. This is an exciting time to be an American. Why? Because we have the occasion and the opportunity to reignite the promise of America. Our new President and his complicit Congress have shown us their path. They have taken the hard left turn. They have revealed their disdain for the principles that built America. Yet the Founders built the “house” on solid rock to withstand storms. Whenever Americans have been confronted by dramatic differences in direction, they have chosen freedom, prosperity, and national greatness. Give the people a fair opportunity to make an informed choice, however stark. I am more than an optimist…I am confident they will always prefer God’s noblest gift to man: the gift of individual freedom.
Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin’s 1st District is the Ranking Minority Member on the House Budget Committee. Read more of TNL’s series on a conservative comeback here.
TNL