Looking over this audience, I sense that I may have been around the political track a few more laps than most of you. I can tell you that every lap is unique in its own way -- and that the lap we completed last November was uniquely disappointing. Rarely in my experience has a winning candidate appealed to meaner spirits. Never has a winning candidate seemed less interested in calling his countrymen to reconciliation and common purpose. When has an American President, even in the afterglow of victory, seemed so small?
As you all are painfully aware, it is the settling judgment of the commentariat that the light of the American day is beginning to fade. They say that we are on the downslope of history and headed for inconsequence. That's highly unlikely, in my view, but it may help to remember that ours is not by a wide measure the darkest day in the American story. Heed the words of Abraham Lincoln, speaking from the pitch-blackness of December 1862: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion . . . We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country."
Exactly. Let's begin today to disenthrall ourselves.
I propose, in search of wisdom, to summon the ghosts of my two great mentors, William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan. Buckley, the younger man by 14 years, first.
Bill Buckley was, as you know, a man of great accomplishment. He wrote more than fifty books. He edited an earth-shaking magazine. He hosted the longest-running talk show in television history. Bill Buckley took it upon himself to shape and then build and then lead the conservative revival in this country. That task became the central mission of his life.
When I went to work for him in 1963, he had begun the rough assembly of a new conservative coalition. The first cluster of potential supporters he called Traditionalists. These were people of religious faith. People of patriotic fervor. People who stood up a little straighter when the flag went by. The second cluster was made up of Libertarians. People who reveled in the promise of American opportunity. People who squirmed under the hot breath of government on the back of their neck. And the third cluster, at the time much the largest of the three, were the anti-Communists. People who saw American values as a stay against international chaos. People who saw American military might as a civilizing force in the twilight struggle for the world.
The tensions between and among these groups, as you can imagine, were palpable. The Libertarians looked at religious belief and saw superstition. The Traditionalists looked back at the Libertarians and saw godless amorality. Both groups looked at the anti-Communists and remarked the high price in individual liberty paid to the national security state. The coalition seemed always at the edge of dissolution.
But they were pulled together by centripetal forces, as well - not just by the charismatic leadership of Bill Buckley, but by a shared cultural heritage, by a temperamental optimism tethered to an historical pessimism, and by the most powerful adhesive of all, a common enemy. The Traditionalists knew that a dominant Soviet Union would crush religious freedom. The Libertarians knew that a dominant Soviet Union would crush economic opportunity. And the national security hawks knew that a dominant Soviet Union would replace a benign pax Americana with a rapacious pax Sovietica. Bill Buckley's allies in those days amounted to little more than a ragtag scouting party. But they would grow in time into a continental army.
One of the pivotal moments in conservative history, a moment that would define the political contours of our movement even to the present day, came in the winter of 1964. The question before the editorial board of Buckley'sNational Review was this: whom should the magazine support for the Republican presidential nomination? In those early, formative days, National Review's support was thought to be dispositive in such questions.
No comments:
Post a Comment