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The Republican Century

A Speech to the Leadership Institute

San Diego, California

I want to thank you for your invitation to join you this afternoon, and to especially thank you for your support of the Leadership Institute. I did not realize the true extent of the Institute's work, and Morton Blackwell's influence, until my staff learned that I would be addressing you today. It turns out that more than half of them are graduates of the Leadership Institute's training programs. I should have suspected as much. My senior consultant has a copy of Morton's Ten Mistakes of Losing Candidates and Ten Mistakes of Winning Candidates framed over his desk. He also has a copy of the Ten Commandments, so I suppose you could say that Morton is leading Moses in my office by a score of 20 commandments to ten.
I must also warn you that Morton is a very controversial figure among California conservatives these days, after he seduced Lou and Jane Barnett to join him in Washington. But after a great deal of discussion, we've decided to be grown-ups about this and forgive him, provided he returns the Barnett's safely to California when he's done with them, in roughly the same condition as when he stole them.

I have chosen a pretentious title for my remarks today: "The Republican Century" republican in the Jeffersonian sense. But I believe I can make a very good case that this indeed is how historians will remember the 21st Century, if we fulfill our responsibilities now.

As Shakespeare's Brutus said:

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.

I submit to you that these words apply in every detail to the work and opportunity that lies before us today.

I think the 20th Century will be remembered as one of history's great ironies. Mankind took unimagined, quantum leaps in our understanding of science and technology. And yet, we took a giant step backward in our understanding of our political institutions.

The Enlightenment produced the recognition, brilliantly reflected and refined by the American Founders, that our governing institutions had to work in harmony with our human nature. We rejected the rigid command and control structures of authoritarianism for the decentralized, individualistic structures of the free market and limited, self-contained governing institutions.

But at the beginning of the 20th Century, we began to make dramatic leaps in our scientific understanding, and I think this led to a hubris that transformed political thought. To the Marxists and so-called Progressives at the turn of the last century, everything that had come before was antiquated and quaint, but obviously wholly inadequate and irrelevant to the modern world. Because Jefferson and Madison and Franklin and Adams had never seen an electric light bulb or flown on an aircraft, therefore they had no clue what a modern government should look like. So Locke and Bastiat and Smith and Rousseau gave way to Marx and Nietzsche and Hegel.

Thoreau's observation on behalf of the American Founders, That government is best which governs least, was replaced with Walter Lippman's reply, That government is best which provides the most. Government would "scientifically manage" our problems, according to Woodrow Wilson and those who followed in his footsteps.

I remember debating Lucy Killea, on San Diego radio about six years ago. At the time, she was a state senator who got her start as an assistant to Eleanor Roosevelt. The subject was the revision of California's constitution. I was explaining the containment mechanisms in the federal constitution. "Oh, the Constitution," she said with disdain. "That is an antiquated document designed for an agrarian society dominated by white men."

And so, we threw away the learning of the Enlightenment, and began to repeat precisely the same mistakes we had made in medieval Europe and Imperial Rome.

The fundamental political issue of the 20th Century was, "How do we centralize government? How do we command and control economies? How do we regulate commerce" And the answers to those questions didn't work any better in the 20th Century with all of its advanced technology than they worked in the Dark Ages. Indeed, as Churchill pointed out, that "authoritarian ideology was made more sinister and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science".

But in the last decade or two, as we have picked through the wreckage that this retrograde ideology has caused, we now hear a completely different question: "How do we decentralize government? How do we deregulate commerce? How do we restore free markets?" These are the questions of the 21st Century, and our role at this junction in history is every bit as momentous as the role of those at the American founding.

If history tells us anything, it is that meaningful change does not come gradually. Long periods of stasis and decline give way to sudden climacterics, where things change, for good or ill, very rapidly. All experience hath shown that mankind are disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by altering the forms (of government) to which they have become accustomed.

We are creatures of habit. It is our nature to resist change. It is our nature to avoid confrontation and upheaval as long as we possibly can, because it is uncomfortable. So the pressures gradually build in a society until the necessity for change overcomes our natural resistance to it. And in that moment, the world can change very quickly. And I believe we are on the thresh hold of such change. Let me tell you why.

First, because we are entering the terminal stage of a bureaucratic state. From the beginning of recorded history, governments follow a very predictable course. Bureaucracies are established for simple purposes. They grow beyond those purposes, eventually subsuming every obstacle in their path. They reach a terminal stage when they become abusive of the population, rapacious for funds, intolerant of independent religious practice, and mired in the most intricate regulation.

And when a civilization reaches that terminal stage, history shows us only three ways in which that condition is resolved.

The early civilizations simply collapsed under the weight of these bureaucracies. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, 320,000 Roman citizens where on some form of public relief. Writing in 1776, Edward Gibbon surveyed the wreckage left by the gigantic military and civil bureaucracy and remarked, "No human civilization, without soon exhausting itself, can maintain above a hundredth part of itself in arms or idleness." People had neither the intellectual empowerment to circulate ideas nor the political empowerment to act on those ideas. The civilizations simply collapsed.

The second way to resolve this terminal stage of a bureaucratic state is revolution. The introduction of the printing press led to intellectual empowerment, but without political empowerment the only recourse was to arms. While Edward Gibbon was publishing in London, the American colonists were publishing a list of indictments of their sovereign, among them: "He has erected a multitude of new laws and sent hither swarms of officials to harass our people and eat out their substance."

We kicked that bureaucracy out of this country at Yorktown in 1781. What do you suppose happened to it? It went right on passing taxes and trade restrictions in its own country. Also in 1776, Adam Smith was publishing the Wealth of Nations in Edinburgh. It was a scholarly but bitter denunciation of the same policies imposed by the same bureaucracy in England. But something was changing in Britain. As Democratic institutions took root, people now had both the intellectual empowerment of the press and the political empowerment of the polls, and we begin to observe the third manner in which the terminal stage of a bureaucratic state is resolved: sudden, radical downsizings of the bureaucracy. In 1846, the British finally had a belly full of it, the Parliamentary majority suddenly shifted, and in one day's legislative business, 18,000 of the trade restrictions were repealed.

And I believe we are beginning to see that pressure building in our own country. In the 1950's the political scientist VO Key, Jr. observed a pattern in American politics that he called the "realigning presidential elections". He noticed that the governing agenda of the nation and the political coalitions formed on both sides around that agenda remained very stable for a period of about 40 years. But then, at regular intervals, in a relatively brief period of time, a previously uninvolved portion of the population became active, usually around a charismatic leader and a new governing agenda, and the political landscape changed permanently. In 1824-28 came the rise of the Jacksonian Democrats as western territorial voters suddenly energized. In 1856-1860 came the fall of the Whigs and the rise of the Republicans over free-soil. In 1896-1900, Republican hegemony was established as a reaction and rejection of William Jennings Bryan's populism. Finally from 1928-32 came the rise of democratic socialism under Franklin Roosevelt. This is where Key's theory leaves off (he was writing in the 1950's), but just to carry his theory farther, you come to 1968 to 1972, when Kevin Phillips published his 1969 work, "the emerging Republican majority." Phillips noted a realignment taking shape as the Democratic Party lost its stranglehold over blue-collar voters in the northeast and its traditional solid base in the South.

And if you fast-forward another 40 years, you reach this decade. And the signs of realignment are all around us. Young people, though entirely disengaged, are perhaps the most libertarian generation we have spawned since the American Revolution. And why shouldn't they be? Government is now taking more than half of everything they earn; more from their earnings than it has ever taken in its history. Their freedom of thought is under constant attack from the time they enter grade school. They are the victims of the biggest intergenerational transfer of wealth in the history of the world. And they know it. Only a fourth of them expect ever to see a dime from social security, for example. Go ahead and ask them if government is their "friend."

If it is true that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, this generation is a generation that has been mugged by big government. Politically, it is entirely disengaged, but its dissatisfaction is huge. We saw the first stirring of this generation in 1980, 84, and 88, when young voters became the strongest voting block for Ronald Reagan and for George Bush Sr., before Bush became, in Arthur Laffer's words, "the Anti-Reagan". And look at the generation behind them. They might be totally disengaged and rather hedonistic, but the vast majority is highly resentful of the intrusions by government upon their liberties and property. Indeed, in 1998, when neither party was willing to return a multi-billion dollar surplus to taxpayers in Minnesota, Jesse "The Body" Ventura appeared out of nowhere, and not exactly on a liberal platform. His political slogan was "Retaliate in '98," the central issue was return of the surplus to the people who earned it. He packed a gun and believed others should have the same right of self-defense. When accosted by a single mother on the steps of the state capitol, who demanded "what are you going to do for me," his reply was "With all due respect, why is it that your bad life choices are my responsibility?" Young people galvanized, energized, and voted in droves.

And I believe the salvation of our freedom, if it is to be saved, rests with this young generation. Our generation must provide the Benjamin Franklins and the George Wythes that make possible the next generation's Thomas Jeffersons.

The tools that await this generation are greater than any we have known before. If it was the printing press that made possible the age of revolution, well, what a puny thing it is next to the power of the Internet. The price of knowledge plummets, the cost of communication collapses, and now the political views of the American Founders, so distasteful to the 20th Century ruling class, are once again accessible on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Mailing lists, once very expensive to maintain and use are now giving way to effortless and costless e-mail.

What are the two elements of political mobilization? Knowledge and communication. And the acquisition of those two elements is easier than at any time in our history. Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill both complained about the political elite of their times dominating the media by which public debate was conducted. That complaint is harder and harder to make today with the explosion of telecommunications.

And rarely has the case for freedom been easier to make than it is today. At the beginning of the last century, there was some novelty to the philosophy of the Left. Today, it is increasingly viewed for what it is: a retrograde, authoritarian ideology that is a very real and very practical threat to our freedom, our prosperity and our pursuit of happiness.

In many ways, California pioneered this ideology, first as one of the hotbeds of so-called progressivism, and as the first of the ultimate manifestation of this ideology, radical environmentalism, or what can be more accurately described as "new age authoritarianism."

California public policy today is founded on several tenets that are antithetical to the philosophy of freedom. One of the most damaging is that there is no limit to decisions made in a democracy; that the majority has the right to extend or withdraw inalienable natural rights at whim; and that you have an absolute right to dictate how I may enjoy the fruit of my own labor. With the outset of the Jerry Brown administration in 1974, this notion became integral to the new powers of government.

It was in that year that it became the policy of this state to actively discourage the construction of new power plants. At the same time, we stopped building dams; we stopped building roads; we actively discouraged and obstructed the construction of houses. This was the ultimate folly of government "scientifically managing" our problems.

Now let me tell you what is the practical effect of this policy. After 27 years discouraging the construction of power plants, the day finally arrived when we ran out of power. It is that simple. The California Independent System Operator; the agency responsible for maintaining the electrical grid, warns that the state will be 6,000 megawatts short of electricity this summer. That means six million homes without power during the hottest hours of the hottest days of the year. The Chicago blackout in the heat wave of 1995 killed 700 people. We are talking not about one city and one blackout; we are talking about a summer of blackouts in an entire state.

The Left is already mobilizing to use the crisis as a pretext for seizing power plants and nationalizing the delivery of power. And they have, at the moment, a very sizable following. But their solutions are predicated entirely on an ideology that is devoid from reality. They predicate their entire policy on the fervent belief that the crisis is the result of capitalists gouging the proletariat. We view it as the inexorable working of the laws of supply and demand. Their solution , seizing power plants , doesn't work. It doesn't add an inch to the transmission lines or a watt to our capacity. So even if they prevail in the immediate future, they will fail miserably within the next few years.

And when that rotting, rusting, corroded framework of ideological claptrap comes crashing down around Californians over the next few years, I believe the opportunity for political change will be awesome.

But in order to accomplish that change, we need young leaders who are steeped in knowledge and skilled in communications.

We are, I believe, on the eve of a political climacteric of a magnitude that occurs maybe once in five generations: the opportunity, as Tom Paine said, "To make the world over again."

You, the supporters of the Leadership Institute have already trained many of the leaders who will save this country. But many more need to be trained. Rush Limbaugh last week offered the opinion that the Reagan Revolution faltered because we assumed we had won the ideological battle and didn't need to keep educating the people. With the Leadership Institute now firmly in place and its legacy of knowledgeable, eloquent, and committed leaders now secure, and thriving, and growing, that mistake will not be made again.

In 1780, with the tide of the revolution turning, John Adams took a moment to write a few thoughts about the future. A lesser man would have rested on his laurels , but political revolutions are not made of lesser men. He realized that his generation's duty was to secure American liberty for future generations to come. And he wrote to Abigail:

"The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

I believe that wheel has come full circle and once again, a generation is called upon to proclaim liberty throughout all the land, and unto all the inhabitants thereof. The study of politics must now consume all of us if we are to rise to the opportunity and the responsibility history and providence have thrust upon us when they placed us at this moment in time.

I will attribute this piece later tonight or tomorrow. We surely need leaders who believe like this in our day and age. If given an opportunity I would gladly vote for and support with my time, talent and treasure, someone who thinks this way.
Wouldn't you ?