The Four Pillars of Conservatism

Author’s note: This is an update of a post I published last winter on several blogs (now closed) that I was maintaining in support of Fred Thompson’s candidacy for the GOP Presidential nomination.

Mitt Romney, in his speech to the Family Research Council’s Values Voters summit last October, told the assembled faithful:

I want to build a stronger military, a stronger economy, and stronger families. I call these the three legs of the Republican stool. These three unite the coalition of conservatives that Ronald Reagan championed—defense conservatives, economic conservatives, and social conservatives.

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We won’t win the White House with only 2 out of 3 or 1 out of 3. Republicans win the White House by motivating all 3 parts of our coalition to carry us to victory.

Close, Guv’nor, but no cigar. The cigar goes to Fred Thompson. Buy him a box of  La Gloria Cubanas. The three-legged stool is an unfortunate choice of metaphor for conservatives. It tips and falls over when its occupant leans too far in any one direction. That’s why the great majority of stools, chairs, tables, etc. have four legs, not three. It makes for a more stable platform. The three-legged stool also becomes much more unsteady if one of the legs is cut even a little shorter than the other two. This renders it just about useless.

In Mitt’s defense, he’s not the only one who doesn’t understand the underpinnings of conservatism. After Ronald Reagan, many conservatives thought that there were indeed only three legs underneath their movement, but along came the big government, big-spending “conservatives” who had lost their sense of balance somewhere along the way. At first they cut just a little off of the economic leg of the stool. Then they cut a little more, until the stool was left so tilted that it could no longer support anything of substance. The two pieces that were sawed off of the fiscal leg were lower spending and smaller government. Virtually all that remains of that orginal economic leg is lower taxes. What are conservatives to do about this? Should we try to pick up the pieces and glue them back on the leg?

Perhaps it would be a better not to use the milking stool as an allegory for the principles underlying conservatism. I prefer the sumbolism of a solid building built on a strong foundation of four substantial pillars, not three. The fiscal column which helps support the edifice needs to be the same length as the others, with more emphasis on lower spending. And we can invite libertarian conservatives back into the fold to help us raise the fourth buttress. Call it federalism, small government or whatever you want to, but it’s an underpinning which is about more than just fiscal matters and should not be lumped in with economic issues. Libertarian conservatives and federalists have for too long been given the short leg of the old three-legged Republican stool, and the coalition needs both of these essential parts to strengthen the whole.

Big government and big spending in the guise of conservatism and a myopic focus on social concerns have made a mess out of Ronald Reagan’s coalition of conservatives. By focusing only on narrow views of what conservatism should mean, some erstwhile conservatives have failed to show due respect for the other essential parts of the coalition. Big governmentalism has done this by attempting to redefine economic conservatism, ignoring the need to reduce government spending at the federal level. Some interpretations of social conservatism have led to the snubbing of economic and small government conservatives altogether. The emphasis on social conservatism at the expense of other essential conservative principles has chased away many of the libertarian conservatives, while federalists have, since Reagan’s death, been put away in the attic like some crazy aunt or uncle.

Ronald Wilson Reagan considered federalism to be a bedrock “first principle”, and he committed himself to revitalizing that principle:

Of all his accomplishments, perhaps the most profound part of the Reagan legacy — and we hope the most enduring — was President Reagan’s commitment to our nation’s Constitution and its explication of federalism, though that foundation had been neglected for most of the 20th century. With the constitutional aberrations of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society well-embedded in the nation’s collective consciousness, Reagan’s commitment to constitutionally limited government and the pre-eminence of the states in the American system envisioned by the Founders came as a much-needed shock to the system.

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Issued on 26 October 1987, President Reagan’s Executive Order 12612 on federalism speaks directly to the point. Indicating federalism’s “fundamental principles,” Reagan wrote as crisply and cogently as Madison, Hamilton or Jay ever did: “Federalism is rooted in the knowledge that our political liberties are best assured by limiting the size and scope of the national government. … The people of the States created the national government when they delegated to it those enumerated governmental powers relating to matters beyond the competence of the individual States. … All other sovereign powers, save those expressly prohibited the States by the Constitution, are reserved to the States or to the people.”

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Unlike many of his political contemporaries, Reagan understood that the fundamental premise of American society, and that society’s greatness, did not reside in, nor was it regulated by, Washington. Instead, he understood that “The people of the States are free, subject only to restrictions in the Constitution itself or in constitutionally authorized Acts of Congress, to define the moral, political, and legal character of their lives.”

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Likewise, the President wrote, “In most areas of governmental concern, the States uniquely possess the constitutional authority, the resources, and the competence to discern the sentiments of the people and to govern accordingly.” Quoting Thomas Jefferson, Reagan added that the States are “the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies.”

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Never known for his integrity, constitutional or otherwise, Bill Clinton revoked EO 12612 in 1998 and replaced it with EO 13083, which largely re-justified the excessive unconstitutional role the federal government has assumed since the time of Franklin Roosevelt.

Although Reagan’s executive order was re-established under the Bush administration, the President has mostly ignored it, allowing the federal leviathan to grow even larger than it did under Clinton.

Conservatives need to honor President Reagan by putting federalism back on the front burner. It should be one of our first principles, just as it was for Reagan.

Though his presidential campaign started late and never caught up, It was Fred Thompson who offered the best balance for movement conservatives. On economic and small government issues, he is still regarded favorably. Like John McCain amd most of his former rivals for the GOP presidential nomination, Fred’s strong on security matters. On social issues he’s pro-life, but his prosposal for a consitutional amendment to prevent state judges from altering the definition of marriage without the direction of their states’ legislatures falls short of the federal amendment banning gay marriage that most social conservatives favor.

Fred’s federalist principles have clearly put him at odds with many social conservatives on this one issue. Which begs the question of which tradeoffs are some social conservatives willing to cointinue to make? Was rejecting Thompson on this one issue a matter of cutting off noses to spite faces? The bar for getting any amendment incorporated into our constitution was intentionally set very high by the founders, who were so dedicated to the constitution they bequeathed us that they wanted us to think long and hard before we attempt to change it. If conservatives sacrifice security in exchange for promises of a federal amendment banning gay marriage, we could be making a deal which may not deliver the goods and could weaken our nation, especially at its borders. If we trade federalist principles for the same promises, there’s still have no guarantee of getting such an amendment, and the federal government will keep on growing, perhaps to the point where it can’t be stopped.

In addition, we will betray one of those first principles which Ronald Reagan stood for. As J.B. Williams has pointed out:

Reagan was most conservative in the arena of national security and firm foreign policy. Reagan understood that America was the only nation in the world with the power and moral authority to defend freedom and liberty around the globe, in defense of freedom and liberty here. Reagan commanded respect across the political aisle at home and abroad and remains one of the most loved US Presidents in US history even today.

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But he was somewhat liberal on social issues. Or, like Thompson, he was at least an anti-federalist who sought to return private assets and personal liberty to the states and the people at every chance.

Some conservatives need to sit down and think carefully about how John McCain came to be the 2008 nominee of the Republican Party. There’s a lesson all conservatives should take to heart. We need leadership which can bring economic, security and small government conservatives together with social conservatives to defeat the Democrats, dust off Ronald Reagan’s blueprints and rebuild the Republican party and the nation. Fred Thompson is no longer a presidential candidate for 2008, but he is a leader who can teach us a few things about balancing our conservative principles.

And who knows? Some conservatives are already drawing up their checklists for 2012.

- JP

‘The Axis of Idiots’ by J. D. Pendry - Sergeant Major, USMC, Retired

‘The Axis of Idiots’

 
Jimmy Carter, you are the father of the Islamic Nazi movement.  You threw the Shah under the bus, welcomed the Ayatollah home, and then lacked the spine to confront the terrorists when they took our embassy and our people hostage.  You’re the runner-in-chief. 
 
Bill Clinton, you played ring around the Lewinsky while the terrorists were at war with us.  You got us into a fight with them in Somalia and then you ran from it.  Your weak-willed responses to the U.S.S. Cole and the First Trade Center Bombing and Our Embassy Bombings emboldened the killers.  Each time you failed to respond adequately, they grew bolder, until 9/11/2001. 
 
John Kerry, dishonesty is your most prominent attribute.  You lied about American Soldiers in Vietnam ..  Your military service, like your life, is more fiction than fact.  You’ve accused our military of terrorizing women and children in  Iraq ..  You called Iraq   the wrong war, wrong place, wrong time, the same words you used to describe Vietnam ..  You’re a fake.  You want to run from Iraq and abandon the Iraqis to murderers just as you did the Vietnamese.   Iraq , like Vietnam , is another war that you were for, before you were against it. 
 
John Murtha, you said our military was broken.  You said we can’t win militarily in Iraq ..  You accused United States Marines of cold-blooded murder without proof and said we should redeploy to Okinawa .   Okinawa, John?   And the Democrats call you their military ex pert!   Are you sure you didn’t suffer a traumatic brain injury while you were off building your war hero resume?   You’re a sad, pitiable, corrupt and washed up politician.  You’re not a Marine, sir.  You wouldn’t amount to a good pimple on a real Marine’s backside.  You’re a phony and a disgrace.  Run away, John. 
 
Dick Durbin, you accused our Soldiers at Guantanamo of being Nazis, tenders of Soviet style gulags and as bad as the regime of Pol Pot, who murdered two million of his own people after your party abandoned Southeast Asia to the Communists.  Now you want to abandon the Iraqis to the same fate.  History was not a good teacher for you, was it?  Lord help us!  See Dick run.. 
 
Ted Kennedy, for days on end you held poster-sized pictures from Abu Ghraib in front of any available television camera.  Al Jazeera  quoted you saying that Iraqi’s torture chambers were open under new management.  Did you see the news, Teddy?   The Islamic Nazis demonstrated another beheading for you.  If you truly supported our troops, you’d show the world poster-sized pictures of that atrocity and demand the annihilation of it.  Your legislation stripping support from the South Vietnamese led to a communist victory there.  You’re a bloated, drunken fool bent on repeating the same historical blunder that turned freedom-seeking people over to homicidal, genocidal maniacs.  To paraphrase John Murtha, all while sitting on your wide, gin-soaked rear-end in  Washington … 
 
Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Carl Levine, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Russ Feingold, Hillary Clinton, Pat Leahy, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, the Holly wood Leftist morons, et al, ad nauseam; Every time you stand in front of television cameras and broadcast to the Islamic Nazis that we went to war because our President lied, that the war is wrong and our Soldiers are torturers, that we should leave Iraq, you give the Islamic butchers - the same ones that tortured and mutilated American Soldiers - cause to think that we’ll run away again, and all they have to do is hang on a little longer. It is inevitable that we, the infidels, will have to defeat the Islamic jihadists. Better to do it now on their turf, than later on ours after they have gained both strength and momentum. 
 
American news media, the New York Times particularly:  Each time you publish stories about national defense secrets and our intelligence gathering methods, you become one united with the sub-human pieces of camel dung that torture and mutilate the bodies of American Soldiers.  You can’t strike up the courage to publish cartoons, but you can help Al Qaeda destroy my country.  Actually, you are more dangerous to us than Al Qaeda is.  Think about that each time you face Mecca to admire your Pulitzer.
 
You are America ’s ‘AXIS OF IDIOTS.’  Your Collective Stupidity will destroy us.  Self-serving politics and terrorist-abetting news scoops are more important to you than our national security or the lives of innocent civilians and Soldiers.  It bothers you that defending ourselves gets in the way of your elitist sport of politics and your ignorant editorializing.  There is as much blood on your hands as is on the hands of murdering terrorists.  Don’t ever doubt that.  Your frolics will only serve to extend this war as they extended Vietnam …  If you want our Soldiers home as you claim, knock off the crap and try supporting your country ahead of supporting your silly political aims and aiding our enemies.
 
Yes, I’m questioning your patriotism.  Your loyalty ends with self.  I’m also questioning why you’re stealing air that decent Americans could be breathing.  You don’t deserve the protection of our men and women in uniform.  You need to run away from this war, this country.   Leave the war to the people who have the will to see it through and the country to people who are willing to defend it. 
 
No, Mr. President, you don’t get off the hook, either.  Our country has two enemies: Those who want to destroy us from the outside and those who attempt it from within.  Your Soldiers are dealing with the outside force.  It’s your obligation to support them by confronting the AXIS OF IDIOTS.
 
America must hear it from you that these self-centered people are harming our country, abetting the enemy and endangering our safety.  Well up a little anger, please, and channel it toward the appropriate target.  You must prosecute those who leak national security secrets to the media.  You must prosecute those in the media who knowingly publish those secrets.
 
Our Soldiers need you to confront the enemy that they cannot.  They need you to do it now.

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