Conservatives, on the other hand, cut Nixon a lot of slack for a very long time. They shouldn’t have. They fell for the argument that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But Richard Nixon was never a friend of conservatism; he just used the rhetoric and the movement to his own advantage. He played conservatives—and Republicans—for suckers. And Barry Goldwater was one of the biggest suckers of all.
Yes, Richard Milhaus Nixon really was Tricky Dick.
Nixon not only didn’t repeal Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, he went out of his way to put the entire program on steroids. Nixon never balanced a budget (even LBJ did it in 1968–69), but he did create the Environmental Protection Agency and proclaimed Earth Day. He signed OSHA and an Emergency Unemployment Act into law. He recognized Communist China (a policy that I would venture to say has now had a few unintended consequences) and he spent more on social programs than on defense. In fact, Nixon wanted to spend more with his “Family Assistance Program,” which would have provided a “guaranteed income” to tens of millions of Americans.
Under Nixon, Medicaid’s spending skyrocketing 120 percent. He also wrecked what was left of the gold standard and devalued the dollar. And, when inflation ran riot, he instituted wage-and-price controls.
Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s vice president, was actually an eastern establishment Rockefeller-type Republican who only mouthed conservative words to keep Nixon’s Republican base at ease. Liberal Senate minority leader Hugh Scott got it right when he boasted: “The conservatives get the rhetoric; we [the liberals] get the action.”
New York Times columnist James Reston said of Nixon in 1970: “He is at a critical point in his career. He has been trying to liberate himself from his conservative and anti-Communist past, and work toward a progressive policy at home and a policy of reconciliation with the Communists abroad. . . .”
Reston got it only half right. Nixon never really was a conservative; he was always—you guessed it—a progressive. And his favorite president was—you guessed right again—Woodrow Wilson. In fact, while Ronald Reagan placed a portrait of Calvin Coolidge in the Cabinet Room, Nixon hung portraits of Wilson—and Theodore Roosevelt—in his own private office.
INTO THE BUSHES
I’ve met George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. They are both decent, kind, courteous people. But neither of them did a very good job with bringing a true conservative philosophy to the Oval Office.
The GOP had come a long way under Ronald Reagan. This new and improved party might not have accomplished everything that conservatives wanted (it never could, for example, figure out how to balance a budget or abolish Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education), but it seemed to be finally taking us away from the progressive track that Teddy Roosevelt had laid for the country all those years ago.
Reagan’s conservatism, however, never seemed to be good enough for the first president Bush. He was too busy ridiculing “voodoo economics” or introducing his own brand of watered-down, progressive “kinder, gentler conservatism.” Before you could say “Read my lips, no new taxes,” Bush Sr. had blown an 89 percent approval rating and received a pathetic 37.5 percent in the 1992 election.
It was pretty much the same with George H. W. Bush’s son when he took over eight years later. George W. had marketed his own brand of politics as “compassionate conservatism.” He campaigned for the White House without promising to abolish any federal agencies—something that was odd for a true small government politician. Conservatives should have seen through this act (we’ve seen it enough times to know how it ends), but we didn’t. There was so much concern about beating Al Gore (for good reason, I should add) that no one really stopped to think about Bush himself.
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Vladimir Milhaus Lenin?
There are many strange things about Richard Nixon, but this is among the strangest: When Nixon rolled out his abandonment of the gold standard, a rise in the tariff, and wage-and-price controls, he could have named his program anything. He could have called it “the New Progressivism.” He could have called it “the Great, New, Fair, Square Deal-Frontier-Society.” Instead he called it “the New Economic Policy”—the name Soviet dictator Vladimir Ilyich Lenin gave to the economic policy he instituted in 1922.
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George W. not only abandoned the traditional GOP promise to eliminate the federal Department of Education, he imposed a whole new level of Washington bureaucratic control on local schools with his “No Child Left Behind” act. He also doubled federal education spending (amazing fact: Bush spent more on education than on Iraq) and grew federal spending 68 percent overall.
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Voodoo Election Returns
How bad did George H. W. Bush’s “kinder, gentler conservatism” stink up the lot in his 1992 reelection campaign? This bad: Bush ended up with 37.5 percent of the vote. In 1932, colorless old Herbert Hoover, running at the depth of the Great Depression, got 39.7 percent! Bush got exactly 1.0 percent more than hapless Alf Landon did in 1936 when Landon won a whopping 8(!) electoral votes.
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For years on end, a Republican Congress spent like Charlie Sheen in a Vegas nightclub, and Bush generally stood by and accepted it. He issued just twelve vetoes over his two terms, the lowest total since Warren Harding—which isn’t even a fair comparison considering that Harding died in office during his only term.
George W. nearly doubled our national debt, taking it from $5.768 trillion to $10.626 trillion. He oversaw creation of the $700 billion blank-check TARP program, the first stimulus, and a $180 billion Medicare drug benefit program.
In 2009, the Mercatus Institute ran the numbers on George W. They aren’t pretty:
Bush increased spending more than any of his seven predecessors (LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, GHWB, Clinton).
In Bush’s last term discretionary spending skyrocketed 48.6 percent.
Adjusted for inflation, Bill Clinton’s budget rose by just 11 percent. Bush’s budgets soared by 104 percent.
The number of federal subsidy programs expanded by 30 percent. When Bush left office the number of programs had grown to 1,816.
My point with all of this is not to add to the George W. Bush bashing—he obviously did plenty of very good things—but simply to underscore that he was not even close to being a conservative president. A Republican? Sure. A guy who kept us safe during one of the most dangerous times in American history? Absolutely. But a real, small government, constitutional conservative? No way.
FOOL ME ONCE. . .
At this point some people may be thinking that I believe there’s absolutely no difference between Republicans and Democrats.
No, not at all. There is absolutely a difference between the way Michele Bachmann, Jim DeMint, and Mike Lee view the world as opposed to the way Nancy Pelosi, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Barbara Boxer view it. What I am saying, however, is that those on the right who stand for real conservatism are relentlessly attacked and marginalized and, therefore, never really even make it into the running for the West Wing. You only have to look back to how Sarah Palin was treated once she had a chance at making it to Washington to see how this works in practice.
I am also saying that even those who claim to carry the conservative torch can backfire once they are exposed to the glitter and glamour found along the Potomac. No candidate is a sure thing to be conservative or moral or honest or constitutionally focused just because they wear the label “Republican.” Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew weren’t any of those things. Teddy Roosevelt was no small government conservative. George III interfered less in our educational system than George W did.
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Courting Disaster
The rationale of those who tell us to ignore our gut and vote Republican usually boils down to something like this: No matter how bad Republicans really are, conservatives have to vote Republican so that we can place conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. But guess what? Democrats are told the same thing! I’m not sure that either si
de is really all that happy with the results.
There have been plenty of Republican SCOTUS nominees who were so atrocious they didn’t even get confirmed: Clement Haynsworth, G. Harold Carswell, Douglas H. Ginsburg, and Harriet Miers. And then there’s the nightmare of GOP nominees who actually do get confirmed: Ike’s disastrous choices of Earl Warren (a payback for help at the 1952 convention) and William J. Brennan (chosen solely to woo northeastern votes in Ike’s 1956 reelection bid), Nixon’s catastrophe of the cranky and unprofessional Harry Blackmun (he gave us Roe v. Wade), Gerald Ford’s pick of John Paul Stevens, and George H. W. Bush’s stupefying selection of the liberal nonentity David Souter.
With selections like that, who needs Democrats?
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We’re told that we have to forgive the GOP for the Nixons and McCains that it hands us from time to time; that we have to turn a blind eye to what’s wrong with the Republican Party. The “smart people” in charge tell us that we just have to keep our mouths shut, turn off our brains, and rally around the elephant. Sorry if I’m not thrilled by the idea of standing in line to pull the lever for a party that couldn’t seemingly care less about governing by the values it pretends to stand for.
There are also those who make a more fundamental argument about why none of this matters: old-fashioned conservatism’s time has passed. I hear it all the time; people say that the modern GOP has to move on and adapt. They say it has to expand beyond its traditional base, be a big tent, be progressive—maybe not as progressive as Barack Obama, but smart and tough when it comes to using government as a tool to help people. If you want to win, they say, then you have to move toward the middle—offer a little something to everyone. Be more like McCain and Romney and less like Palin and Santorum.
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RINO Fun Fact
John McCain voted to confirm ACLU general counsel Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a Constitution in the year 2012”) to the Supreme Court in 1993. And he wasn’t alone: the vote was 96–3.
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Nope, sorry, not buying it. Decades of evidence are in to show us exactly what we get when we compromise our values to win elections: more government, more spending, more taxes, more regulations, more bureaucracy, more interference by Washington in our daily lives. If that’s what winning means then you’ll excuse me if I’m not excited about continuing that trend. If turning my back on my principles is a prerequisite to winning elections, then, I hate to say it, but I’d rather lose. I’d rather not be in power than have to justify using that power to do things that I’m fundamentally opposed to.
But perhaps the biggest problem for those of us who care about the future of liberty is that most people don’t understand that we are being offered false choices; that John McCain as the standard-bearer of the Republican Party in a presidential election is indicative of how the conservative/libertarian chair has been taken from the table.
The truth is that we are the mark—the sucker—in a national shell game. The ball—which represents real small government, constitutional candidates—seems like it’s always there, ready to be discovered, when, in reality, the operator is palming it. It doesn’t matter which shell you choose or how many times you play or how closely you pay attention—the ball will never be where you think it is.
You will lose every time.
That is why understanding history is so vital to understanding the current political playing field. What the establishment is doing today is what progressives originally did when they took the chair away from constitutionalists and said: Here’s your choice: Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson; John McCain or Barack Obama. Which is it going to be?
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Beck Quotes a Socialist!
I’d rather vote for what I want and not get it, than vote for what I don’t want and get it.
—EUGENE V. DEBS, SOCIALIST CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT IN 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, AND 1920.
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Sorry, that’s not a fair choice—and so it’s time that we call the shell game what it really is: a scam. I don’t know about you, but I don’t participate in scams, I expose them. And that’s what we need to do now: expose the system as not just flawed, but rigged; expose the “two-party” system as a one-party monopoly; and, most important, show America that there is another choice. We just have to pull our chair back up to the table.
“Where morality is present, laws are unnecessary. Without morality, laws are unenforceable.”
—Anonymous
CAN ANYONE NAME a modern-day politician who has actually given us more freedom and less government, or who has made our lives happier and more prosperous?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
We all hear a lot of talk from politicians about their deep concern for the ideals of the Founders—even President Barack Obama pays lip service to streamlining and shrinking government—but when it comes to action, those who actually believe in the core principles of the Constitution always come away disappointed.
Always.
As journalists Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch explain in The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America: “[W]e are held hostage to an eighteenth century system, dominated by two political parties whose ever-more-polarized rhetorical positions mask a mutual interest in maintaining a stranglehold on power.” And the only way to end this stranglehold is to disconnect government from our morality, from our prosperity, and from our lives in general.
Most of you reading that last sentence are probably nodding your heads in agreement. It sounds great—maybe even easy; after all who wants government in their lives? The problem is that human nature is a very worthy adversary. To disconnect from government we also have to strip away all of the feel-good rhetoric and lofty promises made by politicians and instead demand real change and real accountability. We have to stop supporting the newest “savior” politician and stop hitching our futures to the best-run campaigns or the most charismatic establishment candidates because they are “most electable.” We have to stop being distracted by the gotchas and rumormongering of the mass media, which cares more for its own ratings than the future of our country. But, most of all, we have to stop thinking about politics and start concentrating on ideas. Electoral maps, delegate counts, and brokered conventions may all be fun for political insiders on twenty-four-hour news channels to dissect and debate, but they do nothing to change our actual course as a country.
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Lip Service
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi came up with an interesting angle to celebrate the passage of Obamacare. Democrats, she claimed, “honor the vows of our founders, who in the Declaration of Independence said that we are ‘endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ This legislation will lead to healthier lives, more liberty to pursue hopes and dreams and happiness for the American people. This is an American proposal that honors the traditions of our country.”
When the National Labor Relations Board decided that it could dictate by fiat where companies could move and produce their goods, nixing Boeing’s decision to build its Dreamliner 787 fleet in union-free South Carolina, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed that the NLRB “acts as a check on employers and employees alike” and was consistent with the “spirit of checks and balances” the Founding Fathers had envisioned.
And Barack Obama, during his inaugural address, also invoked the Founders, saying that their “ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”
It all goes to prove that while it’s very easy to quote the Founders’ words, it’s much harder to actually govern by them.
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YOU JUST MIGHT BE A LIBERTARIAN
I’m proud to say that I’m a libertarian—and you might be one, too. In fact I believe that most Americans are libertarian at heart. Most Americans understand individual strugg
le and individual reward. Even though we are teaching them that everybody gets a trophy, most still understand that the government usually screws things up. But let’s get away from the words and labels for a minute and instead talk about ideas.
When you boil it down, libertarians believe that government is best when it governs least. We don’t believe government should try to make life more “fair” or force you to lose weight or “nudge” people into wanting to use solar panels. We believe that citizens should be making those decisions for themselves. In other words, a libertarian is an antiprogressive. Like the Founding Founders, libertarians are classical liberals, people who believe that limited government, the rule of law, individual liberty, freedom of religion (not from religion), speech, press, and assembly, and free markets represent the most moral kind of government.
Libertarians also understand a fundamental truth about this country: the most pressing problem we face isn’t a lack of fairness, or private-sector corruption in the business world, or unfettered capitalism, or a diminishing work ethic, or China, or fill-in-any-other-issue-here. No, the most pressing problem we face is that the balance of power in this country has tilted toward the political class. Turning that around will require rethinking everything we’ve been conditioned to believe about how Washington and the two-party system work.