Tag Archives: Conservatism

NRO: Reassessing Warren G. Harding

Posted on by
1

This article from National Review about one of the most derided presidents in American history seems particularly pertinent in the age of Obama. A “return to normalcy” and end to socialist experimentation is exactly what is needed today:

Reassessing Warren G. Harding
And a call for normalcy.

By Ryan Cole & Amity Shlaes

Change isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. That’s what most of us have come to realize in recent years, whether the change proposed came from Pres. Barack Obama or the Tea Party movement. Still, most haven’t quite reached the point where we oppose change and fight for stability.

Maybe we ought to: Maybe sometimes it is the time for no change. That, at least, was the position of Warren Harding. Warren who? On the presidential roster, Harding is POTUS 43. No, that doesn’t mean he’s replaced George W. Bush: Harding’s “43” is his aggregate rank among presidents. Since there’s a tie somewhere in there, this means Harding is the worst-ranked president in the history of our land.

Still, the most despised chief exec had something to say about the issue that’s preoccupying the country. Nowhere did Harding put the case against change, and the case for realism, better than in his inaugural address, delivered 90 years ago today.

When Harding sat down to plan that address, he was confronting a nation suffering the kind of uncertainty that is familiar to us today. After the war, unemployment hit 14 percent. Inflation raged. The economy contracted severely, and the stock market followed suit. Restless veterans and angry workers thought they might imitate the revolutions taking place overseas.

In his 1920 campaign, Harding ran as the anti-revolutionary: He sought “a return to normalcy.” His choice of Calvin Coolidge as his running mate underscored his commitment to that concept. Coolidge stood for caution and for drawing the line at extremism. It was Coolidge who had pulled a pre-PATCO and, Reaganesque, fired the Boston police force for leaving the city to looters when they went out on strike in 1919.

One of our problems today is that politicians are unwilling to concede certain truths about the economy. One is that housing prices may fall more. Another is that government intervention will inevitably force upon us a period of inflation. Yet another is that wages may not go as high as we like until the economy sorts itself out. Instead of skirting those issues, Harding spelled them all out, trusting voters to accept the truth.

While government would do all it could, there were imbalances it could not rectify, Harding allowed. “Perhaps,” he said, “we never shall know the old level of wages again.” To assume that life might be instantly reordered was also to overreach: “There is no instant step from disorder to order. We must face a condition of a grim reality, charge off our losses and start afresh.”

Next Harding turned to the topic of change. “Any wild experiment,” the new president said, “will only add to the confusion.” He went on: “Our supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way. Reconstruction, readjustment, restoration, all these must follow. I would like to hasten them.”

Harding went on to lay out what he thought normalcy should be like: “I speak for administrative efficiency, for lightened tax burdens, for sound commercial practices, for adequate credit facilities . . . for the omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business, for an end to Government’s experiment in business, and for more efficient business in Government administration.”

If Americans could accept all these realities, the new president argued, “We can reduce the abnormal expenditures, and we will. We can strike at war taxation, and we must.”

Harding was right. The decade began with a recession. But soon enough, and while Harding was still living, those other things he predicted did follow. After Harding’s Teapot Dome Scandal in 1923, and his death that summer, the new president, Coolidge, sought to clear his own administration of scandal. But Coolidge was careful not to abandon Harding’s theme of normalcy. Normalcy for both presidents meant keeping government out of the way, reducing what the scholar Robert Higgs today calls “regime uncertainty.” Harding and Coolidge after him honored Harding’s inaugural-speech promise to drop the nation’s high tax rates. Harding promised to create a Bureau of the Budget, and did. New presidential authority from the law he signed in 1921 aided both him and his successors in their effort to trim spending.

Normalcy gave the United States a Wunder-decade of strong growth, low unemployment, and little inflation. Americans got cars and electricity for the first time. They got healthier. The federal budget moved into surplus and stayed there. The 1920s also saw strong productivity gains, so strong that Americans began to accomplish in five days what they used to in six.

Continue

WSJ: The World Needs a Strong GOP

Posted on by
1

From the Wall Street Journal:

The World Needs a Strong GOP
Republicans can show the way with careful fiscal conservatism at home and quiet idealism abroad.

By DAVID DAVIS

It is always hazardous for outsiders to offer opinions on a foreign country’s political landscape, and as a lifetime admirer of America and its values I have always been cautious in doing so. Nevertheless, the world today is as volatile and dangerous as it has been for a long time, and it needs a strong and coherent Republican Party leading American opinion and policy. With the streets of the Arab world in flames, an ever more ascendant and ambitious China, and a global financial crisis that has not been well managed, let alone resolved, the rest of the world needs America to be a confident champion of Western values.

As a political movement, the various strands of Republican opinion have a force and vigor rarely witnessed elsewhere in the Western world. What is more, each strand brings its own wisdom and insight to the political debate.

Take, for example, the tea party movement. European liberals deride it as unsophisticated and simplistic. Yet we should remember that they said much the same of Ronald Reagan when he was alive, even as they now recognize him as the great, world-class statesman that he was. Discovering the right answer after the event is a luxury often exercised by the political left, but not one that we can afford now.

So the tea party brings vigor, but it also reflects a skepticism about big government that is a wisdom of our times. In the aftermath of a historically unprecedented bank rescue and economic stimulus, and in the absence of a serious intellectual answer to the banking crisis, who is to say that they are entirely wrong?

Similarly, it is fashionable to dismiss the neoconservatives for their aggressive foreign policy. I am uncomfortable with some of the incompetences of Western interventions, but the current explosion of unrest across the Arab world adds some validity to their claim that democracy is a universal human value wanted by everybody, irrespective of their culture, religion and history.

Even more unfashionable with the political left are the social conservatives in Republican ranks. It may be that the problems facing the U.S. economy will ensure that social issues take a back seat to candidates’ fiscal policies, but to America’s 60 million evangelical Christians social issues still matter. Those candidates seeking the Republican nomination in 2012 who choose to ignore social-issues voters will do so at their peril.

It would be naive to claim that the Republican Party, with its 47 senators, 241 representatives and millions of voters, can be neatly divided into a small number of distinct factions. It is potentially problematic for the Republicans, however, that there are groups within the GOP which hold widely different views not only about the party’s policy priorities, but also about what those policies should be.

For instance, there is a sharp divide within the GOP on federal spending. A recent Pew survey showed that Republicans identifying themselves as tea party supporters would broadly welcome cuts in spending on education, social-security and environmental programs, while non-tea party Republicans were more supportive of increased spending in these areas.

Continue

No Eugene Robinson, Democrats are NOT the Party of Reagan

Posted on by
3

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Eugene Robinson wrote an incredibly disingenuous pieces on Ronald Reagan, claiming that today’s Democrats are the party Reagan, because the GOP has moved so far to the right.

First, Robinson cited Reagan’s record as governor of California:

When he took office as governor of California in 1967, the state faced a huge budget deficit. Reagan promptly raised taxes by $1 billion – at a time when the entire state budget amounted to just $6 billion. It was then the biggest state tax increase in history.

When Ronald Reagan became Governor of California, the state faced an enormous budget shortfall. Reagan’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, used slight-of-hand bookkeeping tricks to hide the enormity of the state’s budget crisis. By the time Reagan took the helm, he had six months to balance California’s books. In order to clean-up the Democrats mess, Reagan was forced to raise taxes in his first year as Governor. However, it was not a position he enjoyed supporting:

It was not an enjoyable speech to make. I’d campaigned on a promise to keep the lid on taxes, now I was asking for an increase. But I swallowed hard and said that as soon as I could, I’d make sure we gave the people some of their money back to them.
(Am American Life p.165)

In fact, Reagan cut taxes four times as Governor, including a 1968 tax rebate of $100 million, the first in California history. The rebate was made possible by Governor Reagan’s budget surplus.

Next, Robinson claimed that as President, Ronald Reagan was not a real tax cutter:

What eludes the GOP’s selective memory is that Reagan subsequently raised taxes 11 times, beginning with the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982. All told, he took back roughly half of that hallowed 1981 tax cut. Why? Because he realized that the United States needed an effective federal government – and that to be effective, the government needed more money.

On this one, Robinson is again wrong. To get the facts straight, in 1980 the top marginal tax rate was 70%. In 1989, the top marginal rate had been cut down to 28%. As for the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, President Reagan absolutely did not sign it because “he realized that the United States needed an effective federal government – and that to be effective, the government needed more money.” It seems as though this explanation was invented out of thin air by Robinson.

Ronald Reagan dealt with a Democratic House his entire time in office, with a Senate going back and forth. As such, President Reagan was forced to negotiate with the Democrats. One such example was the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982. While President Reagan opposed raising taxes, the Democrats promised him that for every $1 in tax hikes, there would be $3 in spending cuts. Under these pretenses, President Reagan acquiesced to a tax hike. The Democrats did not keep up their end of the bargain – for every dollar in tax increases the Democrats only cut spending by 27 cents. After this mistake, President Reagan never again raised taxes. In fact, in 1986 Reagan signed into law the most sweeping tax rate reduction in history.

Perhaps Robinson and his ilk forget who Ronald Reagan really was. After the 1964 election, where Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan said:

“We don’t intend to turn the Republican Party over to the traitors in the battle just ended. We will have no more of those candidates who are pledged to the same goals as our opposition and who seek our support. Turning the Party over to the so-called moderates wouldn’t make any sense at all.”

No matter what liberals now claim, Ronald Reagan was not a ‘moderate Republican.’ Ronald Reagan was a conservative champion. The attempt to whitewash his record is an attempt to deny the great successes of conservatism. Ronald Reagan communicated and implemented great ideas; conservative solutions that that still apply today.

My Interview With Craig Shirley on the Legacy of Ronald Reagan

Posted on by
3

In this interview, I discuss the legacy of President Reagan with renowned Reagan authority Craig Shirley.

The interview focuses on three specific fields: Ronald Reagan’s fight for the GOP nomination, how the Gipper changed his party, and what President Reagan’s legacy really means.

Today, many have fallen victim to a form of presentism: a belief that just because things turned out the way they did, the course of history was inevitable. President Reagan’s fight for the GOP nomination was far from inevitable, and his election in 1980 was even less certain at the time.

This year, the first GOP presidential debate will be held at the Reagan Library. From around the country, every Republican now claims to be a Reaganite. However, things were very different when Ronald Reagan was seeking his party’s nomination. Reagan had run against Gerald Ford, the sitting president, in the 1976 for the GOP nomination. Much of the GOP’s establishment reviled Reagan. Conservatives were looked down upon in the party. As such, President Reagan was painted as a far-right extremist that had no hope in a general election. President Reagan’s win in 1980 reshaped the Republican Party, and changed the American political landscape forever.

Historians have made a conscious effort to whitewash President Reagan’s true legacy. Members of the GOP establishment claim Reagan as one of theirs today. We are told that Ronald Reagan was a great pragmatist and that he only spoke ‘conservative’ to appease the base. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Ronald Reagan was a conservative champion, and the elites hated him for that. Reagan’s conservatism guided him throughout his presidency.

Listen online:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.