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JUNE 15, 2011 |
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By Matthew Continetti |
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COLD OPEN |
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No doubt you've heard a conservative quote Ronald Reagan's Eleventh Commandment: "Thou shalt not attack a fellow Republican." Not a day passes, it seems, without a GOP presidential candidate or a Fox News "personality" citing the Gipper's quip as though it were sacred. How the witticism turned into an iron law of American politics is a mystery to me. It's time to cast this cliché into the dustbin.
Reagan's joke is funny—or was funny, before candidates and cable anchors turned it into boilerplate—because it is so blatantly untrue. Attacking other Republicans makes for political success. The author of the Eleventh Commandment fought the Rockefeller wing of the GOP as a citizen and California governor; ran for president four times; challenged a sitting U.S. president for the 1976 Republican nomination; and helped overturn the party's traditional positions on deficits, morality in foreign policy, and abortion. If Ronald Reagan had obeyed his own rule, one of the most consequential presidencies in American history would not have occurred.
Political insurgencies have been harbingers of winning elections. The Moral Majority brought millions of new voters to the GOP in the late 1970s, while the Supply Siders were changing the direction of conservative economics, laying the groundwork for Reagan's victory. Newt Gingrich's war on Republican minority leader Bob Michel was a crucial factor in the 1994 Republican Revolution. And we all know the role the Tea Party played in 2010.
The greater the ferment, the greater the chances for conservative victory. Which is why I can't wait for the fireworks to start in this year's fight for the Republican nomination. Let the infighting begin! |
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LOOKING BACK |
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"To anyone who grew up in a suburban-style house in the 1970s, mere ownership of a space heater was a form of insanity. We used to read about them on the front page of the Boston Herald all winter long. 'XMAS Tragedy in HUB Tenement,' the headline would read, over a picture of fire trucks and—in an inset on the lower right—the charred space heater that was to blame. Space heaters were like syphilis: something poor people acquired through their own incorrigible foolishness, then died of."
—Christopher Caldwell, "Rage Against the Machine," from our January 4 / January 11, 2010, issue.
Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe. |
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FROM THE DESKTOP |
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Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1915-2011
Let's use unemployment benefits as a signing bonus
Joseph Epstein is bored
Jhumpa Lahiri's literary apprenticeship
Christopher Hitchens on our Pakistani "ally" |
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK (SO FAR!) |
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"I think we need a Democratic Anti-Defamation League, and I urge you to found an institute to that end, so that even as Johns Hopkins gave graduate work distinction, so will it be said that Johns Hopkins returned distinction to political democracy. The institute would monitor, and hand down grades to, men and women responsible for political utterances—whether delivered over radio or television or before a live audience, or written in books or on billboards. I would like to see your Democratic Anti-Defamation League defend the honor of democracy by attacking those who abuse that venerable convention of self-government by public travesties of orderly thought. How fine if we succeeded in convincing American voters that the index to the political health of the nation was not the density of the vote, but the thoughtfulness of it!"
—William F. Buckley Jr., "Democracy and the Pursuit of Happiness," included in Let Us Talk of Many Things: The Collected Speeches (2000), p. 307. |
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LOOKING AHEAD |
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Be on the watch for my profile of Michele Bachmann, along with articles by William Kristol, Fred Barnes, and Noemie Emery, in upcoming issues of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. |
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PARTING SHOT |
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I went to New Hampshire to see the Republican presidential candidates debate on June 13, and came home thinking about the influence Ron Paul has had on his party. When the Texas congressman ran for president in 2008, he was dismissed as an eccentricity, a strange but lovable libertarian grandpa who wanted the troops to come home. This time around, though, Paul seems comfortable alongside the other Republicans. His views haven't changed. But the GOP is hurtling toward him.
President Obama shocked Republicans into abandoning so-called "compassionate conservatism." The 2012 Republican candidates sound like Barry Goldwater, talking not of making laws but repealing them. Which is where Paul has been all along.
The same is true for foreign policy. Not one of the Republican candidates defended President Obama's intervention in Libya, or made the case for a long-term American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, or criticized the president for not doing enough to promote democracy in Egypt, Syria, Iran, and China. They want the troops to return, sooner rather than later—just like Ron Paul.
The CNN moderator was too busy asking about American Idol to mention monetary policy. But if he had, I bet you would've heard the candidates attack the Federal Reserve and call for a sound dollar. Who does that remind you of?
Ron Paul is still more radical than most Republicans, not to mention most Americans. But he shows how, if you stand firm in your principles, the rest of the world (for better or worse!) eventually catches up.
See you next week. And don't forget you can write me at editor@weeklystandard.com.
--Matthew Continetti
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