To save the Reagan Revolution and the 10th Amendment, we may need a brokered convention

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

In the wake of the Iowa Caucus results yesterday, it would be fair to say that I am disappointed with the direction in which the Republican nomination process is headed. There was essentially a three-way tie between a managerial Republican of the Eisenhower mold from Massachusetts, a pro-life statist Republican of the William Jennings Bryan mold who lost his last statewide election by 18%, and an anti-government libertarian who has never been elected to office outside his Congressional District in Texas. If this race continues along this course, I am afraid that the budding Reaganite movement to resurrect and implement the principles of the 10^th Amendment will die on the vine. In a year when we Conservatives have the greatest chance since 1980 of not only winning the Presidency, but changing the direction of the country, this development is depressing.

Then, I read here that a number of self-anointed leaders were being invited to convene at a Texas ranch to try to short-circuit the nomination process and pick a “conservative” candidate for us to support. Given the track record of the leaders of this group, I have no confidence that the candidate they choose to support will be Conservative, or will give a hoot about the 10^th Amendment. As depressed as I am at the current state of the race, this attempt to hijack the process is wrong. I, for one, am not inclined to support anyone anointed through such a process.

As hard as it is to watch this nomination process unfold, it should be allowed to unfold. It should be allowed to go through all of the primaries, and then to the convention. Let’s still give our 10^th Amendment candidates, like Perry and Gingrich, the chance to continue to make their case through the primaries, and let’s really see if any of these candidates has what it takes to win this nomination. Then, if no candidate receives a majority of the delegates before the convention starts, let the convention pick the nominee. Those are the rules of our party, and the rules under which we started this race, so let’s follow them.

In fact, the way that this race is unfolding, I believe that a brokered convention could lead to the nomination of a strong Conservative candidate—one who understands the real promise of the Reagan Revolution and the 10^th Amendment, and one who is fighting in the trenches to make conservatism work. One who believes the following:

… Americans, in a vast majority, are still a people born for self-governance. They are ready to summon the discipline to pay down our collective debts as they are now paying down their own; to put the future before the present, their children’s interest before their own. …
We should distinguish carefully skepticism about Big Government from contempt for all government. After all, it is a new government we hope to form, a government we will ask our fellow citizens to trust to make huge changes. …

… If freedom’s best friends cannot unify around a realistic, actionable program of fundamental change, one that attracts and persuades a broad majority of our fellow citizens, big change will not come. Or rather, big change will come, of the kind that the skeptics of all centuries have predicted for those naïve societies that believed that government of and by the people could long endure. …

The second worst outcome I can imagine for next year would be to lose to the current president and subject the nation to what might be a fatal last dose of statism. The worst would be to win the election and then prove ourselves incapable of turning the ship of state before it went on the rocks, with us at the helm.

The man who spoke these words was Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, in his address at last year’s CPAC convention (full text here). Daniels is one potential candidate, other than Perry or Gingrich, who the convention delegates could turn to, but there are others—like Governors Walker of Wisconsin, Snyder of Michigan, Kasich of Ohio and Christie of New Jersey, who are fighting to rebuild their state governments consistent with principles of Reagan’s New Republican Party, and like Paul Ryan, who has championed a new vision for government through his bold proposals. One or more of these men could still jump into this race before the April “winner-take-all” primaries begin if Perry or Gingrich don’t catch fire, or they could still answer the call of a brokered convention.

So, let this process unfold, and, while doing so, let’s fight for our future through the rules provided. Let’s not let any self-anointed group choose our nominee—let’s control this process to the very end. If we do, I still believe we will choose someone, either through the primaries or at the convention, who not only will beat Obama, but will lead us through the changes we need to implement to preserve the promise of the country for our children and grandchildren.

The Journey Home

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics.

It’s funny how our minds work sometimes. As I’ve watched news coverage of the public union members protesting in Wisconsin over the last few days, what came to my mind was one of the last scenes from The Wizard of Oz.

I am sure you remember the scene. After the balloon takes off and leaves Dorothy stranded, Glenda reappears and tells Dorothy that she had always had the power to go back home to Kansas. Glenda then asks if Dorothy has learned anything from her experience in Oz. Dorothy explains that she now realizes that it wasn’t enough to just want to go back home; instead, she had to learn that what she had been searching for had been back home in Kansas all along. With that, Glenda tells her to click the heels of her slippers and she can go back home.

In many ways what Conservatives have been wanting over the last few years is to return to that “Kansas” that mankind found so exceptional when it looked to America over these last few centuries: to a government and society based on the principles of real liberty, where we are free from the control of our lives and choices by a government or elite class, and where we address the needs of our families and neighbors together through our communities, our churches, and, if need be, our local governments. In essence, we’ve wanted to journey home to the country our Settlers and our Founders hoped we would inherit, strengthen and secure.

As the scenes from Wisconsin show, we aren’t in Kansas anymore—and we haven’t been there for a long time. Toward the end of the 19th Century, as our cities were bulging with immigrants and workers from the countryside, who came to work in the great industries of the day, activists and churches established what they always had formed—organizations and facilities to help these newcomers assimilate and survive in the new environment. Neighborhoods formed, and new institutions, like Hull House in Chicago, helped individuals and families navigate in the new industrial society.

But then, the activists became impatient. They studied the welfare-state and socialist movements in Europe (which were familiar to many of the new immigrants, too), and they believed that the power of government could be used to meet the needs of the new industrial society better than the old model inherited from the Settlers and Founders—an old model that these impatient activists themselves had, until then, been adapting to the urban environment. As a result, our 100-year odyssey in the progressive land of Oz began.

Frederick Jackson Turner, the famous University of Wisconsin and Harvard University History Professor, observed this process throughout his academic career. He gave a famous keynote speech at the Columbia Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, in which he noted that the frontier was gone, and that we would be faced with the challenge of addressing problems that we could no longer “go West” to avoid. Almost thirty years later, Turner noted

Western democracy through the whole of its earlier period tended to the production of a society of which the most distinctive fact was the freedom of the individual to rise under conditions of social mobility, and whose ambition was the liberty and well-being of the masses. The conception has vitalized all American democracy, and has brought it into sharp contrasts with the democracies of history, and with those modern efforts of Europe to create an artificial democratic order by legislation. The problem of the United States is not to create democracy, but to conserve democratic institutions and ideals.

Turner understood that, in trying to cope with the effects of the Industrial Revolution, Europe had tried to change the social dynamic of class and monarchy, and of the emerging urban class distinctions, through laws designed to give the common man more direct say in the government, and to give government more responsibility over the welfare of the common man. What Turner noted was that America already had created a working system whereby citizens’ liberties were protected—they didn’t need to legislate it into existence, but they did need to preserve it.

But by 1920, our century-long adventure in the Oz of centralized national government, and national and state government involvement in most facets of our lives and decisions, had begun. Though it would be slowed during the 1920s, and again during the 1980s, the march toward the Europeanization of our society has continued unabated—until now.

Over the last few years, a lot of us have awakened to the fact that we aren’t where we wanted to be: that what those activists 100 years ago had been looking for—more liberty, more economic prosperity, more security, and more "social justice"—wasn’t in Oz after all. Instead, we’ve built a mirage of an Emerald City based on money we never really had, and we’ve depleted the reserves of the grand Shining City on a Hill. We know now that the answers were always in the principles of the Settlers and the Founders, and in the society and governments they created; and we understand it’s time to go home to those principles, and to rebuild that society and government, to meet the challenges of a new century.

Unfortunately, a great many of our neighbors who still receive the benefits of the Oz we created, and who never really learned about, or lived in the Kansas of our country’s youth—like the union protesters in Madison—haven’t figured this out yet. In fact, they like Oz, and they want to cling to it as long as they can.

So, it’s for the rest of us to start the journey home, because we know that the Oz we’ve created can not last—it is unsustainable. However, the transformation that will be needed to travel from the Oz of today to the Kansas of tomorrow—to re-establish a limited government, and a strong, interdependent society of free people, based on our Settlers’ and Founders’ principles—won’t be as easy as closing our eyes and tapping our heels. If any of us ever thought that the journey would be short and painless, the pictures from Wisconsin this week should snap us out of that delusion.

As we make this journey, we need to make sure that those who want to lead us understand the difficulty, as well as the necessity of the journey ahead. Thankfully, we are learning that some do. For example, take a look at the CPAC speech given by Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana (speech text - video). Over the months and years ahead, let’s make sure that all of our leaders understand what we need to do to get back to Kansas.