|
Creator's
of the Future
Ronald
Reagan
March
8, 1985
Thank you all very much.
Thank you Vice Chairman [of} the American
Conservative Union James A.] Linen, for those very
kind words. I'm grateful to the American Conservative
Union, Young Americans for Freedom, National Review,
Human Events, for organizing this wonderful evening.
When you work in the White House, you don't get to
see your old friends as much as you'd like. And I
always see the Conservative Political Action
Conference speech as my opportunity to "dance
with the one that brung ya."
There's so much I want to talk about tonight. I've
been thinking, in the weeks since the inauguration,
that we are at an especially dramatic turning point
in American history. And just putting it all together
in my mind, I've been reviewing the elements that
have led to this moment.
Ever since F.D.R. and the New Deal, the opposition
party, and particularly those of a liberal
persuasion, have dominated the political debate.
Their ideas were new; they had momentum; they
captured the imagination of the American people. The
left held sway for a long time. There was a right,
but it was, by the '40s and '50s, diffuse and
scattered, without a unifying voice.
But in 1964 came a voice in the wilderness-Barry
Goldwater; the great Barry Goldwater, the first major
party candidate of our time who was a true-blue,
undiluted conservative. He spoke from principle, and
he offered vision. Freedom-he spoke of freedom:
freedom from the government's increasing demands on
the family purse, freedom from the government's
increasing usurpation of individual rights and
responsibilities, freedom from the leaders who told
us the price of world peace is continued acquiescence
to totalitarianism. He was ahead of his time. When he
ran for President, he won six states and lost 44. But
his candidacy worked as a precursor of things to
come.
A new movement was stirring. And in the 1960's Young
Americans for Freedom is born; National Vezriew
gains readership and prestige in the intellectual
community; Human Events becomes a major voice on the
cutting edge. In the '70s the anti-tax movement
begins. Actually, it was much more than an anti-tax
movement, just as the Boston Tea Party was much more
than an anti-tax initiative. In the late '70s
Proposition 13 and the Sagebrush Rebellion; in 1980,
for the first time in 28 years, a Republican Senate
is elected; so, may I say, is a conservative
President. In 1984that conservative administration is
reselected in a 49-state sweep. And the day the votes
came in, I thought of Walt Whitman: "I hear
America singing."
This great turn from left to right was not just a
case of the pendulum swinging-First, the left hold
sway and then the right, and here comes the left
again. The truth is, conservative thought is no
longer over here on the right; it's the mainstream
now.
And the tide of history is moving irresistibly in our
direction. Why? Because the other side is virtually
bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say,
nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its
intellectual capital, such as it was, and it has done
its deeds .
Now, we're not in power because they failed to gain
electoral support over the past 50 years. They did
win support. And the result was chaos, weakness, and
drift. Ultimately, though, their failures yielded one
great thing-us guys. We in this room are not simply
profiting from their bankruptcy; we are where we are
because we're winning the contest of ideas. In fact,
in the past decade, all of a sudden, quietly,
mysteriously, the Republican party has become the
party of ideas.
We became the party of the most brilliant and dynamic
young minds. I remember them, just a few years ago,
running around scrawling Laffer curves on table
napkins, going to symposia and talking about how
social programs did not eradicate poverty, but
entrenched it; writing studies on why the latest
weird and unnatural idea from the social engineers is
weird and unnatural. You were there. They were your
ideas, your symposia, your books, and usually
somebody else's table napkins.
All of a sudden, Republicans were not defenders of
the status quo but creators of the future. They were
looking at tomorrow with all the single-mindedness of
an inventor. In fact, they reminded me of the
American inventors of the 19th and 20th centuries who
filled the world with light and recorded sound.
The new conservatives made anew the connection
between economic justice and economic growth. Growth
in the economy would not only create jobs and
paychecks, they said; it would enhance familial
stability and encourage a healthy optimism about the
future. Lower those tax rates, they said, and let the
economy become the engine of our dreams. Pull back
regulations, and encourage free and open competition.
Let the men and women of the marketplace decide what
they want.
But along with that, perhaps the greatest triumph of
modern conservatism has been to stop allowing the
left to put the average American on the moral
defensive. By average American I mean the good,
decent, rambunctious, and creative people who raise
the families, go to church, and help out when the
local library holds a fundraiser; people who have a
stake in the community because they are the
community.
These people had held true to certain beliefs and
principles that for 20 years the intelligentsia were
telling us were hopelessly out of date, utterly
trite, and reactionary. You want prayer in the
schools? How primitive, they said. You oppose
abortion? How oppressive, how anti-modern. The normal
was portrayed as eccentric, and only the abnormal was
worthy of emulation. The irreverent was celebrated,
but only irreverence about certain things:
irreverence toward, say, organized religion, yes;
irreverence toward established liberalism, not too
much of that. They celebrated their courage in taking
on safe targets and patted each other on the back for
slinging stones at a confused Goliath, who was too
demoralized and really too good to fight back. But now one simply senses it. The American people are
no longer on the defensive. I believe the
conservative movement deserves some credit for this.
You spoke for the permanent against the merely
prevalent, and ultimately you prevailed.
I believe we conservatives have captured the moment,
captured the imagination of the American people. And
what now? What are we to do with our success? Well,
right now, with conservative thought accepted as
mainstream thought and with the people of our country
leading the fight to freedom, now we must move .
You remember your Shakespeare: "There is a tide
in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood,
leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their
life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a
full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the
current when it serves, or lose our ventures." I
spoke in the -[applause]. It's typical, isn't it? I
just quoted a great writer, but as an actor, I get
the bow. [Laughter]
I spoke in the State of the Union of a second
American revolution, and now is the time to launch
that revolution and see that it takes hold . If we
move decisively, these years will not be just a
passing era of good feeling, not just a few good
years, but a true golden age of freedom.
The moment is ours, and we must seize it. There's
work to do. We must prolong and protect our growing
prosperity so that it doesn't become just a passing
phase, a natural adjustment between periods of
recession. We must move further to provide incentives
and make America the investment capital of the world.
We must institute a fair tax system and turn the
current one on its ear. I believe there is natural
support in our country for a simplified tax system,
with still lower tax rates but a broader base, with
everyone paying their fair share and no more. We must
eliminate unproductive tax shelters. Again, there is
natural support among Americans, because Americans
are a fair-minded people.
We must institute enterprise zones and a lower youth
minimum wage so we can revitalize distressed areas
and teenagers can get jobs. We're going to take our
revolution to the people, all of the people. We're
going to go to black Americans and members of all
minority groups, and we're going to make our case.
Part of being a revolutionary is knowing that you
don't have to acquiesce to the tired, old ideas of
the past. One such idea is that the opposition party
has black America and minority America locked up,
that they own black America. Well, let me tell you,
they own nothing but the past. The old alignments are
no longer legitimate, if they ever were.
We're going to reach out, and we need your help.
Conservatives were brought up to hate deficits, and
justifiably so. We've long thought there are two
things in Washington that are unbalanced-the budget
and the liberals.
But we cannot reduce the deficit by raising taxes .
And just so that every "i" is dotted and
every at" is crossed, let me repeat tonight for
the benefit of those who never seem to get the
message: we will not reduce the deficit by raising
taxes. We need more taxes like John McLaughlin
[Washington executive editor of National Reviews
needs assertiveness training.
Now, whether government borrows or increases taxes,
it will be taking the same amount of money from the
private economy, and either way, that's too much. We
must bring down government spending. We need a
constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget.
It's something that 49 states already require -no
reason the federal government should be any
different.
We need the line-item veto, which 43 governors
have-no reason that the President shouldn't. And we
have to cut waste. The Grace commission has
identified bilions of dollars that are wasted and
that we can save.
But the domestic side isn't the only area where we
need your help. All of us in this room grew up, or
came to adulthood, in a time when the doctrine of
Marx and Lenin was coming to divide the world.
Ultimately, it came to dominate remorselessly whole
parts of it. The Soviet attempt to give legitimacy to
its tyranny is expressed in the infamous Brezhnev
doctrine, which contends that once a country has
fallen into Communist darkness, it can never again be
allowed to see the light of freedom.
Well, it occurs to me that history has already begun
to repeal that doctrine. It started one day in
Grenada. We only did our duty, as a responsible
neighbor and a lover of peace, the day we went in and
returned the government to the people and rescued our
own students. We restored that island to liberty.
Yes, it's only a small island, but that 's what the
world is made of-small islands yearning for freedom.
There's much more to do. Throughout the world the
Soviet Union and its agents, client states, and
satellites are on the defensive-on the moral
defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the
political and economic defensive. Freedom movements
arise and assert themselves. They're doing so on
almost every continent populated by man-in the hills
of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central
America. In making mention of freedom fighters, all
of us are privileged to have in our midst tonight one
of the brave commanders who lead the Afghan freedom
fighters-Abdul Haq. Abdul Haq, we are with you .
They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we
owe them our help. I've spoken recently of the
freedom fighters of Nicaragua. You know the truth
about them. You know who they re fighting and why.
They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and
the brave men and women of the French Resistance. We
cannot turn away from them for the struggle here is
not right versus left; it is right versus wrong.
Now I am against sending troops to Central America.
They are simply not needed. Given a chance and the
resources the people of the area can fight their own
fight. They have the men and women. They re capable
of doing it. They have the people of their country
behind them. All they need is our support. All they
need is proof that we care as much about the fight
for freedom 700 miles from our shores as the Soviets
care about the fight against freedom 5 000 miles from
theirs. And they need to know that the U.S. supports
them with more than just pretty words and good
wishes. We need your help on this and I mean each of
you-involved active strong and vocal. And we need
more.
All of you know that we re researching non-nuclear
technologies that may enable us to prevent nuclear
ballistic missiles from reaching U.S. soil or that of
our allies. I happen to believe -logic forces me to
believe-that this new defense system the Strategic
Defense Initiative is the most hopeful possibility of
our time. Its primary virtue is clear. If anyone ever
attacked us Strategic Defense would be there to
protect us. It could conceivably save millions of
lives.
SDI has been criticized on the grounds that it might
upset any chance of an arms control agreement with
the Soviets. But SDI is arms control. If SDI is say
80 percent effective then it will make any Soviet
attack folly. Even partial success in SDI would
strengthen deterrence and keep the peace. And if our
SDI research is successful the prospects for real
reduction in U.S. and Soviet offensive nuclear forces
will be greatly enhanced.
It is said that SDI would deal a blow to the
so-called East-West balance of power. Well let s
think about that. The Soviets already are investing
roughly as much on strategic defenses as they are on
their offensive nuclear forces. This could quickly
tip the East-West balance if we had no defense of our
own. Would a situation of comparable defenses
threaten us? No for we re not planning on being the
first to use force.
As we strive for our goal of eventual elimination of
nuclear weapons, each side would retain a certain
amount of de Sensive-or of, I should say, destructive
power-a certain number of missiles. But it would not
be in our interest, or theirs, to build more and more
of them.
Now, one would think our critics on the left would
quickly embrace, or at least be open-minded about a
system that promises to reduce the size of nuclear
missile forces on both sides and to greatly enhance
the prospects for real arms reductions. And yet we
hear SDI belittled by some with nicknames, or
demagogued with charges that it will bring war to the
heavens.
They complain that it won't work, which is odd from
people who profess to believe in the perfectability
of man-machines after all. And man-machines are so
much easier to manipulate. They say it won't be 100
percent effective, which is odd, since they don't ask
for 100 percent effectiveness in their social
experiments. They say SDI is only in the research
stage and won't be realized in time to change things.
To which, as I said last month, the only reply is:
then let's get started.
Now, my point here is not to question the motives of
others. But it's difficult to understand how critics
can object to exploring the possibility of moving
away from exclusive reliance upon nuclear weapons.
The truth is, I believe that they find it difficult
to embrace any idea that breaks with the past, that
breaks with consensus thinking and the common
establishment wisdom. In short, they find it
difficult and frightening to alter the status quo.
And what are we to do when these so-called opinion
leaders of an outworn philosophy are out there on
television and in the newspapers with their steady
drumbeat of doubt and distaste? Well, when all you
have to do to win is rely on the good judgment of the
American people, then you're in good shape, because
the American people have good judgment. I know it
isn't becoming of me, but I like to think that maybe
49 of our 50 states displayed that judgment just a
few months ago.
What we have to do, all of us in this room, is get
out there and talk about SDI. Explain it, debate it,
tell the American people the facts. It may well be
the most important work we do in the next few years.
And if we try, we'll succeed. So, we have great work
ahead of us, big work. But if we do it together and
with complete commitment, we can change our country
and history forever.
Once during the campaign, I said, "This is a
wonderful time to be alive," and I meant that. I
meant that we're lucky not to live in pale and timid
times. We've been blessed with the opportunity to
stand for something-for liberty and freedom and
fairness. And these are things worth fighting for,
worth devoting our lives to. And we have good reason
to be hopeful and optimistic.
We've made much progress already. So, let us go forth
with good cheer and stout hearts-happy warriors out
to seize back a country and a world to freedom.
Thank you, and God bless you. Thank you very much.
|
