The record for the highest number of electoral votes ever in a US presidential election is 525. That record is held by on Ronald Wilson Reagan. To amass those electoral votes Ronald Reagan had to form a coalition of people of different backgrounds and interests. He did so without sacrificing his core values, or by catering to purely centrist themes. Ronald Reagan was no moderate.
He was opposed by the Republican establishment as being too extreme. He formed a grassroots movement that in many ways bypassed the party apparatus and energized regular folks of both the Democrat and Republican varieties. Through strength he ended up defeating the Soviet Union and bringing about an end to the Cold War. We turned around a mindset of malaise and downward spiral that pervaded the Carter years and restored the faith of ordinary Americans in the greatness of their country.
Before the attack on Pearl Harbor the American public was firmly against any involvement in the war in Europe. In less than 24 hours the mindset of an entire nation turned on a dime. Change is not only possible, it can often happen much more quickly and much more decisively than one might imagine.
One can look at the problems on the US southern border as a sign of our weakness and ineffectiveness in maintaining our border security. One can also note that people are actually risking their very lives to set foot on American soil, just for the opportunity to take advantage of all this remarkable nation has to offer.
We complain about the backsliding in Iraq and the ongoing war in Syria as we drive to Starbucks or enjoy a baseball game. We debate whether an employer should be forced to offer all 20 forms of “birth control”, or just 16, as the stock market sets new records. The left complains of a “War on Women” in the US as we learn ever more disturbing details of the horrible treatment of women and girls in other parts of the world.
Sometime in the early 20th century a liberal professor by the name of Robert Park (1864-1944) taught a young student by the name of Saul Alinsky (1909-1972). Alinsky later would be considered the founder of modern community organizing. He wrote the book Rules for Radicals and founded a number of organizations in inner city areas such as Chicago. Hillary Clinton wrote her senior honors thesis on Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago, following Alinsky’s methods and incorporating them in his political campaign.
The ideas Alinsky presented in Rules for Radicals are often mocked by those on the right, but Alinsky’s political realism is based on the ideas of Machiavelli. Organizing factions and doing “whatever it takes” to achieve political goals and in fact organizing communities are very old and time tested ideas. Republicans tend to sit around and wait for elections to happen while bashing each other for a lack of ideological purity. Democrats organize on a precinct level in communities. That explains in large part why big cities such as Chicago vote in overwhelming numbers for Democrats.
The Democrats are bringing about their changes, and implementing their ideas, and the American people are no more receptive to progressivism today than they were to the malaise of Jimmy Carter. When Barack Obama tells business owners “you didn’t build that”, he is honestly asserting his belief that people should not be able to own the means of production. He does not believe in property rights in the same way that most Americans do, and he wants to bring his “fundamental change” to our society.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are not as incompetent and clueless as we may believe. They have a different conception of society and fairness than we do, and they know that it will take time to have their ideas accepted by American society. They do not believe in property rights or limited government or individual liberties as envisioned by our founders. They believe in collectivism and groups and factions and shared responsibility. Common Core is merely an extension of the idea that “it takes a village”.
Lots of Americans embrace socialism and the values of collectivism and the idea that everyone should have a right to what they feel should be “public resources”. But the idea of authoritarianism is something else entirely. There are many who want to see more equality of outcome but who reject the idea of using government force to achieve it.
We have the opportunity to present the American people with a vision of a better future that will unite our society across a broad spectrum of people. But we have to reject the hereditary/aristocratic approach of Edmund Burke. We have to reject government enforcement of traditionalism and instead rely on society, not government, to deal with questions of morality.
Carrie Nation’s heart was in the right place when she began her mission to rid this country of the scourge of alcohol. Alcohol still ruins a lot of lives. But in so doing she did not realize the effect of curbing men’s liberties, their ability to make right or wrong decisions for themselves. To get a constitutional amendment passed is a monumental undertaking. To pass prohibition meant that there was a massive consensus across a super-majority of states. And yet, in another example of how quickly public opinion can change, after seeing the ill effects of prohibition enough people changed their minds to reverse it after just a few short years.
We do not have to compromise on our core beliefs to change the direction of this country. We simply have to articulate what they are in a way that brings in people across a broad spectrum of society. Here are a few core values that we need to articulate and “market” to the American people.
· We are the party of individual liberty. We believe people should be free to pursue their lives and happiness in any way that does not infringe on the rights of others.
o We believe that children, including unborn children, are human beings and that they need help ensuring their rights are protected, especially the right to life.
· We believe in limited government. We believe government has grown too big and too intrusive and needs to be scaled back in terms of size and scope and spending.
o We also believe more power should go to state and local governments and less should stay at the federal level.
· We do not believe in cronyism or corporatism or picking winners and losers in business. We need to scale back all of the incentives and loopholes and bailouts and credits and subsidies and favors to business and support free marketsand competition. We need to support free markets NOT big business.
· We believe in tax reform. Whether a simple sales tax or a flat tax or 9-9-9 we all agree the present tax code is a monstrosity and needs to be scrapped.
· We believe in private charity andvoluntary collectivism. Whether it is the United Way or churches or Boy Scouts or community softball leagues, we support Americans coming together voluntarily in groups and organizations to make a better society. We recognize the need for our society to take care of the less fortunate but on a more voluntary and local level.
· We believe in our society, not our government. We are an exceptional society because we are a free people with great values. If we unleash our society by scaling back government the result will be extraordinary. The best ways to pass down good moral values is to teach them in civil society rather than mandate them from government.
· We believe in a less interventionist foreign policy. We must honor our treaties and commitments but we need to stop nation-building and trying to dictate to the rest of the world. It doesn’t work. That does not mean isolationism, just recognition that we cannot be the world’s policeman. We need to build our defensive capabilities, rather than spending our resources where they will not make a difference.
Scandals and the character of individuals are not unimportant, but they should not be at the core of our philosophy. Ronald Reagan did not just sit back and point out how bad Jimmy Carter was, he presented a positive view of a stronger America. We have to realize that any significant victory in terms of creating a coalition to realize the full potential of this country will not come from the Republican establishment. It will come from the grassroots, over the objections of the establishment.
We must never let go of our core values but we must also not ignore political reality. Obama and Clinton are working from the Machiavelli and Alinsky playbooks. We should not pander to any specific factions based on polling and politics, but we must understand enough marketing to create grassroots groups in every community to communicate our core positions and explain how they will help everyone.
We need to invigorate people on the precinct and township level. We need get our message across to neighborhoods and families.
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
-Stephen Covey
Jericho, on the West Bank in Israel, is the oldest continuously occupied city in the world, with the first settlements being around 9600 BC. There were organized communities of humans in China and North American around 8000 BC. Humans have been coming together in communities for over 10,000 years.
The printing press is less than 600 years old and The United States is less than 240 years old. We have only had an income tax for about 100 years. Many of us would like to blame everything wrong in the world on the current occupant of the White house, but he has only been in power about 6 years.
Families, and communities, have been the basic building blocks of society since the dawn of man. Before there was an internet or drones or television or cars there were farms and churches and taverns and markets and horses. People gathered together to talk and find out what was happening in the lives of other families and share scarce resources.
The advent of telephones and television and the internet has radically altered communication for people all around the globe, and allowed access to information that people throughout history could not even dream about. You now have access to virtually all of the wisdom of mankind within a few keystrokes. To say this is comparable to the invention of the printing press may be an understatement. We are witnessing an explosion in information and ideas that is on a par with the Renaissance.
This is an exciting time. We live in the greatest nation on earth and we have an amazing society of people. There are tremendous resources at our disposal and we have a great message of individual liberty and free markets and limited government. But in the end we need to bring that simple message to communities and families and have these ideas discussed around the dinner table and across the fence in the back yard. In the end, all politics is local because all lives are local. When people finally set down their iPhone and look around they see their kids and neighbors and friends. And that’s what it’s all about.
Happy Birthday America!
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