3. The March of Freedom 3
The March
of Freedom
T he modern American conservative movement
has been guided for the past 70 years by a
remarkable group of men and women—philosophers
and thinkers, popularizers and idea merchants,
politicians and policymakers.
Starting in 1986, I have published each year a President’s Essay
during the holiday season about one of these consequential
conservatives, commenting on their lives and careers and offering
an excerpt from one of their works. We titled a 2003 collection of
the essays The March of Freedom: Modern Classics in Conservative
Thought. And so they are.
You know their names: F. A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman,
William F. Buckley Jr., Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan,
Margaret Thatcher, and two dozen others. And you know the
central idea that unites this intellectually diverse group: Given
the opportunity, individual freedom trumps central planning in
economics and politics every time and everywhere. Heritage has
proved that this principle applies around the world with each new
edition of our annual publication, the Index of Economic Freedom.
This 2012 essay is different. Rather than focusing on the thinking
and writing of one person, I offer an overview of the intellectual
contributions of all the individuals I have highlighted in my essays.
I decided to do so because this is my last President’s Essay. I will be
stepping down in 2013 after 36 years as president and CEO of what
4. 4 president’s essay
many observers say is the most influential think tank in Washington,
D.C.—and perhaps the world. In this essay, I look back at the past
quarter of a century and reflect on the wisdom and insights of these
apostles of freedom and their applicability to our times and the
future.
I begin with a triumvirate of classical liberals: F. A. Hayek, Ludwig
von Mises, and Milton Friedman. I had the great fortune to hear
Professor Hayek lecture in 1965 at the London School of Economics,
where I was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and years later to bring him
to Heritage as a Distinguished Fellow on three different occasions. I
was especially pleased to arrange a first-time meeting in the White
House between Professor Hayek and President Ronald Reagan, who
revealed what a lasting impact The Road to Serfdom had had on him.
I first met Milton Friedman, a Nobel Laureate like Hayek, in 1964
when my good friend Don Lipsett and I hosted an organizational
meeting with Friedman and William F. Buckley Jr. about what
became the Philadelphia Society. In addition to seeking his advice
on a wide spectrum of public policies over the years, I collaborated
with Milton on the activities of the Mont Pelerin Society, including
its 50th anniversary, at which we honored Milton Friedman as the
leading intellectual light of the global movement for liberty.
I encountered the thought of Ludwig von Mises as a graduate student
at the London School of Economics: Human Action is one of the most
demanding and rewarding books I have ever read. My one meeting with
Professor Mises was in New York City in the late 1960s when I asked
him to inscribe my copies of his great works and asked him one or two
tentative questions. He was wonderfully patient in his explanations.
v
F. A. HAYEK
Friedrich von Hayek was more than a Nobel Prize winner in
economics. He was a philosopher and a prophet. He was intrigued
by the mind of man, the markets he has made, and the way those
markets have made man and society what they are. He used
5. The March of Freedom 5
economic precepts to unveil the totalitarian nature of socialism and
explain how it leads to serfdom. Using meticulous scholarship and
powerful logic, he stopped the advocates of economic planning in
their tracks, leaving them without a theoretical leg to stand on.
At ease on the heights of abstruse monetary policy, he was also the
primary popularizer of free-market ideas in the Western world. He
may well be the only Nobel Laureate to have a major work—The
Road to Serfdom—abridged in Reader’s Digest, causing it to become a
best-seller. Immersed in the critical economic issues of his time, he
was also prescient, foreseeing the collapse of Communism nearly
half a century before it happened.
Among all of Hayek’s accomplishments, I believe his greatest was
uncovering a simple but profound truth: Man does not and cannot
know everything, and when he acts as if he does, disaster follows.
Hubris is a tragic flaw for ancient Greek heroes and modern national
leaders alike. Those who try to control an economy, he wrote, are
guilty not only of a “fatal conceit,” but also of factual error, which
inevitably dooms planned economies to failure.
In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek emphasizes that liberty cannot
exist without responsibility—a practice that many in the modern
world have rejected for fear of failure and an unwillingness to accept
blame if they fail. Hayek forcefully argues that although freedom
imposes the burden of making man responsible for his own fate, it
also allows him to use his abilities to advance himself and to help
others. He writes:
It is part of the ordinary nature of men (and perhaps
still more of women) and one of the main conditions
of their happiness that they make the welfare of
their people their chief aim.… By common opinion
our chief concern in this respect should, of course,
be the welfare of our family. But we also show our
appreciation and approval of others by making
them our friends and their aims ours. To choose our
associates and generally those whose needs we make
our concern is an essential part of freedom and of the
moral conceptions of a free society. [Emphasis added.]
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v
LUDWIG VON MISES
In his book Socialism, Mises states that a socialist system cannot
make rational economic decisions because the only way to
determine whether resources are used efficiently is to calculate
profit and loss. Should more cars be produced? Should another
factory be built? Without a price system, such choices are arbitrary.
This, says Mises, is “the essential vice” of socialism. “Without
economic calculation,” he writes, “there can be no economy.”
Mises later extended his critique to “mixed” economies, in which
government intervention is substantial but short of socialism (all too
descriptive of the present U.S. economy). Such an approach, he said, is
not sustainable in the long run because such interventions are almost
always counterproductive. Economist Murray Rothbard wrote
that the Austrian economist had arrived at a general law: Whenever
the government intervenes in the economy to solve a problem, it
invariably ends not by solving the problem, but by creating another.
Perhaps Mises’ most important intellectual contribution was his
rejection of the social science that reduces human beings to physical
objects that are summarized in statistics and studied like specimens in
a laboratory. His impatience with quantitative economics was based on
his concern that such an approach is an invitation to social engineering.
Human action, Mises argues, is based on individual values and ideas, on
reason and will, which cannot be adequately summarized or predicted
by quantitative laws or computations. “The basic notion of economics,”
he says, is “the choosing and acting individual.”
Hayek lauded Mises’ creed: “Do not yield to the bad, but always
oppose it with courage.” Friedman declared that no one had done
more to promote free markets in America. Even the traditionalist
Russell Kirk, who read both Mises and Hayek as a young man, wrote
that the Vienna of Freud “also has its great schools of economists of
a very different and much sounder mind.”
Reflecting his humanistic side, Mises stresses the influence of
individualism on Western civilization:
7. The March of Freedom 7
The distinctive principle of Western social
philosophy is individualism. It aims at the creation
of a sphere in which the individual is free to think,
to choose, and to act without being constrained by
the interference of the social apparatus of coercion
and oppression, the State. All the spiritual and
material achievements of Western civilization were
the result of the operation of this idea of liberty.
v
MILTON FRIEDMAN
Milton Friedman defined himself as a classical liberal or libertarian,
not as a conservative, but his greatest influence has been on the
American conservative movement, which shares his core concern
about the freedom of the individual.
In his book Free to Choose and the award-winning television series with
the same title, Friedman talks of “the importance of the intellectual
climate of opinion, which determines the unthinking preconceptions of
most people and their leaders, their conditioned reflexes to one course
of action or another.” His enormous contribution to conservatism was
to influence this climate—through his books, articles, lectures, and TV
programs—like a welcome thaw after a long ice age.
Specifically, he discredited the idea, common since the Great
Depression, that capitalism is inherently flawed and requires
the “fine-tuning” of government to avoid excess and disaster. He
demonstrated that the one-third fall in GDP during the Depression
was due to a one-third cut in the money supply from 1929 to 1933.
He showed in case after case, echoing von Mises, that government
interventions in free markets are not only ineffective but result in
the exact opposite of their intended purpose. He called this “the
invisible foot”—the unseen force that makes things go terribly
wrong with government programs.
Friedman made the case, powerfully, that economic, social, and political
freedom are inseparable, part of the same yearning of the human spirit
8. 8 president’s essay
to be free. He argued that the finest achievement of capitalism is not the
accumulation of wealth and property but “the opportunities it offers to
men and women to extend and develop and improve their capacities.”
There has been no more articulate voice in defense of freedom
than Milton Friedman, but he was always careful to note that while
freedom is the highest goal of society, it cannot be the highest goal of
individuals. In his classic work Capitalism and Freedom, he writes:
In a society, freedom has nothing to say about what
an individual does with his freedom; it is not an all-
embracing ethic. Indeed, a major aim of the [classical]
liberal is to leave the ethical problem for the individual
to wrestle with. The really important ethical problems
are those that face an individual in a free society—what
he should do with his freedom.
v
NOCK, ROGGE, HAZLITT, READ, ROEPKE
Of the other classical liberals whom I profiled, Albert Jay Nock,
Ben Rogge, Henry Hazlitt, and Leonard Read were essentially
popularizers; only Wilhelm Roepke could properly be described
as a philosopher. Nock was a radical libertarian of the 1920s and
1930s whose denunciations of the state and unbridled materialism
influenced conservatives Russell Kirk, Bill Buckley, and Robert
Nisbet, among others. They responded to his call to preach the
gospel of individual freedom, trusting that a “Remnant” would one
day build a new and free society.
The fundamental message of “Isaiah’s Job,” the Nock essay I
selected, is that one must do the right thing regardless of the cost.
No defense of freedom is possible without prophets who, despite
the starkest circumstances, proclaim the truth and a Remnant that
hears and acts on it.
Professor Ben Rogge of Wabash College was equally comfortable
with his freshman students, his good friend Milton Friedman, and
9. The March of Freedom 9
the entrepreneur Pierre Goodrich, founder of the Liberty Fund.
They all responded to his exuberant and knowledgeable defense of
economic freedom. The most important part of his defense, he wrote
in Can Capitalism Survive?, is not capitalism’s success in promoting
economic growth but “its consistency with certain fundamental
moral principles of life.” Rogge’s emphasis on the moral dimension
of the free-market system echoes the moral sentiments of Adam
Smith and modern disciples such as Hayek and Roepke.
Excluding classroom textbooks, Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One
Lesson (published in 1946) may be the most widely read overview of
economics published since World War II. Its central theme remains
relevant: Government’s economic actions usually have long-term
consequences that are the opposite of what policymakers intended.
As Frederic Bastiat would put it, there is that which is seen and that
which is unseen, and the latter is ultimately more important.
Here is one among many telling examples: Governments impose rent
controls to protect certain citizens, but a price ceiling discourages
landlords from maintaining their properties at a proper level. Thus,
the quantity as well as the quality of available housing falls, hurting
the “protected” citizens worse than if their rents had been increased.
Simultaneously, reduced rents mean a lower return on investments,
and that means less will be invested in the rental units.
Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic
Education (FEE), was an indefatigable idea merchant who
published 27 books and hundreds of articles and pamphlets about
the American experiment and its commitment to the free market.
His most famous essay was “I, Pencil.” Speaking in the first person,
Mr. Pencil promises to convince the reader of a surprising fact: No
individual knows how to produce this common tool used by every
school child and many an adult.
He describes the details of his family tree that includes not only
actual trees, but the lumberjacks who harvest the trees, the trucks
and saws and ropes essential for the harvesting, the railroads that
carry the logs to the mills, the motors and other tools that trim the
logs into slats, the kilns that season the slats, the lacquer that coats
them, and the graphite mined in Ceylon that is the chief ingredient
10. 10 president’s essay
of the “lead.” In less than 2,000 words, Leonard Read convinces you
that an ordinary pencil is a miracle wrought through the free market.
Wilhelm Roepke’s A Humane Economy and his other writings did
much to reverse the troubling trend toward economic collectivism in
Western Europe after World War II. His free-market philosophy was
vindicated when the governments of West Germany and then Italy
implemented the measures that he advocated. He rejected socialism
as “a philosophy which … places too little emphasis on man, his
nature, and his personality.” In contrast, he defended the “intrinsic
morality of the market economy,” which allows the individual to
profit by working for his own welfare and that of his fellow man.
II
Let us now consider the intellectuals who were the major spokesmen
of traditional conservatism: Russell Kirk, Forrest McDonald, and
Richard Weaver. It was at an Intercollegiate Studies Institute
seminar in 1962 that I, still an undergraduate, first met Dr. Kirk, a
luminous star in the conservative firmament by reason of his classic
work, The Conservative Mind. Twenty years later, Russell Kirk would
be a Heritage Distinguished Fellow and deliver more lectures at
Heritage (over 40) than any other outside speaker. In 1991, I had
the honor of presenting Russell with the first Henry Salvatori Prize,
awarded by ISI to an outstanding conservative scholar.
I first heard Forrest McDonald speak at a national meeting of the
Philadelphia Society and was struck by his love of history for its
own sake. Not for him—as for many professional historians—the
promotion of some present-day policy agenda. He insists that
tradition be given a place of honor, agreeing with G. K. Chesterton
that tradition is “trusting to a consensus of common human
voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record.” He is
a conservative’s conservative—wise, just, courageous. He burst
onto the academic scene in 1958 with We the People, a devastating
refutation of Charles Beard’s long-accepted neo-Marxist
interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.
Richard Weaver lived a quiet life, writing and teaching about
goodness, beauty, and truth as a professor of English at the
11. The March of Freedom 11
University of Chicago. Embracing socialism as a young man, he
“woke up” one day to the fact that he had free will and could reject
the worship of the false idols put forth by socialists. Never hesitant
to act on his ideas, he was an early trustee of ISI and an editor of
the conservative quarterly Modern Age. For many, his book Ideas
Have Consequences is the fons et origo (source and origin) of the
conservative movement.
v
RUSSELL KIRK
Derided by the intelligentsia, ignored by the media, and
unsung even by its scattered adherents, conservatism was so
inconsequential 50 years ago that the notion of a “conservative
mind” was dismissed as oxymoronic. Russell Kirk’s monumental
book The Conservative Mind (published in 1953) changed that
overnight. Kirk proved conclusively that conservatism had an
illustrious intellectual lineage, that many of the most influential
British and American thinkers and writers—Edmund Burke, John
Adams, John C. Calhoun, Benjamin Disraeli, Walter Scott, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, John Henry Newman, Orestes Brownson, T. S. Eliot—
were conservative. His work was also a scathing indictment of
every liberal nostrum from the perfectibility of man to economic
equalitarianism, leading Whittaker Chambers to hail it as one of the
most important books of the 20th century.
Kirk did conservatives an extraordinary service by setting forth six
“canons” or principles of a conservative credo. They are (1) belief in a
transcendent order, including natural law; (2) respect for the variety
and mystery of human existence; (3) recognition that civilization
requires classes and orders; (4) acknowledgement of the crucial link
between freedom and private property; (5) adherence to custom and
convention; and (6) awareness that change is not necessarily reform
and agreement that Providence plays the final role in the affairs of men.
He was never a liberal and always a conservative, he wrote, from
the hour he began to reason. He committed his life to conserving
“the three great bodies of principle … that tie together modern
12. 12 president’s essay
civilization”: Christian faith, humane letters, and the social and
political institutions that define our culture. In one of his Heritage
lectures, he urged all of us to defend this culture and preserve what
Eliot called “the permanent things.”
Despite the incivility, materialism, irreverence, and immorality
all around us, Russell was not discouraged about the future. He
predicted that if conservatives “take up the weapons of reason and
imagination,” they have every reason to anticipate victory. He drew
his optimism in part from Burke, who reminds us that the goodness
of one person, the courage of one man, the strength of one individual
can turn the course of history and renew a civilization.
v
FORREST MCDONALD
In 1987, Forrest McDonald was invited by the National Endowment
for the Humanities to give the annual Jefferson Lecture, the
federal government’s highest academic honor. He talked about
limited government and federalism, about private character and
public virtue, and concluded by quoting George Washington that
“the sacred fire of liberty” is deeply and finally “staked upon the
experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” “That
fire,” McDonald said, “was three thousand years in the kindling. Let
not our generation be the one to extinguish the flame.”
Throughout his life and career, Forrest often wrote about the
indispensable document of the founding—the U.S. Constitution.
The key to the Constitution, he said, lies in the Framers’ conviction
that the essence of tyranny is the unrestrained will of the sovereign,
whether he is a king, a parliament, or the people. In order to divide
the unchecked will of the people, a system of checks and balances
was created, partly along a vertical axis with the federal–state
system and partly along a horizontal axis among the branches of the
national government. In such a multi-level government, the people
would not be able “to act as the whole people”: They were separated
from themselves both in space and in time.
13. The March of Freedom 13
A critical aspect of the Constitution is that power on both the
vertical and horizontal axes is vaguely defined and free to shift
from place to place as “time and circumstance should dictate.” Yet
despite all the economic, social, and technological changes of the
past two centuries, the Constitution has been amended only 27
times, a testament to the genius of the Framers. The Constitution,
McDonald says, is to be cherished and protected against all enemies,
foreign and domestic. It is, in the words of my Heritage colleague
Edwin Meese III, “our great charter of liberty.”
v
RICHARD WEAVER
For Richard Weaver, rhetoric was the discipline of teaching men
to know the good, speak and write about it convincingly, and
act upon it. To this end, he wrote two books that have become
classics: The Ethics of Rhetoric and Ideas Have Consequences. In the
former, Weaver argues that language is a divine gift that accurately
represents its speakers and their culture. He warns that language,
by its very nature, is “sermonic,” always encouraging its auditors to
good or evil.
Ideas Have Consequences (published in 1948) is his most influential
book, occupying a central place among modern conservative works.
Its attack on modern nominalism—which declares there are no
universal truths—heralded the revival of conservatism in America.
Weaver says that the evils of modernity began in the 14th century
when Western man decided to abandon a belief in transcendentals
and made man the measure of all things. This fateful choice resulted
in “the dissolution of the West,” which expressed itself in the decline
of proper sentiment, the eradication of rightful distinctions, and
the obliteration of legitimate hierarchies. This led to fragmentation,
with specialists knowing more and more about less and less while
individuals, separated from each other, became obsessed with self-
realization. Such self-absorption, Weaver comments, cuts man off
“from the ‘real’ reality and from … social harmony.”
14. 14 president’s essay
Furthermore, Weaver maintains, our egotism is constantly being fed
by what he called “the Great Stereopticon”—the mass media—which
presents false images of reality. Designed to increase our “spoiled-
child psychology,” these media-generated images promise us
everything for nothing in a “pushbutton existence.” Richard Weaver
foresaw the entitlement mentality of so many Americans today.
But Ideas Have Consequences is not a jeremiad. Weaver offers three
proposals for reform. First, we must defend the right of private
property, “the last metaphysical right remaining to us.” Second, our
language must be purified and rescued from “the impulse to dissolve
everything into sensation.” Third, we must adopt an attitude of
“piety” toward nature, other human beings, and the past. Such piety,
he says, will serve as at least a partial antidote for modern man’s
egotism and excessive materialism.
Although he considered the 20th century an “age of crisis,” Weaver did
not despair. Echoing both Kirk and McDonald, he believed that “man
will prevail over the dark forces of this time” and that “a chief means
of his prevailing will be … persuasive speech in the service of truth.”
v
NISBET, NOVAK, WILSON
Robert Nisbet, Michael Novak, and James Q. Wilson belong in
the same traditionalist category as Kirk, McDonald, and Weaver.
Nisbet’s classic work The Quest for Community has not been out of
print since it was published nearly 50 years ago. Man’s fundamental
desire for community, he argues, cannot be satisfied either by the
centralized state or by unrestrained individualism. He quotes
Thomas Jefferson’s shrewd observation that a state with the power
to do things for people has the power to do things to them.
Many individualists, Nisbet says, fail to recognize the close
dependence of their thought on “the subtle, infinitely complex
lines of habit, tradition, and social relationship.” “The quest for
community will not be denied,” Nisbet maintains, “for it springs
from some of the powerful needs of human nature—needs for
15. The March of Freedom 15
a strong sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and
continuity.”
Long one of America’s most prominent socialists, Michael Novak
broke publicly with his leftist colleagues in the late 1970s, declaring,
“Socialism makes no sense as an economic theory.” It has resulted in
tyranny and poverty in almost all of the countries in which it has been
tried. Novak embraced capitalism because it recognizes that “the
cause of the wealth of nations is the creativity of the human person.”
On a more personal level, three experiences opened his eyes to the
true nature of the Left. Contemplating the genocide in Cambodia,
the miseries of the boat people from Vietnam, and accounts of life in
postwar South Vietnam showed him how mistaken much of his anti-
war writing had been. Furthermore, participating in the elections
of 1970, 1972, and 1976 revealed how the new power elite of the
Democratic Party had divorced itself from mainstream Democrats
and the values of the American people.
In his widely praised work The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,
for which he received the Templeton Prize, Michael describes the
three dynamic and converging systems on which capitalism rests:
a democratic polity, a market economy, and a moral culture. He
argues that capitalism, with its emphasis on the individual, leads to
democracy: Economic liberty and political liberty reinforce each
other. What holds them together, he says, is a moral social system
that “is not just a system but a way of life.”
The late James Q. Wilson is probably best known for his “broken
windows” theory of preventing crime: Paying attention to the little
things like drug dealing on street corners and prostitutes on parade
can have an enormous impact on big things as well. New York City’s
police commissioner credited Jim Wilson with providing a key
concept in the campaign to reduce crime in American cities.
In my President’s Essay, I focused on another aspect of Wilson’s
scholarship: his consideration of the moral sense in society. He
argues that if we want to live in a community of reasonable order
and general decency, we must encourage a moral sense made up of
sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty. And we must reject the
totalitarian notion that man is infinitely malleable.
16. 16 president’s essay
III
Let us now look at the preeminent popularizers of conservative
thought. Was there a more eloquent herald of the truth than
William F. Buckley Jr.? If, as George Orwell wrote, “political chaos is
connected with the decay of language,” the reordering of American
politics is inseparable from Bill Buckley’s resurrection of rhetoric.
For more than five decades, he was an orator in an age of mutterers.
He was a polemicist with the power to convince or enrage. He was a
eulogist who expanded our empathy into places we never expected.
He added the fuel of ideas to the fire of political debate.
Few remember how isolated the conservative remnant seemed
in the 1940s and 1950s, meeting by torchlight in its catacombs.
In August 1945, Churchill was defeated in the British elections
and a Labour majority walked into Parliament singing the “Red
Flag,” a leftist battle hymn of the Spanish Civil War. In America,
the Republican Party adopted a program that was little more, in
Buckley’s words, than “measured socialism.” Historian Mortimer
Smith wrote that conservatism “is all but dead in our present world.”
It was not true, but it felt true. Ronald Reagan joked that he received
his first issue of National Review in a plain brown wrapper. “The
few spasmodic victories conservatives are winning,” Buckley wrote
in 1954, “are aimless, uncoordinated and inconclusive. This is so …
because many years have gone by since the philosophy of freedom
has been expounded systematically, brilliantly and resourcefully.”
Buckley demonstrated that wit is possible without cynicism, that
a pundit can also be a pilgrim. “I am not tortured by the problems
that torture a great many other people,” he wrote, “because I do
very sincerely and very simply believe in God and in the whole of
the Christian experience.” This is the key to understanding both his
character and his politics. “I myself believe,” he said, “that the duel
between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world.”
Liberalism’s chief flaw, Bill wrote, is its skepticism and relativism, its
elevation of method over substance, its defense of freedom as an end
in itself. It “has no eschatology; no vision, no fulfillment, no point of
arrival.” Liberalism is a political faith crippled by moral apathy, unable
17. 17
to distinguish between noble and base, just and unjust, or to “call for
the kind of passionate commitment that stirs the political blood.”
One contribution in particular defines Bill Buckley’s central place
in the history of conservative thought: his role as a master fusionist.
Conservatism is notoriously difficult to define, and any of its
elements—freedom, order, individualism, tradition—can be taken to
extremes that undermine the whole. It was Buckley’s self-delegated
duty to grab the wheel and give it a sharp turn when conservative
thought veered toward crackpot alley. He did that with the John
Birch Society and anti-Semitism, among other extremes.
In Up from Liberalism (published in 1959), he commends a
conservatism that is principled but not dogmatic, that balances
long-term goals with the politics of the present. The objective
is to adjust skillfully to current circumstances until all of our
fundamental commitments are aligned. This allows for vigorous
disagreement without recourse to anathema and schism because
our unity rests on first principles, not narrow self-interest. Bill ends
with a hymn to freedom:
I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to
God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never
to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday
at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not?
It is certainly a program enough to keep conservatives
busy, and liberals at bay. And the nation free.
v
FRANK MEYER
The events of our times confirm the message that Frank Meyer,
author, editor, critic, and ex-Communist, never tired of telling:
A small band of men armed with truth, virtue, and courage can
defeat a corrupt, idolatrous empire and give birth to a civilization.
Frank’s lasting contribution was conditioned by his early adoption
of Marxism–Leninism, his rejection of the “total hideousness of
Communism,” and his fervent embrace of conservatism.
18. 18 president’s essay
While at Oxford University in the late 1920s, he fell under the sway
of Communism and eventually became a member of the “cadre,”
holding responsible posts in the Communist Party in Britain and
the United States. Despite apparent submission to the will of the
party, he enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II and began to
recognize the true nature of Marxism–Leninism and the true value
of what it was trying to destroy. He finally broke with the party in
1945 when Stalin decided to pursue revolutionary aims globally—
after the war ended.
In 1962, he published what he considered his most important book,
In Defense of Freedom, in which he laid the groundwork for the
major argument to which he devoted the last 10 years of his life.
Libertarians and traditionalists, often unbeknownst to them, share
a common conservatism, though they emphasize different aspects
of the tradition they both inherited. He advanced his theory in a
subsequent work, What Is Conservatism?, and summarized the
consensus as:
Belief in an objective moral order; agreement that
the human person is the proper focus of political
and social thought; conviction that the power of
the state should be limited; support of “the spirit
of the Constitution as originally conceived” [an
early expression of the constitutional “originalism”
championed by my colleague Ed Meese several
decades later]; and a shared devotion to Western
civilization coupled with the will to defend it from
hostile ideologies.
Since the death of Communism, I have often thought of Frank
Meyer and how he would have rejoiced to witness what we have
seen—a playwright as the freely elected president of Czechoslovakia,
private property in what used to be East Germany, public prayer
in Red Square in Moscow. He would have rejoiced not only in the
triumph of freedom but in the way it happened, with one man,
one heart, one spirit at a time refusing to be the creature of the
commissar. He always believed in the inviolability of man’s free will,
in the importance of each individual, and in the unlimited potential
of each person to do good.
19. The March of Freedom 19
v
JOHN WITHERSPOON
In two President’s Essays, I went back more than 200 years
to the founding of our Republic to discuss the most famous
founder, George Washington, and an unsung hero of the American
Revolution: John Witherspoon, the only clergyman to sign the
Declaration of Independence. I will discuss Washington in the last
section of this essay.
I selected Witherspoon for my 2001 essay because America had
recently suffered the terrorist attacks of September 11, and in that
time of crisis, we were in need of rediscovering the special legacy
of our Founding Fathers. As my colleague Joseph Loconte pointed
out, Witherspoon embodied “the potent alliance between faith
and freedom that would radically distinguish America from her
European cousins.” He did so by word and deed.
As a member of the Continental Congress, he signed the Declaration
of Independence and lost a son in the Revolutionary War. As a
leader of the American Presbyterian Church, he argued that robust
religion depended not on government sponsorship but on freedom
of conscience. And as president of the College of New Jersey (later
Princeton University), he not only made the campus a “seminary
of sedition” against the Crown, but prepared a generation of men—
including James Madison—for leadership roles in the new nation.
John Adams called Witherspoon “as high a son of liberty as any man
in America.”
v
DECTER, PODHORETZ
Like Frank Meyer, Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz were initially
of the Left but in Irving Kristol’s memorable phrase were “mugged by
reality” and sought a more rational and hospitable home on the Right.
20. 20 president’s essay
Decter has made major contributions to the development of
American conservatism, providing an insightful, timely critique
of feminism; a resolute defense of democracy against tyranny;
and a keen understanding of those commitments that unite the
conservative movement. She has also been a highly valued and
listened-to member of the Heritage Board of Trustees since 1981.
In her 1975 book Liberal Parents, Radical Children, Midge writes
about the most fundamental conservative act: passing character to
children. Civilization, she says, depends on the cultivation of moral
discipline among children, “the long, slow slogging effort that is the
only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling.”
For 35 years, Norman Podhoretz edited the always influential
Commentary magazine, first as a dependable organ of the liberal
establishment and then as an eloquent critic of the radical Left.
Podhoretz, Kristol, and other neoconservatives consciously set
about building an intellectual and cultural counterestablishment.
They rejected the charges of the New Left that America was
intrinsically “racist or imperialistic or counterrevolutionary.”
In June 2004, Norman Podhoretz received from President George
W. Bush a Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.
“It is the most wonderful honor ever to come my way,” said the
Brooklyn-born Jew whose father was a milkman. He preferred to
think he was being saluted not for his firm defense of the President
and the Bush Doctrine but for his patriotism. “This honor,” he said,
“comes from the United States of America.”
v
WHITTAKER CHAMBERS
Whittaker Chambers was the subject of my first President’s Essay.
I selected him because he had written Witness, one of the most
influential books of the second half of the 20th century, which
describes his seduction by Communism, his repudiation of its false
ideology, and his conversion to belief in God. Published in 1952, the
book had a profound influence on Ronald Reagan, Bill Buckley Jr.,
21. The March of Freedom 21
and Robert Novak, among many others. I also picked Chambers for
his amazing courage in the face of a hostile Liberal Establishment
and for his deep understanding of what was at stake in the epic
struggle between Communism and freedom. He was aware that all
of human history depended on which philosophy was victorious.
In Witness, he chronicles his pilgrimage from faith in the
preeminence of man to belief in the sovereignty of God. He
recognizes that Communism’s strength derives from its identity as
a religion and its horrors result from its identity as a false religion.
As he points out, Communism is man’s “second oldest faith,” first
instituted in response to the promise of the serpent in the Garden of
Eden: “Ye shall be as gods.”
Chambers’s witness (as a former Communist and spy for the Soviet
Union) shows the fraudulence of this promise and testifies to his
own faith in Western civilization. He risked his life to defend it,
knowing that others who had broken with the Communist Party had
been murdered. He wrote Witness so that others might profit from
his sacrifice and a resurrection might be wrought for himself, for his
children, and for the West.
IV
Finally, I turn to modern conservatism’s greatest political heroes:
Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and Margaret Thatcher. I have
been privileged to have known each of them and to have worked
with them to advance the cause of freedom at home and abroad.
President Reagan transformed conservatism from an intellectual
movement into a political revolution that continues to this day. He
exposed the bankruptcy of modern liberalism and proved that true
liberty is the motivating force of a just and prosperous society. He
understood the momentum of freedom and, through the power of
his words and the impact of his deeds, buried Leninism and ended
the Cold War without firing a shot.
He was called the “Great Communicator,” and so he was, but he
always placed more emphasis on substance than on style. “I wasn’t a
great communicator,” he insisted, “but I communicated great things,
22. 22 president’s essay
and they didn’t spring full blown from my brow. They came from the
heart of a great nation—from our experience, our wisdom and our
belief in the principles that guided us for two centuries.” He boiled
down politics to its fundamental level and spoke a plain language of
right and wrong. “At the heart of our message,” he said, “should be five
simple familiar words … family, work, neighborhood, freedom, peace.”
He intended his presidency to be an extension of the conservative
movement. His favorite magazine was National Review; his favorite
weekly paper was Human Events; his nightstand reading was
Chambers’s Witness and George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty. “A
revolution of ideas,” he later explained, “became a revolution of
governance.” He restored Americans’ confidence in themselves
and in their nation. When Reagan left office, a strong plurality of
Americans described themselves as conservatives.
President Reagan created an economic miracle. After a three-
stage tax cut and a reduction in government growth, the American
economy began to expand, growing 31 percent from 1983 to 1989 in
real terms. Americans of every class—rich, middle-class, and poor—
saw their wealth increase. It was the longest peacetime expansion in
our nation’s history.
This extraordinary economic achievement was equalled by events
overseas. Reagan said, “We meant to change a nation, and instead
we changed a world.” His administration determined that after 40
years of trying to contain Communism, the Cold War needed an
end game. The objective was no longer to maintain the status quo
but to roll back and bring down the Soviet empire. The Reagan
Administration did so with a multi-layered campaign that included
a buildup of U.S. military might, psychological warfare in Poland and
elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and a sophisticated economic
offensive that drove down the price of oil and limited Soviet exports
of natural gas to the West.
And who can forget the most famous six words of the Reagan
years: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Standing in front of
the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the President issued that ringing
challenge in June 1987. Barely two years later, the Berlin Wall came
tumbling down.
23. The March of Freedom 23
The Berlin challenge was preceded by what Reagan himself called
“one of the most important speeches I gave as president”—the 1982
Westminster Speech to the British Parliament. He said then that
it is possible and essential to preserve both freedom and peace. In
fact, it is freedom, not Communism, that has a kind of historical
inevitability rooted in the hopes of a world weary of poverty and
oppression. It is the “march of freedom and democracy,” he declared,
“that will leave Marxism–Leninism on the ash-heap of history as
it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the
self-expression of the people.” (I took “the march of freedom” from
this speech for the overall title of the President’s Essays.)
While liberal historians and Keynesian economists continued to
laud Moscow and predict a long life for its totalitarian rulers, Ronald
Reagan saw a quite different fate for the Soviet Union. The President
“achieved the most difficult of all political tasks,” former Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher said later, “changing attitudes and
perceptions about what is possible. From the strong fortress of his
convictions, he set out to enlarge freedom the world over at a time
when freedom was in retreat—and he succeeded.”
v
BARRY GOLDWATER
To borrow from George Will, before there was Ronald Reagan there
was Barry Goldwater, who affected American politics more than any
other losing presidential candidate in the 20th century.
Like a stern prophet of the Old Testament, Goldwater warned
the people to repent of their spendthrift ways or reap a bitter
harvest. Anti-Communist to the core, he urged a strategy of victory
over Communism by a combination of strategic, economic, and
psychological means including military superiority over the Soviets
and the encouragement of the peoples behind the Iron Curtain to
“overthrow their captors.” He talked about the partial privatization
of Social Security and a flat tax. Denounced as extremist in 1964,
such proposals have since entered the mainstream.
24. 24 president’s essay
Barry Goldwater laid the foundation for a political revolution
that culminated in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as
President and the 1994 Republican capture of the U.S. House of
Representatives under Speaker Newt Gingrich. In his memoirs,
he insists that he did not start a revolution, that all he did was to
begin “to tap … a deep reservoir [of conservatism] that already
existed in the American people.” That is like Thomas Paine saying
he did not ignite the American Revolution with his fiery pamphlet
Common Sense.
Four years before he ran for President, Goldwater published The
Conscience of a Conservative, a political manifesto that inspired
thousands of young people like myself to enter the world of politics.
The book was a fusion of the three major strains of conservatism
that existed in 1960: traditionalist, libertarian, and anti-Communist.
On the very first page, Goldwater declared that America was
fundamentally a conservative nation and that the American people
yearned for a return to conservative principles.
He dismissed the idea that conservatism was “out of date,” arguing
that saying this was like saying that “The Golden Rule or the
Ten Commandments or Aristotle’s Politics are out of date.” The
conservative approach, he said, “is nothing more or less than an
attempt to apply the wisdom of experience and the revealed truths
of the past to the problems of today.”
He listed what the conservative had learned about man from the
great minds of the past: (1) each person is unique and different from
every other human being, so provision must be made for the differing
development of each person; (2) the economic and spiritual aspects
of man’s nature “are inextricably intertwined”—neither aspect can
be free unless both are free; and (3) man’s spiritual and material
development cannot be directed by outside forces—“each man,” he
declared, “is responsible for his own development.”
But freedom is in peril in America, he said, because leaders
and members of both political parties had allowed government
to become too powerful. In so doing, they had ignored and
misinterpreted the single most important document in American
government: the Constitution, which was an instrument above all
25. The March of Freedom 25
“for limiting the functions of government.” The alarming result was
“a Leviathan, a vast national authority out of touch with the people
and out of their control.”
The solution, he said, lay with the people. The transition from
authority to freedom would come when the people entrusted their
affairs to those “who understand that their first duty as public
officials is to divest themselves of the power they have been given.”
The turn toward freedom, he wrote, would come when Americans
elected those candidates who pledged to enforce the Constitution,
to restore the Republic, and who proclaimed:
My aim is to not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It
is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel
old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or
that have failed in their purpose, or that impose
on the people an unwarranted financial burden.…
And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my
constituents’ “interests,” I shall reply that I was
informed their main interest is liberty and that in
that cause I am doing the very best I can.
v
MARGARET THATCHER
The history of Great Britain in the last quarter of the 20th century is
the biography of a great woman: Margaret Thatcher. This variant of
Thomas Carlyle’s dictum about the impact of heroes on history is based
on the extraordinary accomplishments of the British political leader
dubbed the “Iron Lady” by a grudgingly admiring Soviet adversary.
Committed to the ideas of limited government and the free market,
Prime Minister Thatcher transformed Britain during her 11-and-a-half
years, from May 1979 to November 1990, at No. 10 Downing Street. She
literally turned the nation around, putting it on the road to freedom
and prosperity rather than the road to serfdom and stagnation it had
been traveling for much of the post–World War II period.
26. 26 president’s essay
It is easy to forget how desperate Britain’s situation was in the
late 1970s. The country was invariably described as the “sick
man of Europe.” To pay its bills, it had to borrow money from the
International Monetary Fund. Protracted labor disputes led to
long strikes and a “Winter of Discontent” in 1978. Dead bodies
went unburied. Uncollected trash piled up in the streets. More
strikes loomed. The famous British attribute of patience reached its
breaking point in the spring of 1979: The Labour prime minister was
ousted on a vote of no confidence and replaced by the Conservative
Thatcher—Britain’s first woman prime minister.
Convinced that the solution to the country’s persistent economic
problems lay in a return to the market system, Thatcher launched a
bold plan to get rid of what she called the “nanny state.” She set out
to break the grip of power-hungry trade unions and the monopoly of
nationalized industries.
She tamed the unions despite a violent coal miners’ strike in 1984;
unlike previous prime ministers, she refused to cave in to radical
demands. Under her direction, and over the strenuous objections
of the opposition Labour Party, the government sold off British
Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, and British Steel, resulting
in vastly improved service for the public and profits for the
stockholders of the companies. She assumed control of the money
supply, reduced the government’s budget deficit, trimmed state
spending, cut taxes, and reduced government regulations. On the
seventh day, she rested.
Freed of the nanny state, Britain embarked on its longest economic
expansion in the postwar period. Annual growth averaged between 3
percent and 4 percent in the 1980s, besting the European Community’s
average of 2.5 percent. Real household income rose 34 percent during
the decade. Government spending was tightly controlled.
As a result, inflation fell sharply and unemployment declined
markedly. In fact, Britain created more new jobs in the ’80s than
the other members of the European Community combined. The
program of privatizing state-owned industries brought share
ownership to millions of workers. Public-sector tenants were given
the option to buy their homes at significant discounts, and over
27. The March of Freedom 27
a million did. Margaret Thatcher proved yet again that freedom
works—for everyone. Her successful application of conservative
ideas is a lesson to be studied by everyone, including our own
leaders.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were loyal allies and staunch
friends. At their first meeting in April 1975, when Thatcher was the new
leader of the Conservative opposition and Reagan had recently stepped
down as California governor, the two conservatives quickly realized they
were of like mind. They shared the same philosophy and the same desire
to put their philosophy into practice. Reagan later recalled, “Margaret
ended our first meeting by telling me, ‘We must stand together.’” And so
they did as political soul mates and champions of liberty.
In her book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, “Lady
T” writes that “the pursuit of statecraft without regard for moral
principles is all but impossible.” And she looks to America to lead
the way in a world of risk, conflict, and latent violence. Like a latter-
day Tocqueville, she suggests that America is more than a nation
or a state or a superpower. “It is an idea”—the idea of what she
calls “orderly freedom.” The idea is founded on “a sense of personal
responsibility and of the quintessential value of the individual
human being.” America, she says, is the most reliable force for
freedom in the world because “the entrenched values of freedom are
what make sense of its whole existence.”
v
JACK KEMP
Most public officials come and go in Washington, making only the
faintest of impressions. Only rarely does a politician advance an
idea that changes the course of the nation; such a political leader
was Jack Kemp.
Following meetings and extended discussions with journalist Jude
Wanniski, academic Arthur Laffer, and Wall Street Journal editor
Robert Bartley, Jack became convinced that supply-side economics,
with its focus on deep across-the-board tax rate cuts, was the key to
28. 28 president’s essay
national prosperity and political success for the Republican Party.
Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan agreed and made Kemp–Roth
(the latter Senator William Roth of Delaware) a central initiative of
his 1980 campaign.
In the summer of 1981, the Economic Recovery Tax Act, calling for
a 25 percent cut in nominal tax rates over three years, was passed
by Congress and signed into law by Reagan. It sparked the longest
period of peacetime economic growth in U.S. history, lasting more
than two decades. Scholars could not recall when a lawmaker like
Jack Kemp without a seat on the committee with jurisdiction had so
much influence on such important legislation.
I remember especially his soaring address at Heritage’s President’s
Club meeting in November 1994 when he offered a vision of the
American idea rooted in a conservative vision of the Founders:
We must return to people their resources so that
they will accept their responsibility.
We must return to people power so that they will
rebuild the institutions of a free society.
We must return to people authority so that they will
create the moral capital to help renew our nation.
v
JEANE KIRKPATRICK
Ronald Reagan was a superb judge of the right ideas and the right
people to implement those ideas, as proved by his selection of
Jeane Kirkpatrick as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
As President, he was determined to send a powerful message to
the Soviets “that we weren’t going to stand by anymore while
they armed and financed terrorists and subverted democratic
governments.” As part of his strategy, he chose as his U.N.
representative someone who he knew would neither excuse nor
disregard Soviet aggrandizement.
29. The March of Freedom 29
He had been impressed by Kirkpatrick’s penetrating article in
Commentary that traced the Carter Administration’s failed foreign
policy to its inability to make distinctions between “right-wing”
and Communist governments. Referring to Nicaragua and Iran,
she criticized Carter for undermining pro-American, right-wing
autocracies while accepting the rule of anti-American, Communist
regimes. Such realistic analysis appealed strongly to Ronald Reagan.
In the U.N., Jeane eloquently defended Reagan policy during such
crises as Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the U.S. overturn of a Marxist
regime in Grenada, and the Soviet downing of Korean Airlines
flight 007. She was especially vocal in support of aid to the anti-
Communist Contras in Nicaragua. In her original essay for the 2002
President’s Essay, she wrote that international relations depend,
above all, “on the values and the relative power of nations.” U.S.
effectiveness in places like the U. N., require “absolutely that we
have confidence in our values, our experience, our country.”
v
GEORGE WASHINGTON
As we approached the end of the 20th century, I thought it
appropriate in the 1999 President’s Essay to look back and reflect
on where we had been so that we might better judge where we were
headed. And I could think of no better place to begin a reassessment
than to consider our first President and his greatest and longest
writing: the Farewell Address of 1796. I called attention to three
pieces of Washington’s advice that are especially important to
America today.
First is the primary importance of the Constitution and the rule of law.
What makes the obligation to obey the law so vital? Its basis in just
principles of government—above all, the sovereignty of the people
and the consent of the governed embodied in the Constitution.
Second is the place of religion, morality, and what we today call civil
society. Even with good laws and a carefully written Constitution,
Americans must develop and maintain the good habits necessary for
30. 30 president’s essay
free government. In order to have public virtue, Washington said, it
is first necessary to cultivate private virtue.
Third is his advice regarding foreign policy, including this famous
passage: “’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances,
with any portion of the foreign world.” He did not use the phrase
“entangling alliances,” which is actually found in Thomas Jefferson’s
1801 inaugural address. As my colleague and Washington scholar
Matthew Spalding has pointed out, Washington is warning against
political connections and permanent alliances. Rather than a
passive condition of detachment, he is describing an active policy of
national independence.
Much has changed since Washington delivered his Farewell
Address. America has become the strong, prosperous, and great
nation our first President envisioned. But by ignoring his advice,
America has moved down the path of unlimited government power,
political factionalism and rancor, and a culture far adrift of its
traditional moorings. The challenge before us is clear: the renewal
of constitutional government, civil society, and our personal liberty.
V
My own political thinking has been most influenced by Russell
Kirk, a traditionalist; Friedrich von Hayek, a classical liberal; and
Milton Friedman, a libertarian. In the same room, they would have
had (and did have) pointed arguments. But I do not believe that my
respect for them is schizophrenic. All shared a revulsion against
modern Gnosticism (the attempt to merge heaven and earth with
man at the center) and social engineering. All would admit that a
vigorous economy depends on strong families and communities and
that economic policy has a critical influence on the social fabric.
I began writing the President’s Essays all those years ago with
the objective of introducing or reintroducing the conservative
faith to friends and supporters of The Heritage Foundation—and
then to encourage many of you to cross the bridge from thought
to action, matching principles with participation. Judging by the
communications I have received over the years, I believe I have
succeeded.
31. The March of Freedom 31
As to the future, there is much to be done. There is a federal
government to be rolled back, a market economy to be freed,
traditional values to be preserved, and a national defense to be
strengthened. All this can be done, and I believe will be done, if we
look to the right philosophers, popularizers, and politicians to lead
the march of freedom.
32.
33. Previous President’s Essays
A Letter to My Children 1986
Whittaker Chambers
Up from Liberalism 1987
Richard Weaver
The Economic Necessity of Freedom 1988
Wilhelm Roepke
Errand Into the Wilderness 1989
Michael Novak
Isaiah’s Job 1990
Albert Jay Nock
Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism 1991
Frank S. Meyer
Enlivening the Conservative Mind 1992
Russell Kirk
Responsibility and Freedom 1993
F. A. Hayek
The Conservative Framework and Modern Realities 1994
William F. Buckley Jr.
A Letter to the Young 1995
Midge Decter
The March of Freedom: The Westminster Speech 1996
Ronald W. Reagan
Capitalism and Freedom 1997
Milton Friedman
Liberty and Property 1998
Ludwig von Mises
Farewell Address 1999
George Washington
Four Essays 2000
Leonard Read
34. Previous President’s Essays (continued)
The Minister to Freedom: The Legacy of John Witherspoon 2001
Joseph Loconte
Defending U.S. Interests and Principles in the United Nations 2002
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
The Contexts of Democracy 2003
Robert Nisbet
The Conscience of a Conservative 2004
Barry Goldwater
Statecraft 2005
Margaret Thatcher
A New Order for the Ages: The Making of the 2006
United States Constitution
Forrest McDonald
A Letter to My Son 2007
Norman Podhoretz
The Case for Economic Freedom 2008
Benjamin A. Rogge, Ph.D.
Economics in One Lesson 2009
Henry Hazlitt
The Moral Sense 2010
James Q. Wilson
An American Renaissance 2011
Jack Kemp
Most of these essays have been collected in the second edition of
The March of Freedom by Edwin J. Feulner Jr.