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 wenty-four
years ago today, on his 66th birthday, Ronald Reagan visited Washington
to address the American Conservative Union about "Reshaping the
American Political Landscape." The title was no exaggeration: The
speech
spelled
out a plan to remake the Republican party and revolutionize campaign
politics. To anyone who was paying attention that night in 1977, Reagan's
speech would have provided genuine glimpses of the future.
The next day's Washington Post did mention Reagan's presence
— in a "Style" article that described how a group of his friends
threw him a birthday party in suburban Alexandria. Nowhere did the
Post mention what Reagan had said. It was as if a Moscow
newspaper correspondent in 1916 had heard Lenin outline the Russian
Revolution, and then published an article about his hair loss.
Of course, the Post's oversight was understandable: The hot
bet of the moment was not whether the Republican party could reshape
politics, but whether it could survive at all. Gerald Ford had just
lost to Jimmy Carter. Republicans held only 38 Senate seats, not
enough even to sustain a filibuster against Carter legislation.
In the House, they had dwindled to 143 seats, just one-third of
the total. According to the Gallup Poll, more than twice as many
voters identified with the Democrats as with the GOP. In a Fortune
magazine article, election scholar Everett Carll Ladd wrote: "The
GOP today is in a weaker position than any major party of the US
since the Civil War."
And even if the party could survive, few pundits believed that it
could prosper under the Reagan flag. When the GOP last ran a hard-core
conservative, Barry Goldwater in 1964, it suffered a massive, humiliating,
top-to-bottom defeat. And in the aftermath of the 1976 election,
Republican moderates were muttering that Ford might have won if
Reagan hadn't cuffed him up during the primaries.
Yet on that bleak February day, Reagan radiated confidence that
conservative Republicanism was stronger than it seemed. He got straight
to the main question: What is to be done? He
| “Few
pundits believed that [the party] could prosper under
the Reagan flag.” |
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observed that while Republicans traditionally owned economic issues
such as taxation, many blue-collar Democrats were concerned about
social issues such as crime. He asked whether it was possible to unite
the two forces into one politically effective whole.
"I believe the answer is: Yes, it is possible to create a political
entity that will reflect the views of the great, hitherto, conservative
majority. We went a long way toward doing it in California. We can
do it in America. This is not a dream, a wistful hope. It is and
has been a reality.
And so it would be. In later years, pundits would talk about the
"Reagan Democrats," the pro-life, anti-Communist voters who were
more at home in bowling alleys than country clubs. By stressing
themes of family, neighborhood, and peace through strength, Reagan
brought them together with the traditional Republicans who worried
about capital gains.
Turning Lincoln Steffens on his head, Reagan said: "I have seen
the conservative future and it works." This brief phrase captured
two important features of Reaganite conservatism. The first was
the practice of borrowing the Left's rhetoric — a tactic that
would confuse and confound liberals for decades. The second was
Reagan's optimistic orientation toward the future, something that
radically distinguished him from other conservatives of the early
20th century. This change was essential to turning conservatism
from an intellectual eccentricity to a true mass movement. Two years
before Russell Kirk published The
Conservative Mind, Eric Hoffer observed in The
True Believer that those who would transform a nation need
more than widespread discontent or even formal authority: "What
seems to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith
in the future."
In 1977, conservative Republicans had precious few instruments of
power, but thanks in large part to Reagan's faith, they had a great
future ahead of them.
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