Reagan Lays Out the Conservative Challenge

RONALD REAGAN, Remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference Dinner (1981)

Ronald Reagan debuted as a leading conservative figure in the Republican Party when he delivered a keynote speech endorsing Barry Goldwater for president at the party’s 1964 nominating convention. As governor of California, Reagan resisted Johnson’s Great Society programs and condemned student protests against the Vietnam War. He quickly became a powerful voice for conservative ideas, culminating in his 1980 election as president. In this speech, just weeks after his inauguration, Reagan addresses his fellow conservatives by reminding them of the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Who can forget that July night in San Francisco when Barry Goldwater told us that we must set the tides running again in the cause of freedom, and he said, “until our cause has won the day, inspired the world, and shown the way to a tomorrow worthy of all our yesteryears”? And had there not been a Barry Goldwater willing to take that lonely walk, we wouldn’t be here talking of a celebration tonight.

But our memories are not just political ones. I like to think back about a small, artfully written magazine named National Review, founded in 1955 and ridiculed by the intellectual establishment because it published an editorial that said it would stand athwart the course of history yelling, “Stop!” And then there was a spritely written newsweekly coming out of Washington named Human Events that many said would never be taken seriously, but it would become later “must reading” not only for Capitol Hill insiders but for all of those in public life.

How many of us were there who used to go home from meetings like this with no thought of giving up, but still find ourselves wondering in the dark of night whether this much-loved land might go the way of other great nations that lost a sense of mission and a passion for freedom? …

Our goals complement each other. We’re not cutting the budget simply for the sake of sounder financial management. This is only a first step toward returning power to the States and communities, only a first step toward reordering the relationship between citizen and government. We can make government again responsive to people not only by cutting its size and scope and thereby ensuring that its legitimate functions are performed efficiently and justly.

Because ours is a consistent philosophy of government, we can be very clear: We do not have a social agenda, separate economic agenda, and a separate foreign agenda. We have one agenda. Just as surely as we seek to put our financial house in order and rebuild our nation’s defenses, so too we seek to protect the unborn, to end the manipulation of schoolchildren by utopian planners, and permit the acknowledgement of a Supreme Being in our classrooms just as we allow such acknowledgements in other public institutions. …

Now, during our political efforts, we were the subject of much indifference and often times intolerance, and that’s why I hope our political victory will be remembered as a generous one and our time in power will be recalled for the tolerance we showed for those with whom we disagree.

But beyond this, we have to offer America and the world a larger vision. We must remove government’s smothering hand from where it does harm; we must seek to revitalize the proper functions of government. But we do these things to set loose again the energy and the ingenuity of the American people. We do these things to reinvigorate those social and economic institutions which serve as a buffer and a bridge between the individual and the state — and which remain the real source of our progress as a people.

And we must hold out this exciting prospect of an orderly, compassionate, pluralistic society — an archipelago of prospering communities and divergent institutions — a place where a free and energetic people can work out their own destiny under God.

I know that some will think about the perilous world we live in and the dangerous decade before us and ask what practical effect this conservative vision can have today. When Prime Minister Thatcher1 was here recently … I told [her] that everywhere we look in the world the cult of the state is dying. And I held out hope that it wouldn’t be long before those of our adversaries who preach the supremacy of the state were remembered only for their role in a sad, rather bizarre chapter in human history. The largest planned economy in the world has to buy food elsewhere or its people would starve.

We’ve heard in our century far too much of the sounds of anguish from those who live under totalitarian rule. We’ve seen too many monuments made not out of marble or stone but out of barbed wire and terror. But from these terrible places have come survivors, witnesses to the triumph of the human spirit over the mystique of state power, prisoners whose spiritual values made them the rulers of their guards. With their survival, they brought us “the secret of the camps,” a lesson for our time and for any age: Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid.

That’s why the Marxist vision of man without God must eventually be seen as an empty and a false faith — the second oldest in the world — first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with whispered words of temptation: “Ye shall be as gods.” The crisis of the Western world, Whittaker Chambers2 reminded us, exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God. “The Western world does not know it,” he said about our struggle, “but it already possesses the answer to this problem — but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as communism’s faith in man.”

This is the real task before us: to reassert our commitment as a nation to a law higher than our own, to renew our spiritual strength. Only by building a wall of such spiritual resolve can we, as a free people, hope to protect our own heritage and make it someday the birthright of all men.

There is, in America, a greatness and a tremendous heritage of idealism which is a reservoir of strength and goodness. It is ours if we will but tap it. And, because of this — because that greatness is there — there is need in America today for a reaffirmation of that goodness and a reformation of our greatness.

The dialog and the deeds of the past few decades are not sufficient to the day in which we live. They cannot keep the promise of tomorrow. The encrusted bureaucracies and the engrained procedures which have developed of late respond neither to the minority or the majority. We’ve come to a turning point. We have a decision to make. Will we continue with yesterday’s agenda and yesterday’s failures, or will we reassert our ideals and our standards, will we reaffirm our faith, and renew our purpose? This is a time for choosing. …

I made a speech by that title in 1964. I said, “We’ve been told increasingly that we must choose between left or right.” But we’re still using those terms — left or right. And I’ll repeat what I said then in ’64. “There is no left or right. There’s only an up or down”: up to the ultimate in individual freedom, man’s age old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with an orderly society — or down to the totalitarianism of the ant heap. And those today who, however good their intentions, tell us that we should trade freedom for security are on that downward path.

Those of us who call ourselves conservative have pointed out what’s wrong with government policy for more than a quarter of a century. Now we have an opportunity to make policy and to change our national direction. All of us in government — in the House, in the Senate, in the executive branch — and in private life can now stand together. We can stop the drain on the economy by the public sector. We can restore our national prosperity. We can replace the overregulated society with the creative society. We can appoint to the bench distinguished judges who understand the first responsibility of any legal system is to punish the guilty and protect the innocent. We can restore to their rightful place in our national consciousness the values of family, work, neighborhood, and religion. And, finally, we can see to it that the nations of the world clearly understand America’s intentions and respect for resolve.

Now we have the opportunity — yes, and the necessity — to prove that the American promise is equal to the task of redressing our grievances and equal to the challenge of inventing a great tomorrow.

This reformation, this renaissance will not be achieved or will it be served, by those who engage in political claptrap or false promises. It will not be achieved by those who set people against people, class against class, or institution against institution. So, while we celebrate our recent political victory we must understand there’s much work before us: to gain control again of government, to reward personal initiative and risk-taking in the marketplace, to revitalize our system of federalism, to strengthen the private institutions that make up the independent sector of our society, and to make our own spiritual affirmation in the face of those who would deny man has a place before God. Not easy tasks perhaps. But I would remind you as I did on January 20th, they’re not impossible, because, after all, we’re Americans. …

Fellow citizens, fellow conservatives, our time is now. Our moment has arrived. We stand together shoulder to shoulder in the thickest of the fight. If we carry the day and turn the tide, we can hope that as long as men speak of freedom and those who have protected it, they will remember us, and they will say, “Here were the brave and here their place of honor.”

Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference Dinner,” March 20, 1981. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43580.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS