Reagan’s lifetime, we did sort out the two parties along lines of principle not geography. One party largely supports reducing the size and scope of the state and increasing individual liberty. The other party tends to see human progress requiring an increasingly powerful and large government. The central issue dividing the parties is the size of the state. The Republican Party today, the Reagan Republican Party, is a collection of individuals with one thing in common: on the issue that moves their vote – not every issue, but on the issue that moves their vote – what they want from the government is simply to be left alone.
Who sits at the Republican table? Taxpayers, people who vote on the tax issue. They want the tax burden reduced. People concerned about property rights want their property rights respected. The business community – big businesses and small businesses – are not asking for special favours: they are not asking for the government to go and kneecap competitors, they just wish to be left alone (there are businesses that want the government to go and kneecap their competitors, but they bat for the other team). Around this table are also two million Americans who home-school their children. This freedom was only legalised in the past 25 years. These are people making tremendous sacrifices to give their children an education. It is a major commitment and the dominant issue in their life. They do not knock on your door and tell you that you should be a home-schooler: they simply wish to be left alone. The millions of Americans who make the sacrifice to pay for private and parochial education for their children – in addition to their taxes – also hold parental rights in education as a vote-moving political principle.
Then there is the Second Amendment community – I fully realise that nobody in Europe understands this but, in the United States, the Second Amendment, or gun rights, is a big issue. More than nine million Americans have a concealed-carry permit allowing them to carry a gun on their person. Almost twenty million Americans have hunting licences. I serve on the board of directors for the National Rifle Association, which has four million members. We don’t go around urging people to be hunters. We don’t require that all fourth-grade children be taught books in state schools entitled ‘Heather has Two Hunters’. We are simply asking to be left alone to protect ourselves and our families.
There are also members of the various communities of faith in the United States for whom the most important thing in their life is to practise their faith and to transmit it to their children. Evangelical Christians, Roman Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Muslims and Mormons hold very different views of religion, but are united in their preferred relationship with the state: they simply want to be left alone. For each group, first choice, when we were designing the Constitution, might have been: ‘make everybody be my religion’, but because we were already diverse at the beginning, the achievable second choice was ‘everybody gets left alone’.
This is an extremely important thing to understand because, sometimes when you hear the discussion in the United States, you would think that the coalition I am describing will not hold together because some of the ‘religious right’ want to impose their religious values on others. That is why you have to look at political activity in terms of vote-moving issues. The ‘religious right’ came into being in the 1970s. Why? It was because the Carter administration was going after Christian radio stations, using the ‘fairness doctrine’, a regulation originally designed to require TV and radio news to present both sides of a political issue. Christian radio viewed this as an assault on religious liberty. In addition, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was threatening to revoke the non-profit status of Christian schools, which were seen by the government-school teachers’ unions as a competitive threat: so these groups organised in self-defence; they wanted to be left alone; they feared state power. Understand that and you will understand why they sit at the same table and work reasonably well with people who work all day, never go to church, and simply want to pay lower taxes.
What is important is that everyone around the table wishes to be left alone on their key issue, and they vote for the same candidate. The candidate says, ‘I will leave your kids alone, your guns alone, your money alone, your property alone, your faith alone’ and he wins the votes of all these people.
Then the candidate and the party that puts itself in that position can move forward. It doesn’t mean everyone in the centre-right coalition agrees on everything: they certainly don’t. They don’t all have tea together; they don’t socialise. The guy who wants to make money all day looks across the table at the guy who wants to go to church all day and says, ‘That’s not how I spend my time.’ They both look over at the guy who wants to fondle his guns all day and say: ‘That’s not how we spend our time.’ But, for the party of liberty to advance, it is not necessary that everyone is agreed on what they would do with their liberty. It is simply necessary that we each agree on moving towards liberty.
That’s how the coalition became self-aware in time for the 1980 election. The establishment looked at it and said, ‘This will fall apart any moment,’ because they were looking at the secondary and tertiary issues on which the coalition did not agree. There you will find lots of disagreements, but on primary vote-moving issues, they are not in conflict.
Conflict among the opponents of liberty: the ‘takings coalition’
When Hillary Clinton was running for the Senate, back in 2000, she gave a speech saying, ‘What we progressives need is a meeting like Grover runs in Washington, DC.’ I was asked by the press what I thought of that, and I explained how our centre-right coalition meeting works. We put 160 people together every week in a room where there are wide disagreements on what is important, except that what is important to each person is that they be free in the zone that matters to them.
Progressives, the left, have tried to put together similar meetings from time to time. Who would sit at Hillary Clinton’s table, recently stolen by Barack Obama? Around the table might be trial lawyers, labour union bosses and big city political machines. Also the two wings of the dependency movement: people who are locked into welfare dependency and people who make $90,000 a year managing the dependency of people and making sure none of them get jobs and become Republicans. Then we have all the coercive utopians: the people who get government grants to push the rest of us around. The people who mandate cars too small to put your entire family into; the people who designed and required that we must all have toilets too small to flush completely; the people who insist on those light bulbs that convince you that you have glaucoma; and the people who require that on the Sabbath you must separate the green glass from the white glass from the brown glass for the recycling priests.
They have a list of things that you have to do and a list of things you are not allowed to do that is slightly longer and more tedious than Leviticus. It just goes on, and on, and on. So around the left’s table, the ‘takings coalition’ can get along with each other as long as there is enough money in the centre of the table. They can work together as long as taxes are raised and there is more money pouring into the centre of the table to share. They can then cheerfully sit together in the way that they do in the movies after the bank robbery passing out the loot: ‘One for you, one for you, one for you,’ and everybody is happy.
However, if we do our jobs correctly, and we say ‘no new taxes’ and we stop throwing cash into the centre of that table, then all our friends on the left begin to look at each other in a way that is more like the second-to-last scene in those lifeboat movies. Now they are trying to decide who they are going to eat or who they are going to throw overboard.
Our job, step one in the fight for liberty, is to ensure that we don’t make things worse; don’t throw money into the centre of the statist table; do not feed the beast. Don’t raise taxes is rule number one. If you stop the flow of tax dollars, then the other team, as they see the money pile dwindling, begin gnawing on the guy sitting next to them. If they can’t eat taxpayers they will fight each other for the limited amount of other people’s money that is available.
The left is not made up of friends and allies; it is made up of competing parasites.
