Political terms mean different things in different countries, and they mean different things in the same countries at different times. In the United States and across the world in the 19th Century, the word “liberal” described someone primarily concerned about liberty. Over the years, the word “liberal,” deliberately adopted by the left in the United States, has come to mean here someone committed to, among other priorities, greater concentration of power in government, more government spending, and active opposition to traditional values. In modern American politics, liberal means left. Leftists have so sullied the word “liberal” that they often prefer now to call themselves “progressive.” Despite this changed but now familiar meaning of the word “liberal,” many American free-market economists persist in calling themselves liberals. Those economists have every right to try to label themselves any way they please, even though that makes their communications more difficult for the American general public to understand.
Public opinion polls for many years have shown that approximately twice as many Americans describe themselves as conservatives than those who are self-identified liberals, about 40% to 20%. Americans who call themselves conservatives would almost all agree that liberals, in today’s political use of the word, are those who want bigger government.
In Tehran, Iran, people who hang on their walls honored photos of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni may be called conservative. In Madrid, Spain, people who hang on their walls honored photos of the late Caudillo Francisco Franco may be called conservative. In Beijing, China, people who hang on their walls honored photos of the late Chairman Mao Zedong may be called conservative. The same word means different things in different contexts.
In the United States today, someone who hangs on his wall an honored photo of Ronald Reagan can be called a conservative. Most people now understand immediately. That person is probably committed to limited government, free enterprise, strong national defense, and traditional values. For political purposes, these four principles are generally accepted in America as pillars of American conservatism.
About 1960, during my college days, Professor Waldo W. Braden asked each of us in his class at Louisiana State University to describe ourselves in as few words as possible. When my turn came, I answered, “I am a conservative activist.” Professor Braden, who enjoyed quibbles over words, said, “Mr. Blackwell, that is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. A conservative cannot be an activist.” Having already read much by William F. Buckley, Jr., I knew what “oxymoron” meant. I replied to my professor, “We’ll see.” Four years later, I was presidential nominee Sen. Barry Goldwater’s youngest elected delegate to the 1964 Republican National Convention. By then, even liberal college professors had begun to admit that there are such things as conservative activists.
I base this lecture about the real nature of conservative politics on my more than 50 years of personal political participation and observation. I earn my living working for conservative employers: five and a half years, on and off, as executive director of the national College Republicans; campaign director (manager) of a Republican congressional candidate’s campaign in Louisiana in 1966; a year and a half on the senior staff of the American Enterprise Institute; seven years working for Richard Viguerie, the “Funding Father” of the American conservative movement; a year and a half as a top staffer for conservative U.S. Senator Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire; three years as a Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan on his White House Staff, where my duties included serving as President Reagan’s liaison to all American conservative organizations; nine and a half years (1990 to 2000) working part time as executive director of the Council for National Policy, the major conservative movement umbrella organization; and since early 1984, employed as president of the Leadership Institute, the conservative political training educational foundation I created in 1979.
My Republican Party activities include: in College Republicans, local club co-founder, state chairman, and national executive director; in Young Republicans, local club founder, state chairman, and elected national officer; in senior party Republicans, county committee member, state central committee member first in Louisiana and currently in Virginia; participation in every Republican National Convention starting in 1964, serving as a Delegate or Alternate Delegate at all those conventions except in 1972. I’m now in my seventh consecutive four-year term as Virginia’s Republican National Committeeman and thus as one of the 168 members of the Republican National Committee. As a volunteer, I planned and oversaw the 1980 national Youth for Reagan effort, and I currently serve on the governing boards of many different conservative movement organizations (large and small) and Republican Party committees, local, state, and national. That long experience qualifies me to explain what I believe is the real nature of conservative politics. As much as almost anyone, I have walked that walk.
The engine of conservative politics in America is the conservative movement, which began largely as a serious intellectual movement in the 1950s. Its principles were already limited government, free enterprise, strong national defense, and traditional values, but it focused primarily on developing its ideas and on the important job of attracting others to those ideas. Typically, conservative intellectuals considered the nitty-gritty of political action beneath their dignity. They identified the errors and dangers of the left. They persuasively promoted an inspiring set of conservative ideas. They did grow the movement. They formed some national conservative organizations which modestly prospered, without raising much money or identifying, much less activating, really large numbers of people. When they did try political action, those early movement conservatives chose to work almost entirely within the Republican Party.
But that party was dominated by Eastern Establishment Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller who seemed to have all the money and, as far as internal Republican matters were concerned, the support of all the major print and broadcast media. The nascent conservative intellectual movement managed to attract and recruit sufficient numbers of inexperienced but earnest grassroots conservative activists like me to nominate Barry Goldwater for President in 1964, but Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory that year produced confident and loud predictions that conservatism in politics was dead for good.
History didn’t work out that way. Starting in 1965, a number of former Goldwater supporters gravitated to the center of American politics, the D.C. area. Hardly any of us had known each other earlier, much less had prominent roles in the Goldwater campaign. But our past personal support of Goldwater credentialed us to each other as we eventually met, sometimes by working together in election contests, legislative battles, or Republican organizations, but often only by chance. This process took several years.
While I was executive director of the national College Republicans in the mid-1960s, I met Lee Edwards. He had served high up in the Goldwater campaign, as its director of information. Then he came to Washington, D.C., and opened a conservative public relations firm. As far as I knew, his was the area’s only conservative public relations firm. The New York Times once called him “The Voice of the Silent Majority.” Lee generously mentored me, and I supplied College Republican volunteers for conservative events he organized.
In early May 1972, while I worked at the American Enterprise Institute, Lee Edwards introduced me to his friend Richard Viguerie, who had served as executive director of Young Americans for Freedom, the youth group organized around the groundswell for Barry Goldwater. Richard Viguerie had moved to the D.C. area in 1965 to form what turned out to be a spectacularly successful direct mail consulting firm. For most conservatives, he was famous but a man of mystery. I had never met him. He worked very long hours building his business, and he did not circulate socially in what was then the very small circle of D.C.-area conservatives. A story spread that Richard had on the wall behind his desk a huge faucet which he could turn on to pour vast sums of money into the coffers of any organization he would take on as a client.
A couple of weeks after our first meeting, Richard offered me a job with his company. “Morton,” he said, “I want you to come help me build the conservative movement.” I accepted enthusiastically because building the conservative movement was exactly what I wanted to do. The story of Richard Viguerie’s movement-building in the 1970s has been told many times. No longer almost a recluse, he sought out philosophically sound conservatives who had proved themselves as activists in various areas of the public policy process. Most of them already knew and trusted each other. He invited them often and hosted them at mostly small but innumerable meetings and meals to discuss, to figure out, and to implement what had to be done for conservatives to start beating the liberals in politics. As his political assistant, I helped organize Richard’s movement-building meetings and participated actively in them. The discussions often proved highly productive.
Leaders of some previously existing, good groups did not agree with some of the conclusions reached in the Viguerie meetings, particularly the decisions to encourage the creation of a wide variety of new conservative organizations and to persuade existing conservative groups to develop the skills required to grow dramatically in membership and political effectiveness. Some felt creating new and larger organizations would only drain resources from existing organizations. Our response was that, if conservatives couldn’t increase our resources and members, we would never win. Jump-starting the conservative movement worked, and before long new conservative groups of all types sprang up, doing good work in many conservative-issue areas – first dozens, then hundreds, and now thousands of new groups.
As a guide for conservatives wanting to start new public policy organizations or expand existing ones, many years ago I wrote a booklet “The Conservative Organizational Entrepreneur.” Periodically updated, that booklet is now easily accessible for free online. A number of long-established organizations also grew prodigiously in the 1970s. For example, the well-respected National Right to Work Committee increased from 25,000 members in 1972 to more than 1.7 million members in 1979. This significant growth exemplified the expanding influence and reach of conservative organizations during that era.
Alongside these established groups, a wave of new conservative organizations emerged, each addressing specific conservative issues and mobilizing support around them. These organizations varied widely in focus, from traditional values advocacy to economic policy reform, reflecting the diverse interests and concerns within the conservative movement.
The proliferation of these groups was not merely quantitative but also qualitative, as they developed sophisticated strategies to engage in political contests effectively. They recognized the importance of both ideological alignment and organizational efficiency in achieving their goals, marking a shift towards a more integrated and strategic approach to conservative activism.
This period marked a transformative phase for conservative politics in America, where the movement evolved from a primarily intellectual endeavor into a cohesive force capable of shaping public policy and electoral outcomes. The combination of ideological commitment, organizational growth, and strategic thinking laid the foundation for the modern conservative movement’s enduring impact on American politics.
I am interested only that, for the duration of the war, he keep his rifle clean and his trigger finger nerveless against a common enemy. I understand that that is all he wants of me.
The reason for the increasing success of conservative ideas in recent years is not that our ideals are much more correct now than those we held, say, in the Goldwater era. We prosper in many ways because we have begun to study the political process and to work together to implement our new knowledge.
We must teach young intellectuals that a flattering and seductive talisman which they do not fully understand will not guarantee them success. They must not rely on victory falling into their deserving hands like ripe fruit off a tree. They have to earn it. Good ideas have desirable consequences only if we act intelligently for them.
My Leadership Institute offers 40 different types of training schools to teach conservatives how to be successful in government, politics, and the news media. In 2013, more than 19,000 people took my training courses in person. Others study courses the Institute offers online.
For many years, mine was the only conservative organization focused on political training. All the others concentrated on the important task of teaching about conservative principles and public policy issues. However, I am pleased to report that in recent years at least a dozen other national conservative and libertarian organizations have begun to offer useful training programs for successful political participation. I commend their efforts.
I do not entirely neglect to provide philosophical education to my students. About 5,000 Leadership Institute students per year receive copies of my booklet, “Read to Lead,” which lists and briefly discusses 26 books I believe to be especially valuable as a foundation for movement conservatives. The booklet “Read to Lead” is accessible for free online.
Each year I give away to bright students hundreds of copies of excellent books by F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Edmund Burke, Frederic Bastiat, Thomas Sowell, Russell Kirk, Paul Johnson, Whittaker Chambers and others of like mind. But traditionally, conservative educational efforts focused exclusively on teaching about issues and philosophy. That is not, in the main, what I do.
Conservatives used not to be able to identify and communicate widely with each other except through the filter of media determinedly hostile to conservative principles. Now conservatives have direct mail, talk radio, a cable news network, many new types of online communication, and literally thousands of conservative organizations capable of very quickly communicating facts, conservative opinion, and focused calls to action to thousands or millions of fellow conservatives.
The Obama campaigns’ celebrated, high-tech ground game in 2008 and 2012 didn’t mean the left had a monopoly on those techniques. The Tea Party movement had a massive impact on the 2010 elections. It was organized largely through the spontaneous activity of conservative grassroots activists who could become leaders because they, too, had learned how to communicate and organize online.
CONSERVATIVE POLITICS TODAY
Having defined American conservatives and described how conservatives became effective in politics, I shall devote the rest of this presentation to brief discussions of four areas of current concern to politically active conservatives. Those four areas are:
Problems and opportunities caused by the left Problems and opportunities caused by political consultants Problems and opportunities within the Republican Party Problems and opportunities among conservatives themselves
THE LEFT VS. CONSERVATIVES
The left is using the power of government not only to grab more power. The left now uses their power inside government to target and persecute conservatives. Used ruthlessly, the I.R.S. and other government agencies can crush many political opponents and terrorize a great many others. This is a very serious abuse, and what’s worse, they have thus far completely gotten away with it.
The Obama Administration breaks laws written to prevent abuses. Everyone knows it, but even the most abusive leftist bureaucrats thus far have reason to be confident that they will not be fired, fined, or jailed. The left acts as if people on the government payroll are some kind of entitled elite who can act with impunity because they are above the laws and regulations binding on everyone else. Even after exposure for great abuses or disastrous incompetence, the worst that happens to most senior bureaucrats is retirement on a full pension.
Historically, Americans have always tolerated some elected politicians and government officials found to have deliberately misled or blatantly lied to the public for their personal political advantage. Sometimes politicians get away with using their power in government to persecute their enemies or with breaking some laws and unconstitutionally ignoring other laws. Many politicians keep secrets from the public which would otherwise damage them politically, or they grant major and unethical favors to enrich their political allies or to give those allies unwarranted advantages over other Americans.
The public has come to expect and to suffer a certain amount of such abuses from people inside government. Often most people simply shrug their shoulders and think, “Well, that’s just politics.” But when an official’s failings became obvious enough and aggravating enough, an outraged public would rise up and hold that official accountable.
As scandal after scandal piled up, conservatives recently began to wonder if there were anything the Democrats and the nation’s major news media wouldn’t help President Barack Obama get away with. But not now. Everyone except those who are willfully blind now understands that the President and his allies shamelessly lied and misled the public in order to ram Obamacare through the Congress, that its attempted implementation is a disaster for millions of people, and that other and insurmountable problems almost certainly loom for it soon.
Grassroots conservatives and their leaders are delighted to learn at last that there are things Barack Obama and his leftist allies cannot get away with. That development encourages conservatives to explore other ways to hold leftists accountable in the public policy process for their abuses. To coin a phrase, perhaps conservatives now can send more of Obama’s chickens home to roost.
CONSULTANTS AND CONSERVATIVES
Most political consultants limit themselves to working either entirely for Republicans or entirely for Democrats. Nevertheless, very few consultants who work only for Republicans can be relied upon to work only in the best interest of conservative principles in the public policy process. Most of them chase after the money, wherever they can get it.
I discussed this matter in an opinion piece entitled “The GOP’s Consultant Problem,” published in “The Daily Caller” in 2012. It is still available online.
Consultants usually cannot resist the temptation to recruit as clients as many candidates as they can, as long as their clients have or can raise large sums of money for their campaigns. In Republican nomination contests, this frequently results in many conservative candidates splitting the conservative vote and in the nomination of the only well-funded “moderate” Republican in the race.
In recent decades, consultants have often wormed their way into domination of state or national party committees. Uncounted numbers of candidates have been told by those who control party committees that they must hire designated consultants in order to receive money from those party committees. Conservative candidates and shut-out conservative consultants have achieved limited exposures of these practices, and some party leaders have taken steps to prevent such abuses.
Although consultants can legitimately earn money in all aspects of a modern election campaign, the ground war as well as the air war, the big bucks for consultants come from commissionable political advertising.
Karl Rove understands well that advertising alone is not the way to win elections. In fact, when winning elections was the most important thing to him, Rove was a successful innovator in improving Republican candidates’ ground game. In the 2002 mid-term elections, when he was running the political operation in President George W. Bush’s White House, Rove oversaw the development and testing of “micro-targeting” to identify previously unidentified potential Republican voters, target them for individual attention, motivate them to vote, and put together an effective ground game to make sure they voted. His micro-targeting tests worked so well in 2002 that the 2004 Bush re-election campaign used micro-targeting all across the country, to good effect. And Rove made sure then that Republican leaders knew in detail the measurable success his micro-targeting program had produced.
Most political technology is philosophically neutral. Skillfully applied, techniques work for either side. It is fair to say that Barack Obama’s systematic and now-famously-successful ground games in 2008 and 2012 were logical extensions of Karl Rove’s micro-targeting innovations during the George W. Bush Administration. To the best of my knowledge, none of the hundreds of millions of dollars raised by Rove’s 2012 operations was spent on ground-game activities. As far as I have learned, whatever he spent to affect election results was spent on commissionable advertising. Advertising typically includes paying to consultants a commission of 15% of all sums paid to broadcasters or print media to run that advertising.
Compared to the labor of creating and running an effective ground game in an election campaign, running an expensive paid-advertising campaign is easy and highly profitable for political consultants. Paid advertising is a gold mine for consultants. They customarily receive fat monthly retainers. They bill campaigns for the creative work required to produce each ad. Then they receive big commissions from the public-media outlets for all the advertisements they place. In 2012, Karl Rove obviously decided that commissionable advertising is now where the money is for his associates. He knew exactly what he was doing, but probably few of his major donors did.
No one has yet “followed the money” raised and spent by Rove’s operations in 2012. That should be done for the information of the major donors who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Karl Rove’s independent expenditure efforts. By name, who were the consultants who received money from those hundreds of millions of dollars? How much in retainers was each of them paid? How much was each paid for creating ads? How much income did each of them receive in commissions paid on advertising funded by that huge pot of money? When they see such an accounting and an accurate report on the win/loss record of candidates Rove chose to spend their money on, his large donors will be better able to decide for themselves whether or not he looted them.
Many unprincipled operatives who are professional lobbyists or political consultants and cultivate access to people in power make all or part of their income consulting with special interests actively at odds with conservative principles such as those proclaimed, for example, in platforms crafted and adopted by delegates to Republican national conventions. With some admirable exceptions, political consultants and lobbyists have been thorns in the flesh of conservatives for many years. Some of them are complete opportunists from the start. Others prove their competence initially by achievements for conservative principles through work for conservative employers, but too many in this latter category lose their principles when their reputations enable them to increase their income greatly by selling their services on the open market to any employers, regardless of their agendas, who have fat wallets. For many reasons, wise conservatives have learned to trust and hire only consultants who have demonstrated clearly a commitment to work exclusively for conservative candidates and causes.
If you do good work in the local party, others probably will ask you to take on some responsibilities. Accept these tasks. Perform them well. Soon you may be drafted into local party committee office. But you don’t have to hold a party office to play a leading role from time to time in a party committee.
In some areas, local party committees are moribund or dead. The party officers may be unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons. They may be lazy. They may be incompetent. They may be fine people burned out from years of good work. They may be hanging on to power for its own sake. They may be actively hostile to your conservative principles. If party leaders are unsatisfactory, you should work to see that they are reformed or replaced.
Build strong working ties with any other conservatives you meet in party activities.
Build strong working ties with leaders of conservative non-party activity in your community, such as: taxpayer associations, veterans groups, ethnic organizations, right to work groups, right to keep and bear arms groups, civic associations, church groups, traditional values groups concerned about such issues as abortion, traditional marriage, education, government infringement of religious liberty to practice and promote Christianity, etc.
Make contacts with national conservative groups to locate and involve their local activists in your party.
Learn the principles of effective direct marketing and start to assemble lists of contact information for local conservative activists and donors.
Party committees often have influence in the election of candidates for public office, but in some cases they also have decisive power over the rules and therefore the outcomes of the nomination contests. Find out the role of your state and local party committees in the nomination process and the schedule of their required activities before upcoming elections.
Party committees must renew themselves periodically, usually in two-year or four-year cycles. New party committees may be elected by primaries, conventions, or mass meetings. Newly elected committees usually elect their new party officers. Local party units usually send delegates to state party conventions. Sometimes, membership on party committees and delegate slots to party conventions are available just by filing properly for openings. Find out how these processes work in your party. Among the things you’ll need to know:
When are the next party primaries or conventions?
What party offices are to be filled and for what public offices are party nominees to be chosen?
What are the deadlines for filing, dates of conventions and dates of primaries? And how does one file? How are the dates set, by law or party decision?
What are the requirements for party committee membership? For eligibility to be a convention delegate?
If your party has an executive committee, who serves on it? How are its members chosen?
Because all local party committee elections and party primaries are open at the bottom, whoever gets the most people to participate wins. To succeed, you must organize a sufficient number of conservatives to win primaries, conventions, and party committee elections. It is simple but not easy.
Much more information about how to participate effectively in the party of your choice can be found online in my 1993 piece, “The Life of the Party.”
The way to grow a party is to treat newcomers fairly, politely, and even cordially and to show them that power in the party frequently flows from the bottom up, rather than only from the top down.
CONSERVATIVES AMONG THEMSELVES
The late Frank Meyer, for many years a senior editor of National Review magazine, persuaded movement-oriented conservatives like me in the 1960s that there is a natural alliance between people who love liberty and those who deeply believe in traditional values. He argued that, at root, the two interests are philosophically compatible and that they ought to be and are compatible for practical political purposes. Meyer’s analysis of this matter can be found in his writings in National Review and in his book, In Defense of Freedom.
Nevertheless, the left and content-free Republicans cling to their fond hope that their conservative opponents can’t possibly work together. We’ll see.
Centrifugal forces try to pull apart the elements in any coalition. Different elements have different priorities, and some of those priorities sometimes conflict. However, there are centripetal forces which pull people together in politics. When the same organizations and the same leaders work side by side against the same enemies in a long series of election contests and legislative battles, they tend to become comfortable together. They frequently confer, make plans around the same tables, and get to know each other on a first-name basis. They fight against the same enemy, the left, and they know that the left would destroy all of them, without a single scruple. They learn which of their allies are trustworthy and come to like them. Before long the leader of one group goes to dinner at the home of the leader of another group. And when he arrives at the front door, the dog there wags its tail rather than barks. Through such processes, movements and normal governing majorities are born.
Unity is easier in an embattled minority where survival is at risk. Centrifugal forces grow in strength after a principled minority defeats its opposition. Foolish elements of the new majority, heady with success, may take actions grossly offensive to other groups in their coalition. That is always a big mistake. Power does tend to corrupt, and success stimulates hubris—as Republicans sometimes find out to their sorrow.
Conservatives and libertarians now have it in their power to cooperate in using the Republican Party to build a stable, governing majority. Leftist Democrats and content-free Republicans will not be persuaded by sweet reason to change their ways. Nor will many of them change for fear of future defeats by conservatives and libertarians. Some content-free Republican elected public officials and party leaders will have to be replaced before the party can be reliable for conservative principles. Only a critical mass of principled conservatives and libertarians can preserve and advance their principles and only if they work together and do not compromise in ways which accept the left’s power grabs as permanent. Conservative principles may be defeated in some elections and legislative battles, but they can triumph in the long run if those principles are faithfully upheld as the alternative to the left’s agenda.
Using a major party as its principal vehicle, resurgent libertarians and conservatives will break the statist consensus in America only if they nominate and elect people who could not have been elected in recent times. That can be achieved through a more widespread understanding of the real nature of politics, which will lead to greater grassroots political participation and the development and emergence of many new leaders.
