| Home Page * The Megaculture * Contact Us * Archived Articles |
Lord Acton’s famous dictum tells us “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The enormous bureaucratic establishment, founded by Woodrow Wilson and finished by Lyndon Johnson, has bequeathed to America an enormous burden contrary to every principle of our founding as the first great modern free republic. Expenditures by the federal government grew to nearly two trillion dollars by the end of the Clinton administration, only about a quarter of that on foreign affairs, coinage, judicial administration, and the other clearly federal functions. Spending the rest of it on projects with dubious justification or limited accountability clearly can tend towards corruption.
For close to seventy years middle class Republicans, especially small businessmen, waited for a time when the GOP would take control of all three of the elected instruments of power in Washington and begin to dismantle this tremendous engine of corruption. We have suffered an enormous disappointment.
Clearly, most of our Congressmen, Senators, and other GOP leaders forgot the middle class working people who had sent them to Washington. They did not act responsibly, but sought to preserve their own positions and build their own bureaucratic empires by spending like drunken Democrats. The budget rose to THREE trillion. They became the party of Big Government and those Big Businesses who can afford to buy off the regulators.
It didn’t work. The core of the Republican Party outside the beltway believes first of all in fiscal responsibility, whatever other issues may motivate them. When the representatives we worked for and elected deviated from the primary responsibility we assigned to them, that of reining in big government, the small businessmen and other stalwarts stopped writing checks and stopped walking precincts. Even if ends do justify means in any way, the six year spending orgy fails this test, because the GOP suffered a huge defeat in 2006, and the prospects for 2008 look bleak. What can we do?
First of all, we must not expect the politicians in Washington to reform themselves. Power tends to corrupt. The lure of the Beltway changes the best of men. We Republicans, to the contrary, believe in the power of the people, in grassroots organization, in bottom up reform. We have seen this sort of agitation from below work in the recent past. Whatever one may feel about the merits, public outcry prevented the appointment of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, stopped the Abu Dhabi port deal, and caused the government to reassess the pending amnesty for illegal aliens. These three and other similar occasions when the people have held the politicians to accountability have usually happened without a co-coordinated campaign or a large organization demanding the attention of the big-wigs in DC. The people CAN demand accountability.
We need to have such an organization that can represent and mobilize the middle class and hold to account Republican legislators and those Democrats that have to worry about conservative constituencies. The twenty-five million small business owners are the backbone of both the middle class and the Republican Party. Someone needs to speak for them. They and their families and employees are not just the biggest group in the GOP, but may be the biggest in the entire country. They have no real organization speaking for them, and the RNC has stopped trying to be that organization. Other issue clusters have groups to represent them. Various organizations have formed to pursue Catholic and Protestant value issues. Many committees represent the issues of veterans and strong foreign policy in Washington. Taxpayer and pro-growth foundations also agitate on behalf of ideas that small businesses may want, but no one really seeks to represent explicitly the middle class or the small business community. This must change.
Tom del Beccaro in his recent book, The New Conservative Paradigm, outlined the three main issue groups that motivate our voters, taxes, security, and values. These three can generally form the basis for the middle class/small business grassroots organization. It is important to note that, as much as opposition to excess taxes has organizations like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform to hold the politicians accountable, nobody has done the same as successfully with the flip side, that of responsible spending and smaller government. Small businessmen know they could not spend the way the GOP did from 2001 to 2007 and hope to have their enterprises survive.
Small businessmen also have great concerns about domestic security, both violent crimes that can make their customers afraid to come to their neighborhood and fraud crimes that cause them losses. The GOP used to campaign as the law and order party, and needs to re-assert this in future election. Rudy Giuliani proved that this wins for us, even in a big Democrat stronghold like New York City.
We also must promote what used to be called middle class values like hard work and self-improvement. The middle class wants proper education that will train its children well, not the bureaucratic government run schools we now have. This will make them more productive and innovative in their work, get them better compensation as their skills improve, and result in more money in the market chasing more and better products. Other values oriented issues often divide rather than unite us, although we may all agree that activist judges harm both religion and business. As Tammany Hall leader and sidewalk political philosopher George Washington Plunkitt noted a hundred years ago, the Democratic party had begun to abandon accountability to the voters as the entrenched bureaucracy began to grow. The GOP took over the cause of accountability after that. We have lost our way the last few years, but can regain that reputation by a grassroots effort. We can reassert ourselves as fiscally responsible, anti-crime, and pro-individual. If we do, we can lead the nation.