Thursday, October 20, former United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher will be honored with the 2011 Faith & Freedom Award in Grand Rapids. The award will be accepted by former Thatcher adviser John O’Sullivan at Acton’s 21st Annual Dinner. O’Sullivan is currently vice president and executive editor Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Still a close friend of Thatcher, O’Sullivan defined the essence of ‘Thatcherism:’

Read more on The Iron Lady and the Acton Institute…

Richard Reinsch II has an excellent condensed summary of his book Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary over at the Heritage Foundation. I really cannot praise Reinsch’s account enough. It is perhaps the best book I read in 2010.

Read more on Still Witnessing: Richard Reinsch on Whittaker Chambers…

Reagan at Danilov Monastery

I point you to Paul Kengor’s insightful 2008 piece on Ronald Reagan’s 1988 summit to Moscow in Christianity Today because it is directly related to this Thursday’s Acton on Tap. I will spend some time discussing the Moscow Summit and Reagan’s revolutionary comments at Spaso House, Danilov Monastery, and Moscow State University. Kengor notes:

Read more on Mission to Moscow…

Ronald Reagan is in the news quite a bit these days. President Barack Obama is even trying to model himself after the popular president, as this piece in Time points out. Reagan’s centennial birthday is February 6. The Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library Centennial homepage is the essential site for information on the celebration.

Read more on Acton on Tap: Faith and Public Life in Reagan’s America…

My commentary this week is about the deeper truths of Ronald Reagan’s witness, words, and deeds. Reagan has been in the news a lot, and will continue to be as we approach his centennial birthday. A great place to visit for all things concerning the Reagan centennial is the Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library Centennial homepage. President Obama even weighed in on Reagan, heaping praise on the popular president in USA Today.

Read more on Deeper Truths Magnify Reagan Centennial…

Estelle Snyder makes an excellent case that Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Jesse Helms had similar humble backgrounds and beliefs that helped form a deep bond between the two men, despite being separated by language, culture, geography, and an Iron Curtain.

Read more on Were Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Jesse Helms Kindred Spirits?…

Whittaker Chambers began Witness, the classic account of his time in the American Communist underground, with the declaration: “In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.” The line was most of all a deep recognition of the power of God to redeem what was once dead. Witness was a landmark account of the evils of Communism but most importantly a description of the bankruptcy of freedom outside of the sacred. “For Chambers, God was always the prime mover in the war between Communism and freedom. If God exists then Communism cannot,” says Richard Reinsch II. And it is Reinsch who reintroduces us to Chambers, the brilliant intellectual, anti-communist, and man of faith in Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary.

Read more on Review: Whittaker Chambers…

Lee Edwards calls William F. Buckley Jr. “The St. Paul of the conservative movement.” No other 20th century figure made such a vast contribution to the intellectual force of political conservatism. He paved the way for the likes of Ronald Reagan and all of those political children of Reagan who credit the former president for bringing them into politics. He achieved what no other had done and that was his ability to bring traditional conservatives, libertarians, and anti-communists together under the same umbrella. Late in life, when asked why he continued working so hard despite fame and wealth, a surprised Buckley said, “My Father taught me that I owe it to my country. It’s how I pay my debt.”

Read more on Review: William F. Buckley Jr….

Shaped by the conservative movement since childhood, publisher Alfred S. Regnery offers an insider’s take on the influence of conservatives in Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism (2008). Regnery’s father Henry started the company in 1947 and published conservative classics such as God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley Jr., and The Conservative Mind by Russel Kirk.

Regnery covers just about everything including think tanks, publishers, candidates, religious conservatives, financial donors, the courts, the Constitution, and free markets. He does an excellent job at explaining the merger of traditionalists, anti-communists, and libertarians in to one political force due in large part to the writings of William F. Buckley, Jr. and other intellectuals,
grassroots activists, and the emergence of Barry Goldwater. Regnery also traces how conservative leaders were able to separate themselves from some of the more radical conspiracy minded leaders like Robert Welch of the John Birch Society. Russel Kirk responded to Welch’s charge that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was an agent of a world communist conspiracy by quipping “Ike isn’t a communist. He is a golfer.”

While Eisenhower was a disappointment for conservatives, Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy unified and excited the conservative movement on a national scale. Regnery notes:

Not only did people donate their time to Goldwater in record numbers, but they donated their money, too. Until the 1964 campaign presidential elections were financed exclusively by large contributions from wealthy contributors, corporations, lobbyists, and other special interest groups. In 1960, twenty-two thousand people had contributed $9.7 million to Kennedy’s campaign and forty-four thousand people had contributed a total of $10.1 million to Nixon’s. LBJ’s money largely came from labor unions and fat cats. But over one million middle-income people contributed to Goldwater’s campaign. When the campaign was over, Goldwater had the names, addresses, and history of over five thousand donors. He showed that candidates could actually raise more money in small amounts from large numbers of people, and thereby gain financial independence from the GOP establishment.

The Goldwater candidacy failed at electing a conservative to the highest office, but it allowed for its leaders and activists to learn valuable lessons for the future. The emergence of Ronald Reagan and “The Speech” was undoubtedly the greatest triumph of Goldwater’s unsuccessful presidential bid.

Regnery also incorporates succinct and effective arguments on why conservatives opposed Great Society programs, wage and price controls, and new government agencies. He also identifies Richard Nixon’s vast expansion of government power through regulation as another key building block for statist policies.

Another intriguing study by the author is an analysis of neoconservatives, the new right (religious conservatives), and Phyllis Schlafly and the rise of the grassroots.

Regnery demolishes the myth that the conservative movement was largely funded by Texas oil tycoons with briefcases of money or big corporations. In fact, he points out that many big businesses and corporations opposed conservatism because of corporate desire for regulation and less competition in the marketplace. “The right has never had the sort of money available to the left. During the early years of the movement, from 1945 into the mid-1970′s, no more than about a dozen foundations were willing to give money to conservative causes, and most of those were small, family charitable organizations,” says Regnery. The author discloses fascinating stories of notable donors who gave out of concern over the rising decay of free market principles. One example being William Volker, who purchased an academic chair for Frederick Hayek at the University of Chicago. Read more on Review: Upstream by Alfred Regnery…

Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, a political biography published in February, crafts a narrative that largely reinforces popular public images of the late Jesse Helms as a demonizing figure. The author, William A. Link, is a history professor at the University of Florida who notes several times in the preface of his book that Helms represented everything he opposes. Link also says his intention was to write a fair biography of the former Senator from the Tar Heel state. While Link’s biography largely fails this test, his depiction is less hostile and more respectable than many modern liberal academics may have been able to attempt. The author does include significant portions of his biography to depicting the impeccable manners, personal morality, and genteel personality that characterized Jesse Helms.

Probably the most controversial position of Jesse Helms was his opposition to the land mark federal Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 while he was a journalist and television commentator for WRAL radio and television in Raleigh, North Carolina. While not a lawmaker at the time, the controversy is further fueled because Helms never renounced his opposition to the legislation, like some Southern politicians would later do because of a genuine change of heart or perhaps for political survival. Helms always insisted he was not a racist and Link notes that Helms tried to tie his opposition to integration to larger anti-statist arguments against federal intervention. Helms kept his distance from the more radical segregationist groups who opposed integration. At the same time, he attacked the alleged communist influences in Civil Rights groups, and even the personal moral failings of its leaders. Helms felt that good people from both races could come together to solve racial problems without federal intervention. He would take further flak for opposing the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday and this political ad against quotas.

Link also discusses many commentaries written and read by Helms at WRAL about the dangers of the growing federal government. Helms declared “government could either be man’s servant or master: it could not be both.” Helms also attacked appeasers of communism and would soon emerge as perhaps the most notable elected anti-communist, with the exception of Ronald Reagan.

Trying to decide to run for the United States Senate, a supporter urged Helms to run by saying, “We need you Jesse in order to save the country from liberalism.” In his first Senate campaign Link declares:

Repeating the familiar Viewpoints message, he told voters in 1972 about an expanding and intrusive federal government, the threat of socialism, the excesses of the welfare state, rising crime, deteriorating moral standards – all problems related, he said, to an out of control liberal state. The welfare system, he explained to an audience in the eastern North Carolina tobacco town of Smithfield, was a “mess,” beset by “loafers and parasites.” Helms fashioned a populist appeal that was targeted toward ordinary people and toward the frustrations of white, rural, and small town North Carolinians. His message, Helms said, was directed toward “the person who pulls on his clothes in the morning and grabs his dinner pail and goes off to work.”

In fact, Link notes that Helms was running as a Republican in the 1972 Senate campaign and had recently switched parties. The Republican Party offered little help or resources to Helms. Most of his supporters were Democrats, who had long dominated state politics in North Carolina during this era. Those supporters were admirably dubbed “Jessecrats.” Helms would however benefit greatly from Democratic Presidential Candidate George McGovern’s unpopularity in North Carolina, and a last minute campaign stop by incumbent President Richard Nixon, when it appeared Helms had a chance to win. Helms did win, and while all of his senate races were relatively close, he was always able to hold together a strong and loyal coalition of religious conservatives, white males, and rural and small town voters. Always the underdog, he played up his anti-establishment and anti-liberal crusades, and his political obituary was prematurely written on a number of occasions. Read more on Review: Righteous Warrior…