Meanwhile, as day follows night, Carter’s bad policies were leading to bad results. In the late seventies, America was suffering from a severe gasoline shortage, all the worse because it was government created. Like so many other Americans, I remember sitting in my Rambler in a gas line for more than an hour, only to see the station owner come out and put up a “no gas” sign right in front me—he had run out. I was literally running on fumes by that time and wondered if I could even make it home after an hour of idling in line. The bureaucrats simply weren’t allowing him enough gas. I thought to myself, This is ridiculous. Off in fat and happy Washington, bureaucrats are toying with our lives and livelihoods—and then when they get it wrong, when they misallocate energy supplies, they’re still no less fat and happy. Working for the government means never having to say you are sorry.
And at the same time, during the Carter years, inflation was surging. The White House tried to blame inflation on everyone else, but the truth was, the Democratic administration was running big deficits while telling the Federal Reserve to print money without value behind it to make up those deficits. Do we see a recurring pattern here? That is, too much government spending, so government pays for its binge by firing up the printing presses. That means a reduction in the value and the soundness of the dollar; in other words, theft by government. So now, during these years, prices and interest rates were rising, and Washington seemed helpless, even complicit, in the foul-up. For his part, Carter kept trying to blame us, the American people, for his self-made problems. He didn’t give any evidence that he understood either his contribution to hurting the nation or how he could turn the country around.
The pieces were now coming together for me: It was a case of ivory tower big government thinking versus the real people who, as Jimmy Stewart said in It’s a Wonderful Life, the classic film, “do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community.” So I wondered: Were we, the people, going to live with overspending, government-created inflation, high interest rates that only allowed home purchases by contract for deed, and gas rationing? Were we going to oppose this hapless embrace of big government? In 1978 I remember cheering as the voters in California enacted the property tax–cutting Proposition 13 by a nearly two-to-one margin. Prop 13, it turned out, was the opening salvo of a nationwide tax revolt.
And that tax revolt could not come soon enough for me. One summer, when I was still in college, I had an eye-opening experience proving that the federal government was capable of operating by both deception and force. Examining my modest paycheck from working a summer job as a reporter for a small local newspaper, I could see how much the government was withholding from my check. I was shocked. The income-tax bite was bad enough, but what was this about FICA taxes? I was, and am, all in favor of everyone having a safe and solid retirement, but I started to wonder if the current system was the best way to achieve that goal. As I dug around on the issue of Social Security, I learned about the illusion that each of us had his or her own Social Security account; we had no such thing. Uncle Sam had no account labeled, for instance, “Michele Amble.” Instead, all the money went into a big general fund, allowing the politicians to do whatever they wanted with it. And what have they done? They have raided the fund and left behind IOUs that the labors of generations of Americans, as yet unborn, will be required to repay. In other words, more governmental theft. In fact, according to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1960 decision in Flemming v. Nestor, we American citizens out in the provinces had no legal right to the Social Security benefits that were supposedly “ours,” even though we had paid all those FICA taxes. I was really fried, I must say.
I thought to myself: I’m young, and I have my whole life ahead of me, and they’re taking this big chunk out of my check. I’d rather take the money myself and put it in a savings account and watch it grow. So I wrote a letter to the Social Security Administration saying I didn’t want to pay those Social Security taxes. I’ll take care of my own retirement, I added; just let me keep my hard-earned money, and I’ll let you off the hook, thank you very much. The next thing I knew, I got an intimidating phone call from Washington, D.C. The caller on the other end of the line said this was coming from the White House! The man said, “We’ve received your letter, and we want you to know that you have to pay your Social Security. It’s a crime not to; you will go to jail if you don’t pay us the money.” I was shocked, but I argued anyway. But the man from the government was not there to help me or even to listen to me; he was there to put me in my place. After a few more moments of not listening, he curtly ended the call. Staring at the dead phone receiver in my hand, I thought to myself, Wow, so this is how it is. We have no choices over our retirement and how we fund it. There has to be a better way, I thought to myself, for the government to interact with the citizenry. A little courtesy, a little respect, and a lot more candor—that’s what we needed then and what we need now. I wanted to invest that money from every paycheck, not turn it over to the government. I would willingly save and invest that money by setting it aside. Instead, I later found out, the government wasn’t investing my retirement money for my best interest; it wasn’t even investing it at all. The government was taking my money and spending it on current recipients, providing no guarantee of return on investment.
If Carter’s energy and economic policies were bad, his foreign policy was worse. In the late seventies, the shah of Iran—a friend not only to the United States but also to Israel—was in trouble, challenged from within by Islamic forces led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. You remember Khomeini: He was the man who called America “the great Satan.” So we saw a decisive fork in the road: Iran would be led either by the pro-American shah or by the anti-American Khomeini. The Carter administration seemingly couldn’t decide what to do about it; the president talked about “human rights,” not seeming to notice that the Ayatollah had no intention of respecting anyone’s human rights. Soon the shah was falling, Khomeini was rising, and still the Carter administration was dithering.
During those years, 1978–79, Marcus and I had Marcus’s little nine-inch black-and-white TV from college that we set on the kitchen counter. Before I went to work in the morning, I always turned on the news, and I remember seeing that the shah had been forced to flee his country. Meanwhile, Carter kept just sitting on his hands. I couldn’t believe it. Then I watched as the Iranian people chanted and shouted, eagerly welcoming Khomeini as he entered Tehran. I thought to myself, he is the scariest-looking person I have ever seen. I felt that I was looking at the face of evil.
I also thought that if past generations had been forced to confront the evil of Nazi Germany, then maybe this generation would be forced to confront the evil of Islamic fundamentalism, which led to radical jihadism in Iran. And that was before the new Iranian regime seized the American embassy in Tehran, holding our diplomats hostage for an agonizing 444 days. The hostage takeover—again, Carter seemed helpless—was a hinge moment for me and, more to the point, for all of America.
Looking back, we can see the results of Jimmy Carter’s failure to confront the Ayatollah before he could take and consolidate power. Since then, the Middle East and the world have suffered a dramatic surge in Islamic radicalism and terrorism. And so now we have to live with the lethal jihad ideology that produced the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, the endless terrorism against Israel, the epic tragedy of 9/11, the prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continuing terrorist threats around the world.
And here on the home front, airline travel is forever changed by the dehumanizing aspects of the Transportation Security Administration. The Israelis have the best airport security procedures I’ve ever seen. Why not pattern our security procedures after what works? The American people aren’t guilty of terrorism, and we shouldn’t all be treated as suspects when we travel on an airplane—I myself seem to get screened quite often. Let’s have a little judgment so that ordinary Americans can move around the country unmol
ested. The way that the Israelis screen airline passengers includes screening everyone, of course, but they screen with a skilled professionalism that enables their screeners to quickly zero in on potentially dangerous individuals; there’s a reason that El Al, the Israeli airline, hasn’t suffered a hijacking since 1969 and that no airplane, ever, that departed from Ben Gurion Airport has been hijacked.
It’s been said that liberals want a strong government and a weak country. Speaking for myself, I want a small government and a big defense. Even an unashamed apologist for free markets like me has to agree that national defense is the single most important function of government. And the father of free-market economics agrees: “The first duty of the sovereign,” Adam Smith wrote more than two centuries ago in The Wealth of Nations, is “protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies.” And that protection requires military force. Moreover, if we are going to have military force—and we must—we should have the best. During the seventies, I remember reading news reports about our military personnel being so underpaid that they were depending on food stamps to make ends meet. At that time, Uncle Sam was suffering from a “hollow military”—that is, not enough resources to protect America. And I must add, those concerns about a hollow military are reemerging ominously today.
In addition, a strong military requires a technological edge. In order to sustain the margin of safety needed to support a policy of “peace through strength,” the Pentagon needs top-notch scientists and engineers. Back in the seventies, the Soviets were busy building new weapons, and many Americans wondered if the United States was keeping up, to say nothing of staying ahead. During the Carter years, General Daniel O. Graham, retired from the U.S. Army, went on to lead a campaign to get Americans interested in the idea of missile defense. We should occupy the “high frontier” of space, Graham argued, so that we could launch satellites and deploy other devices to destroy attacking Soviet missiles. Graham’s idea was so obviously sensible to me. It was foolish to depend on the nuclear doctrine of mutual assured destruction (aptly called MAD). Instead, we should figure out how to shoot down enemy missiles fired by the USSR or other potential enemies. Such a defensive capacity could save not only many millions of American lives but also many millions of Russian lives. It made good sense: You should be able to defend yourself. But to most adherents of the establishment’s pseudotheology of arms control, missile defense was completely anathema. We shouldn’t defend ourselves against the Russians, they declared; what we should do instead is negotiate with the Russians, because we can trust the likes of Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev. It made me wince to listen to the sophistries of State Department officials as they touched down in America long enough to write another anti–missile defense op-ed in the New York Times—before they jetted off to another round of expense-accounted “arms reductions talks” at a deluxe hotel in Zurich or Vienna. And speaking of Vienna, I was shocked that Carter would share a kiss with Brezhnev at the signing of an arms-control treaty. Or maybe by then I wasn’t shocked.
So America’s foreign-policy establishment united around the idea that General Graham’s defense vision shouldn’t even be considered. Sensing that their arms-control-talks lifestyle—the diplomatic equivalent of la dolce vita—was on the line, these diplomatic lifers could never admit that missile defense might actually be possible. And they were joined by leftist scientists who also insisted that missile defense could never work. Yet I knew that such deliberate fatalism about technological potential was ridiculous, because if antiaircraft weaponry could be made to work—as it had worked successfully as far back as the Second World War—so too could antimissile weaponry be made to work during the cold war. It was a matter of a can-do America making the effort and exertion, that’s all. So here was the question: Did we want to defend the American homeland against a missile strike or not? Most conservatives said yes; most liberals said no. I was convinced that missile defense could and should be built.
Let’s look at today’s Israel for a moment: The Israelis are firm believers in missile defense. Confronted by thousands of missiles and Qassam rockets launched against them from beyond their borders, they are moving as fast as they can to deploy what they have poetically dubbed Iron Dome, so that they can protect their people from rocket assault. Indeed, the Kibbutz Be’eri, where I spent an inspiring summer nearly four decades ago, has come under repeated rocket attack from Palestinian terrorists firing from the nearby Gaza Strip. It’s always been clear to me: The Jewish State of Israel has the right to exist, the right to self-defense, and the clear need to build up its defenses. And if they do so, they will be helping themselves and ourselves to perfect the technology to confront new potential threats from countries such as Iran. And we will benefit, too, as we confront potential threats from around the world.
But perhaps the concern that hit me the hardest back then was the urgent need to protect the family and family values. During the 1976 campaign, Carter had promised to hold a White House conference on the family. I believe he might have meant well when he made that campaign pledge; perhaps he thought that a conference on the family would generate policies that would, in fact, help the family, such as school reform or tax relief. But if so, he was naive. He couldn’t control the liberals and the bureaucrats in his own administration. So instead of examining pro-family policies, the Carter administration got bogged down in avant-garde discussions of new kinds of family, seeking to appease liberal-left constituencies that had little or no interest in preserving traditional values and norms.
And so the idea of a White House conference on the family morphed into a conference on families—that is, a politicized gathering that expressed agnosticism and bewilderment as to what a family should be. In 1980, after years of wrangling, the Carter administration’s White House Conference on Families was finally held and, needless to say, was a festival of liberal relativism. For his part, Carter just went along with what the activists said.
Out in the Midwest, watching all this foolishness on TV, I said to Marcus: “The president can’t define what a family is? Any three-year-old knows what a family is! So why are we spending millions of taxpayer dollars on such foolishness?” As I studied the whole sorry saga more carefully, I learned an important lesson: Inside the government, personnel is policy. Carter himself might have had some good Georgia values, especially on social issues, but he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, ride herd over the radicals who had burrowed into his own executive branch.
So yes, I was disappointed and disillusioned by Jimmy Carter. And yes, we could see that in regard to the three major components of modern American conservatism—economics, foreign policy, and social issues—Carter was wrong on all three.
But I still thought of myself as a Democrat. I don’t make big changes suddenly.
Then one day while I was still in college, I was taking the train from Minneapolis to Winona, and I had with me a copy of Burr, Gore Vidal’s 1973 novel about the Founding Fathers. In the novel, Aaron Burr—the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel—was portrayed basically as the hero. This portrayal seemed strange to me, because the historical truth is that after killing Hamilton, Burr fled the United States—then consisting of just seventeen states—and headed for the Louisiana Territory, where he attempted to raise an illegal army for the purpose of conquering Mexico. These misadventures, of course, were gravely serious, violating the Neutrality Act of 1794; Burr was subsequently tried for treason. And although he was acquitted, he spent the rest of his life in disgrace. This man was a villain, not a hero.
Moreover, America’s legendary Founding Fathers, according to Vidal, were all seriously flawed. George Washington was a hopeless bumbler, and Thomas Jefferson was nothing but a hypocrite. In fact, none of the founders were much good. So I could only conclude that the author of Burr was, well, snotty. At best, the book was jaded, and at worst, it lacked truthfulness. The book horrified me. What it says isn’t true, I tol
d myself, and I put it down. Then, looking out the train window, I saw instead the green fields and trees of the midwestern landscape, dotted with pleasant houses and welcoming little towns. Here, truly, I thought, is our wonderful nation—the nation that the founders fought for two centuries ago. These immortals had no idea that there would ever be a state called Minnesota, or that people with names such as Amble and Bachmann would be coming to the United States to find a better life. Nevertheless, the founders had been willing to put everything—their lives, liberty, and sacred honor—on the line for us, for all of us. Indeed, the nation had prospered, just as they had envisioned. And this was the thanks they got?
The idea that Vidal—at the time a major figure in American literature, as well as a regular guest on TV talk shows—would write such a book was disgusting to me. And the fact that critics would love that book was even more disgusting. Indeed, I realized, a snide dismissiveness toward American history and American institutions had become the essence and thinking of the chattering-class gatekeepers of the culture. Then I pondered: So who has the greatest influence today in the Democratic Party? Who is now setting the party’s attitudes and policies? The answer was obvious: It’s the same liberals who have given us policies of scarcity on energy regulation, government spending, and high taxes. It’s the same liberals who have given us a weak-kneed policy toward Iran—and also, of course, the Soviet Union. It’s the same liberals who have given us abortion, racial quotas, school busing, and that ridiculous waste of time and money White House Conference on Families. And now, as the last straw, it’s these liberals who are smearing our own history, and doing a hit job on the founders.
These trendy-left people spoke as though they had no understanding of, or connection to—and only contempt for—my own working-class folks back in Waterloo. Nor did they evidence any connection to or affinity for the working-class folks who were once the backbone of the Democratic Party as a whole. You know, the kind of Democrats, like my mother’s mother, who loved Franklin D. Roosevelt because they believed he had put people back to work, or the kind of Democrats who supported Harry Truman because he gave ’em hell and stood up to Stalin, even as he stood up for Israel. These old-line Democrats, I concluded, had no real place in the new-left Democratic Party. Everything had flipped. And so at that moment, I became a Republican and never looked back. I was through. I realized I wasn’t in line with the new antifamily, antistrong national defense, antifiscal sanity Democratic Party. I was now a Republican.
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