Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571)

by Bachmann, Michele

  As Ronald Reagan always liked to say, he didn’t leave the Democratic Party—the Democratic Party left him. Now I too knew the feeling.

  Indeed, during the late seventies, Marcus and I grew increasingly attracted to Reagan and his conservative philosophy. We loved it when he said that Americans wanted a conservatism of bright colors, not pale pastels—we sure did. That is, we wanted someone who would unabashedly take the fight directly to the economic declinists, the foreign-policy defeatists, and the antifamily relativists who seemed at the time to dominate both parties. Indeed, Republicans of the “me too” persuasion—that is, Republicans supporting everything the Democrats wanted to do, although maybe for a little less money—held no appeal to us. We wanted a GOP that would fight to make real change. So we liked Reagan, and also a newcomer, a charismatic congressman named Jack Kemp, who had been highlighting new and better approaches to economics, such as marginal-rate tax cuts.

  All the things I remember hearing from my Republican grandmother, Anna, began now to make sense to me. I started reading more: The weekly magazines, Time, Newsweek, and US News & World Report. And yes, the Wall Street Journal—I was truly becoming my grandmother’s granddaughter. And another publication, National Review, became a must-read; I needed to know more about the intellectual, ethical, and theological origins of the conservative movement. Indeed, I learned a few new words from National Review’s fearless—and fearlessly polysyllabic—founding editor in chief, William F. Buckley.

  I had been a reader my entire life, but mostly I read biographies and especially mysteries. I loved solving puzzles, but now that I was in my twenties, I saw that I had new mysteries to solve—the mysteries of history and economics. I never finished Burr—and never, of course, read another Gore Vidal novel. Instead, I began consuming books on American history that told the real story—that George Washington, for instance, was not only a military hero but also a good and honorable man. I felt convinced, with patriotic certitude, that the founders were great men, and great women, who bequeathed to us a great country.

  I also read a lot of economics. Keynesian economics made absolutely no sense to me; I rejected the notion that you could “spend yourself rich.” Just the opposite was true, as far as I was concerned; if you spent too much, you spent yourself poor. Keynesianism proved bankrupt in the seventies, when both Republicans and Democrats tried it, and it has been proved even more bankrupt in the last few years, when Barack Obama tried to revive it. The truth is that basic economic realities never change in any era. The economy is not propelled by Keynesian fine-tuners calculating and recalculating their arcane equations about “multipliers” and “money velocity”; the economy is propelled instead by actual, real-world doers. It is animated by “human action,” in the phrase of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who titled his famous 1949 book Human Action: A Treatise on Economics.

  Indeed, it’s pure folly to think that someone in a marble palace somewhere can dictate the economic activity of people far away, all of them pursuing their own individual wants and needs. Instead, von Mises argued, the force that creates economic activity and growth is, simply, people getting up in the morning and making something—that is, free enterprise. The ideas of von Mises were thrilling to me; he put a rigorous intellectual framework around the commonsense observations that we all make. It is, indeed, hard work—a very basic “human action”—that creates wealth and prosperity. So yes, absolutely, the work of von Mises—as I told Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal—makes for great beach reading.

  Applying von Mises’s wisdom, we Americans can all remember a basic truth: No bureaucrat ever put the idea of the lightbulb into the head of Thomas Edison. As Edison said, his inventions were 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Similarly, no economic planner ever put the idea of the assembly line into the head of Henry Ford; it was Ford himself, using his talents, plus his education, plus his sheer hard work. God gave Edison and Ford and all the other business heroes their first sacred spark of life; then those go-getters did the rest.

  And just as important as free enterprise is the free market, the place where producers meet consumers. The empowered and informed consumer is the crown jewel not only of the free market but also of freedom itself. That was the message of Milton Friedman in his classic work Capitalism and Freedom. In the free market, I get to decide “Coke” or “Pepsi,” and the market then responds to me. In fact, we all get to decide on one or the other—or decide on none of the above—and always, the market responds. And if we decide we want something completely different, the marketers will again come running, offering any other beverage we might desire. Capitalism: It’s a beautiful thing. Indeed, as I think about all these great economists, I am reminded again: Freedom is inspiring, and liberty is beautiful.

  Another eye-opening book for me during those years was William Simon’s 1978 best seller, A Time for Truth. After a successful career on Wall Street, Simon, in the 1970s, worked for the federal government, first as “energy czar” under President Richard Nixon, then as Treasury secretary under Nixon and President Gerald Ford. As energy czar, Simon was tasked with making sense of all the idiotic price-control regulations that the government was using to straitjacket the energy market. All that red tape had been a failure, of course: It had decreased energy production, caused those unending gas lines that I had sat in with my Rambler idling, and ultimately raised prices, allowing the OPEC nations to maintain a stranglehold on the American consumer, holding us up for even more billions. Simon, having been inside the belly of the federal regulatory beast, emerged from those depths warning Americans that they were headed toward ruin—that is, if current trends of taxing, spending, and regulating were allowed to continue. And he was right: We had reached a grim point of reckoning. Yet thanks to Ronald Reagan, those negative trends were finally reversed in the eighties. The late Bill Simon’s status as an economic truth teller is thus enshrined forever, even as we realize now that we must take up his fight once again.

  Warning against runaway statism, the Gipper liked to quip, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take it all away.” And that truism reminds me yet again that the ultimate point of free enterprise and free markets can be summed up in just one word: freedom. The bigger the government, the smaller the freedom. And if the government controls the economy, it also controls the media and the right to free speech. As they say, the only way to be guaranteed a free press is to own one—private ownership is a vital check against state power.

  Moreover, when governments grow big enough, they develop an oppressive sameness, relying on common characteristics of regimentation and control. As the great libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek explained in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, the communists and fascists of the era might have hated each other, but in the end, the reds and the browns were similar. That is, totalitarians are all united in their belief that personal autonomy is the enemy. In a later work, The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek further laid out his argument for simultaneously structuring a system of freedom and limiting the power of the state.

  The emphasis on personal freedom and free will took me back to my own biblical thinking. As we are told in Second Corinthians 3:17, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” Liberty is a gift of God. We must not misuse it, and we must always treasure it. We are each made in His image, and when He made us, he wrote a series of truths on our hearts. That’s what natural law tells us—that we each have a soul, that God loves each of us in our uniqueness, and that each of us is born with inherent dignity. The Bible tells us that each one of us, no matter what our surface imperfections, is in fact made in the perfect image of God. This essential equality of all souls, graced by the Almighty, is the ultimate redoubt of our individual freedom.

  I also started following thinkers and activists who helped articulate my Christian conservative worldview. But first I had to see through the faddish fog of “fe
minism,” the radical school of thought propounded by such well-known figures as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. I’m all for strong women as role models; I knew many of them growing up, starting with my mother and both of my grandmothers. Yet in the seventies, women were solemnly instructed by the liberal media to believe that family, tradition, and even faith were merely the disguised manifestations of an oppressive “patriarchy.” We were further told that “women” wanted to be liberated—as if “women” were a bloc, and as if liberals knew what was good for all of us, all across the country.

  I rejected that kind of feminism. First and foremost, I rejected it because of the issue of abortion. Pro-life is a bedrock principle for me. Even hard-core feminists should understand that girls are the biggest losers in abortion, because it’s unborn females who are most frequently selected for elimination. But I was repulsed also by the generalized worldview of liberal-left feminism, which tended to say things like, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” It’s a free country, of course, and everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, but I wanted no part of an ideology that praised wives being apart from husbands or children being apart from fathers. That was the sort of thinking that had gone into the regrettable conference on “families” back in the Carter years.

  So instead I found myself reading the works of Phyllis Schlafly and Beverly LaHaye. I read a copy of the Phyllis Schlafly Report, and soon I was a regular reader. I remember reading about Beverly and her organization, the Concerned Women of America, as a young bride. I opened my mailbox one day and found some of Bev’s cassette tapes; I listened to the first tape as I was driving across Wisconsin. I was immediately a fan. Beverly’s words were inspiring. And I realized that while I might be in the minority, I was hardly alone. And soon, with the 1980 election, I saw that the values and beliefs I held were actually in the majority. As they say, never despise small beginnings. Conservative women started small, but thanks to leaders such as Phyllis and Beverly, we have now become a real force.

  One of my goals was to learn from these wonderful women and to connect with them—and then to take up their great causes. Later I would be blessed enough to spend time with both Phyllis and Beverly and to count them as friends.

  Marcus and I talked about all of these ideas. The difference was that he was focused on his career, and I was developing my own. He would be the listener and the counselor; I would be the speaker and the activist. But we both agreed: We were going to do more than talk the talk. We also wanted to walk the walk. We were going to say to liberals: “Not with my country, you don’t.”

  So Marcus and I became solid, active Republicans. We could see that it wasn’t just a problem of Jimmy Carter; it was the liberalism of the Democratic Party—with, unfortunately, assists from some in the Republican Party—that had enlarged the government, weakened our standing in the world, and decreased responsible liberty at home. We needed energized conservatism, and nobody epitomized it better than Ronald Reagan.

  We enthusiastically voted for Reagan in 1980. We were so proud of him, and also of Nancy for being such an inspiring first lady. Our new president not only cut taxes but also eased up on regulation, thereby unleashing a new generation of entrepreneurs and job creators. He forthrightly declared the Soviet Union to be an “evil empire,” then used the idea of missile defense—which he called the Strategic Defense Initiative—to strike fear and doubt into the hearts of the Soviets, accelerating the collapse of their regime. And he appointed mostly pro-life judges to the federal court system. As for the Supreme Court, he appointed some brilliant individuals, such as Antonin Scalia, appointed and confirmed in 1986; lamentably, the equally talented Robert Bork was shamefully disrespected in his confirmation hearing and was ultimately rejected by the Senate in 1987. We the people are poorer for that reprehensible action.

  It was in the perilous fires of the Carter administration that my ideology was forged. In the seventies, Carter taught me what I was against, and then in the eighties, Reagan taught me what I was for.

  In the meantime, in our own lives, Marcus and I were determined to put “feet to our faith.” That is, not just to believe it but to live it. We enjoyed listening to and supporting the fortieth president, so charming and engaging. And yet we realized that he couldn’t do everything. The nation had spent decades digging itself into a deep trough of misguided policies; it would take more than eight years to climb out. So Marcus and I knew we had plenty of work to do in our own neighborhood, our own state, our own time. So while Reagan was saving the world from communism, Marcus and I had to do what we could to save Minnesota from liberalism.

  But where to start? We started with what we knew to be true, of course—our faith in God. I had always loved reading the Old Testament, especially the story of how Moses carried the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai. I also believed that the immutable truths of the Ten Commandments served properly as the conscience of our Judeo-Christian civilization. The commandments, I knew, provided immutable and universal truths. So I came to see further the need for objectivity, not subjectivity, in the law; that is, the law must be based on solid moral foundations, not on slippery situational relativism. And that process of understanding deepened my interest in the law, because the American concepts of law and justice indeed found their roots in the Decalogue. No wonder the frieze depicting Moses holding his two tablets graces the center of the pediment on the east facade of the Supreme Court building in Washington.

  Some secular activists claim, of course, that the founders have been misinterpreted, and so what we really need now is relentless secularization—for instance, pulling down crosses and crèches on public property. And these ACLU-type activists will gleefully trample public opinion if they can find one judge who agrees with their antireligious bias. Was that truly the founders’ view? What did they have in mind when they authored our founding documents? Many well-qualified scholars have offered undeniable historical proofs attesting to the Judeo-Christian roots of American law. We might note, for example, that the Declaration of Independence makes America’s devoted relationship to God fully clear and manifest. The first sentence of the Declaration asserts:

  When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God [emphasis added] entitle them . . .

  So there’s God, right there, in the first fifty words of the Declaration. And He appears again in the very next paragraph:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator [emphasis added] with certain unalienable Rights . . .

  It’s worth noting that the Declaration is brief—little more than 1,300 words. But then again, there’s the ringing conclusion:

  And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence [emphasis added], we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

  So in their own immortal words, there you have their thinking. From the beginning, American leaders have put their trust in God. In God We Trust—our national motto. Our whole history as a nation has been shaped and guided by our faith in God. We have always used public money to employ chaplains, for example, and to write out oaths and other public statements that acknowledge our enduring devotion to God.

  Mindful of that deep connection between our Judeo-Christian heritage and the formation of American law, my determination to go to law school grew even stronger. I could now see a career for myself as an advocate for these immutable truths. Scripture tells us to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, and by God’s grace, that’s what I wanted to do. I felt called to attend a Bible-based Christian law school. So I chose one of the few available, the O.W. Coburn School of Law—named after the father of Oklahoma’s great U.S. sen
ator, Tom Coburn—at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  Marcus and I traveled there in the fall of 1979. I loved Tulsa, I loved ORU, and most of all I loved law school. I worked hard. I respected my teachers and my fellow students, and I learned to think and talk on my feet. And I did many presentations, developing a skill that would come in handy in the years to come.

  But there was a problem—a big problem. Marcus didn’t feel he had a place in Tulsa. He had made plenty of contacts for jobs back in Minnesota and Wisconsin, but Oklahoma was new territory for him. He got a job as a director of a senior citizens center and loved the folks he was working with. He has always had a love and affinity for seniors. As a second-generation immigrant, Marcus did not have grandparents in the United States. Elma made it a habit when she went on her weekly shopping trip to town on Fridays to take young Marcus along and regularly visit both shut-ins and nursing-home residents. That habit carried over to some of our dates in college. Because we had no money, we would occasionally go to visit some of Marcus’s favorite senior citizens at nursing homes in Winona, at Sarnia, and the Watkins Home. These were very unusual dates, but I got to see what a loving, sensitive, and caring man Marcus is, and afterward, rather than being depressed, we found great joy in recalling the stories and jokes of these seniors. To this day, we still do. It was wonderful work that Marcus was doing with the elderly, and it well fit his personality, but it was not what Marcus was truly meant to do. He wanted more direct contact with helping young people who needed mentoring. He wanted the chance to look into their eyes to come alongside and help them get back on a positive path. While I was in school that year, Marcus traveled to San Antonio—we had no car to spare, so he took the bus—for a Youth for Christ convention. That’s when he realized that he was most truly called to help young people, to offer them better hope than the dumbed-down and often corrupted culture we were seeing all around us.