by Mitt Romney
My index is pretty easy to criticize, of course. It takes no obvious account of a host of important additional factors that will have an impact on America’s future strength—but that’s in the nature of indices. This particular index is simply meant to help us anticipate the future level of America’s prosperity and security. It doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the income gap between the wealthiest and the poor among us. It doesn’t predict the level of racial, ethnic, gender, or religious discrimination in our country. And it doesn’t say much about the health of our environment. These are important topics in their own right. But our national strength is vital to our ability to continue to address and make progress in each of those areas. The disparity between poor and rich and between the weak and the powerful is greatest in poor nations, where discrimination can become genocidal, and where the environment is not given even a passing thought. Real progress is more possible in strong nations with growing vibrant economies and in nations protected by strong friends. That’s one reason why a strong America deserves our applause, not our apology.
The results from this index are cause for real concern. When you examine each of its components, you see that almost every one is trending in the wrong direction. Concern, in fact, is too soft a word; alarm is more apt—the trends are so alarming that we must take action. Now. Yet Washington appears not only to be sanguine about our decline, it actually is pursuing policies that would make matters even worse. Each policy decision has its rationale, of course, but consider the effects of bigger deficits, new entitlements, increasing the power of union CEOs, raising taxes, shrinking military spending, enabling out-of-wedlock births, promoting pseudo-reforms in education, and restraining free trade. If we continue down the current path by enacting policies that further weaken us, the very real prospect is that America will be surpassed by another nation or nations. The consequences of inaction are dangerous to the country and especially to its next generation, our children and grandchildren. Fortunately, there is time for us to take corrective action.
A Conversation with a Friend
Despite my affiliation with the Republican Party, I don’t think of myself as highly partisan. Neither party can claim 100 percent of the good ideas. As governor, I worked with a number of thoughtful and capable Democrats, and appointed a few to positions of significance in my administration. All that said, I am having a more and more difficult time understanding how so many people who basically agree with views such as those I have expressed in this book nevertheless choose to be Democrats. I know that neither party has all the answers, that both parties have their share of bad actors, and that each has been known to fall short of its principles. But in light of the challenges faced by the country, I am puzzled by those who align themselves with a political agenda that may be well intentioned, but that weakens the country and hazards our freedom.
First, however, there are people who correctly presume that they will get more money from government if it is run by Democrats. I understand these kinds of Democrats very well. Adam Lerrick of the American Enterprise Institute calculated for The Wall Street Journal that under candidate Obama’s tax plan, 49 percent of all Americans will pay no income tax. Added to that number are another 11 percent who would pay federal income tax of less than 5 percent of their income. So for 60 percent of Americans, spending restraint and lower taxes championed by Republicans may not mean a great deal to them personally—at least in the short term, even though lower taxes promote economic growth, good jobs and higher incomes in the long term.
I also understand the position of Democrats who feel that the Republican Party has dragged its feet on civil rights or on social issues they feel are critically important. However, I believe that my party long ago caught up on civil rights, and many Republicans like my dad were never behind to begin with. And on certain social issues, such as the importance of life and marriage, we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
The Democratic voters I have a hard time understanding are those who don’t have a personal financial interest at stake or who don’t vote solely on the basis of a social issue.
Just a few days ago, I sat down with a good friend who happens to be a Democrat. He’s highly educated, reasonably well informed, and financially secure. I asked him why he’s not a Republican—not to debate him, but to try to better understand him. Abortion came up. So did gun rights—he’s never owned a gun and really hasn’t given much thought to the Second Amendment. And he said that he doesn’t like the influence of religious conservatives in my party. But he said these issues were mostly about image and cosmetics.
His comment reminded me of a lunch I had in 2006 with a famous Hollywood actor who will remain nameless. He admitted that it would be devastating to his image if he were seen as anything other than a liberal Democrat. Then, he added with a smile, but no one knows how I vote. I wonder how many people choose to be Democrats, as he does, because it’s a better fit in their social circle? Of course, something similar also happens on our side of the aisle. But given everything that is at stake, it’s past the time for choosing parties and candidates based on image.
As my friend and I continued our discussion, he mentioned the environment, and it turned out that we largely agree on environmental issues. He doesn’t like cap-and-trade any more than I do, and he acknowledged that he lines up with so-called green Republicans, who are really just Teddy Roosevelt conservationists, more than with the extreme environmentalists in his own party. He isn’t in favor of higher taxes, but he believes Republicans make taxes too big an issue. Raising capital gains from 15 percent to 20 percent, he argued, isn’t as big a deal as you make it out to be. But he agreed with my opposition to the death tax, calling it clearly unfair. As we ran through the issues, we found ourselves more and more in agreement, especially on the threats to America from our rivals and enemies. When my friend had run out of explanations for why he’s not a Republican, I took the opportunity to explain to him why I am.
I began with my observations about the importance of America remaining the strong and leading nation in the world—and he agreed with them. Then I noted each of the major positions of the Democratic Party, pointing out the weakening effect I believe each of them would have on our future. In education, the Democratic Party is so allied with the teachers’ unions that it cannot adopt the reforms that would close the achievement gap and elevate our student performance; instead, it simply endeavors to send more money to the same schools to do the same things that have failed in the past.
We agreed on the need to increase productivity to strengthen the economy and raise incomes. With that, I noted that the Democratic Party is so beholden to labor union leaders that it is advancing productivity suicide by promoting a plan to remove a worker’s right to a secret ballot, virtually paving the way for worker intimidation and the imposition of unions throughout big and small business. The impact of such a measure on small business and on entrepreneurship would be catastrophic. He couldn’t argue with that, or with the fact that productivity is also burdened by the Democrats’ obligations to trial lawyers, some of whom prey on employers with frivolous, megamillion-dollar lawsuits, which provide little benefit to the aggrieved plaintiffs but millions in fees for the lawyers.
I acknowledged that each party has special interests. For many Republicans, for example, nothing is more important than preserving the constitutional guarantee of the right to bear arms or than protecting unborn life. I support both of these special interests and pointed out to my friend that even though he disagreed with both of them, they do not weaken the economy or put our nation’s future in jeopardy. His party’s special interests, on the other hand, would do just that.
The Democratic Party is obsessed with spending more, borrowing more, and taxing more, all of which sap our national strength, I contended. But my friend pointed out that the Republican Party wasn’t much better when we held the reins in Washington. I had to agree, at least with respect to spending and borrowing. But we also count among our rank
s a good number of spending hawks. They are on the ascendancy in my party, in fact, and are in line with long-standing Republican philosophy. The party is returning to its roots as the party of fiscal discipline. My friend acknowledged that there are many more spending hawks in the GOP than have ever existed or will exist in the Democratic Party.
My friend’s party inaugurated and still defends, against all evidence and experience, the welfare policies that created a culture of poverty, diminished our work ethic, and promoted out-of-wedlock births. These effects continue when Democrats resist welfare work requirements or safety-net reforms that would compel unwed fathers to care for their children.
I ran through the undeniable litany of Democratic mistakes since sweeping to power in the elections of 2008. The party leadership is apparently convinced that government knows best. Rather than reform health care by making it more consumer-oriented, it seeks to make ours a single-payer system. Rather than distribute shares in General Motors to the public, it prefers the idea of guiding the company from Washington. And rather than adopt a stimulus bill that would create new jobs in the private sector, it has funded the largest increase in government programs and government jobs in memory. Free enterprise strengthens America, freewheeling government does not, but the Democrats seem almost to fear and distrust markets and free enterprise.
I pointed out that his party has retreated from support of missile defense, perhaps our single most effective protection from rogue nations such as North Korea. Democrats are cutting military spending to make way for domestic priorities and social programs.
I concluded with the observation that on almost every policy issue that would have an impact on our nation’s strength, his party chooses the course of weakness. It justifies the choice by insisting that it is attempting to help the disadvantaged, but in reality, surely the most important thing we can do for the disadvantaged is to sustain a strong, prosperous, and safe America. Too often, I fear, the Democratic Party is focused less on the disadvantaged than on union bosses, trial lawyers, environment extremists, and the self-interested who want higher government benefits for themselves paid for by higher taxes on others.
I didn’t convert my longtime friend. I didn’t really expect to, at least not that day. Arguments have to be advanced day in and day out to make progress in this media-charged world. Over and over again we have to make the central point that I made with my friend: If the special interests that control the Democratic Party have their way, they will make America less strong, less secure, less able to generate the highest standard of living for all our citizens, and less able to protect our freedom. The Republicans aren’t perfect—far from it, of course—but ours is a party committed to strength and prosperity for all Americans.
A Force for Good
There is good and evil in the world. Many do not agree; they dismiss such a claim as simplistic and moralistic. From their point of view, people and nations do not act from altruistic empathy, sacrificing self for others. They believe humankind is incapable of choosing anything but self-interest. As they see it, there is no good per se, only selfish acts with beneficent by-products.
Rather than recognize inherent evil, they ascribe aberrant and destructive behavior to the influence of a warped society. Change the society, they maintain, and people will behave. They ascribe the conduct of rogue nations to the distortions brought about by past imperialism and exploitation. For such nations, they withhold judgment. For their own United States, on the other hand, they often have little good to say.
In a world with neither good nor evil, no one needs to account for his actions or acknowledge heroism in another. There is no place in their worldview for self-assessment, judgment, or aspiration. They insist that the people I would label evil are simply misunderstood. Everyone, they believe, shares common interests; everyone is just as good as everyone else. This is the perspective of many of those in power in Washington today. It underpins a foreign policy that draws us closer to accommodation and appeasement of the world’s worst actors.
As this worldview has developed and spread, it has sapped our collective judgment and our willingness to speak candidly about the world in which we live. The label evil sends many into outbursts of indignation on behalf of the simply misunderstood, who, they believe, are fully capable of joining the community of human kindness and acting responsibly, if only we would use carrots instead of sticks.
I don’t think so. From the beginning of recorded history, we have seen too much evil to be persuaded by sophistry of the sort that dominates much of the Beltway conversation these days. The most influential book in history recounts events that are intended to teach about the harsh realities of the world: Cain killed Abel, not because of a broken home but because of evil jealousy. Pharaoh brutally repressed the Jews, and centuries later, Herod would kill their firstborn sons. These two rulers were not twisted by circumstance, but by their evil lust for power. The same kind of lust has driven murderous tyrants from Stalin to Saddam, leaving literally millions of their own countrymen in their wake. Only the notion of evil can explain Hitler. And during my lifetime alone, I have witnessed Idi Amin, Miloševi, al Bashir, Hussein, Mao, Pol Pot, and bin Laden, who have collectively been responsible for the death of millions. Like author John Steinbeck, I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. . . . The face and the body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
Evil has been with us from the beginning of time, and it is not going away. Indeed, technology means it is very close. Today, the available means of creating horror are even more deadly than ever before.
I submit that it is vital to believe in evil—it is neither confused nor deterred by vacuous introspection. We should study what is said and written by evil men, and take them at their word. Adolf Hitler told the world exactly what his aspirations were in Mein Kampf and in his speeches, but at first the world dismissed his claims as political bluster. Osama bin Laden’s declarations of war against the United States didn’t make the news until he had killed thousands of our fellow citizens. Today, Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hurl bellicose rants—Kim threatening to use nuclear weapons offensively, and Ahmadinejad denying the awful reality of the Holocaust even as he opens the door to a new one and uses Western confusion about his motives to make possible his murderous ambition. Our dear Imam [Ayatollah Khomeini] said that the occupying regime [in Israel] must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement, Ahmadinejad exhorted at the 2005 World Without Zionism conference. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world.