scrutinized the historical record and knew that the one constant in human affairs is human nature itself, and that, left unchecked, its drives and weaknesses will inevitably undermine free institutions. They gave us a Constitution designed to contain those destructive impulses, a governmental structure that remains as applicable to today’s world as it was to theirs.
I pray that Gibbon’s epitaph will never be read over the American Republic, but time is running out. What we desperately need today is the leadership to focus our people’s attention on the consequences of the present drift. I am convinced that a majority of Americans remain capable of understanding what is at stake, and the success of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” in bringing about the Republican revolution of 1994 demonstrates that that understanding can be translated into effective political action. Unfortunately, once in power, the Republican congressional majorities fell victim to the seductions of office and betrayed their own revolution. But if an indulgent Providence gives us another chance—and President Obama and the congressional leadership may have unwittingly hastened that possibility through their arrogant overreaching—perhaps the next time reformers gain control they will have learned from this very recent history.
There are signs that that may prove to be the case. The tea-party phenomenon and the polls suggest that a significant number of Americans now understand both the seriousness and the nature of the threat to their freedoms, and that they are determined to do something about it. In a very few years, we will know whether they have succeeded—or whether we have slipped irretrievably into the suffocating embrace of an all-caring state, with all that that implies.
In the meantime, we can take comfort from the old saying that God takes care of fools, drunks, and the United States of America.
In Sum: A Political Credo
The following is taken from a statement I issued during my failed bid for re-election to the Senate in 1976. If I were issuing it today, I would modify it in only one respect. I would revise the second sentence to suggest that today’s ideologues are reluctant to allow Americans to make even the most trivial decisions affecting their lives.
For too many years, the ideologues in Washington have been in the driver’s seat. They don’t believe that free men and women can be trusted to govern themselves, and so they insist that the truly important decisions be moved as far away from the people as possible. These are the ideologues who for years have been imposing their goals, their priorities on the people of New York.
I believe that New Yorkers can be trusted to run their own affairs through the levels of government that are closest to them.
I believe that the free-enterprise system, operating in freedom and without the shackles of over-regulation from Washington, can do what it has done: create more jobs and prosperity and comfort and individual happiness than any other economic system in the world.
I believe that the controls we are most in need of in Washington are controls on the bureaucracy’s desire to control our lives.
I believe that we cannot afford one penny less for defense than the amount required to maintain our unquestioned ability to protect our legitimate interests wherever they are challenged.
I believe that our commitment to the proposition that all men are created equal is a commitment to the equal dignity and equal rights of each American as an individual, and not as a member of one sex or the other, or of one category or another.
I believe that the United States Constitution, with its principle of federalism designed to prevent a concentration of power in a central government and its Bill of Rights designed to protect the individual against the abuse of government power, remains the best protection of our freedoms.
I believe, finally, that in a free society, the role of government is to serve, not to rule.
GOVERNANCE
The American Heritage Dictionary defines “governance” as “the act, process, or power of governing; government.” While most of what follows falls within that definition, I have stretched it to include ruminations on the role of families and communities in shaping individuals for responsible citizenship in a self-governing society.
On Becoming a United States Senator
The following article first appeared in the February 2, 1973, issue of National Review. After it had been reprinted under the title of “Notes of an Earnest Freshman” (I fear I was), I received a note from Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, who was kind enough to call it “one of the most revealing and frank commentaries on the Senate and what happens in that august body that I’ve ever read.”
On January 20, 1971, Jacob Javits, pursuant to custom, escorted me down the center aisle of the United States Senate chamber. Vice President Agnew swore me in, and I was handed a pen, with which I entered my name in the books of the Senate. I then walked a few steps to my desk on the Republican side of the aisle. I had become the Junior Senator from the State of New York. Or, as senatorial courtesy puts it, the distinguished and honorable Senator from the great State of New York.
Rarely has anyone, distinguished and honorable or otherwise, entered the United States Senate so innocent of the mechanisms of a legislative body or of the impact of politics on the legislative process. Prior to my election, I had never held public office or participated in any organized political effort other than the third-party mayoralty and senatorial campaigns of the brothers Buckley.
Shortly after my election, Clif White, my campaign manager and guide to the political world, organized a private dinner with a few of the senior Republican senators so that I might acquire a better feel for the life I was about to enter. I had hoped to get specific advice on how to go about the job of being an effective senator. What I got instead were affable assurances to the effect that anyone capable of winning election to the Senate would find no difficulty in getting along once in it. This was all, in its own way, reassuring; but I did not emerge from the dinner with the mother lode of hard, practical information that would help me to thread my way through the complexities of senatorial life.
The first formal business for a senator-elect is the meeting with the sergeant at arms and the secretary of the Senate, who give you the basic housekeeping instructions, take sample signatures for franking privileges, and explain a senator’s insurance and retirement benefits. I also learned where I would stand in the Senate pecking order. I would rank ninety-ninth, because I had no prior service as a congressman or governor, which is taken into account in the calculation of seniority. (I beat out Lawton Chiles of Florida because New York has the larger population.) At that meeting I was presented with three books: The Rules and Manual of the United States Senate; an exegesis thereof by the chief parliamentarian, Dr. Floyd Riddick; and the Congressional Directory for the second session of the prior Congress. I was determined to spend the next few weeks mastering the parliamentary rules, but I was soon bogged down in their intricacy. To my relief, however, I quickly learned that the Senate operates in a reasonably free and tolerant manner, and that much of its business is conducted not by the rule book but by continuing recourse to unanimous-consent agreements. Those who do know the rule book, however, are equipped, at critical moments, to take the parliamentary advantage.
New senators learn that they are expected to carry the principal burden of presiding over the Senate. For someone like me, who had never presided over any official function or even read Robert’s Rules of Order, the prospect seemed ominous. It isn’t all that difficult, however, because sitting immediately in front of the Chair is one of the three parliamentarians, who whispers up the appropriate instruction. The most difficult task is to learn the identity of eighty or ninety brand-new faces, together with state of origin, so that one can recognize the Senator from Such-and-Such without any obvious fumbling.
During this orientation period, I introduced myself to the Senate Republican leadership—to Minority Leader Hugh Scott, Minority