The year was 1980, the location was Houston and the question came from the crowd at a presidential primary debate between Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush — two bellwether conservatives who would eventually serve together as president and vice president.
Should “illegal aliens,” the crowd member asked, be allowed to attend U.S. public schools?
Bush said immigration policy needed to be “sensitive” and “understanding” toward the “really honorable, decent, family-loving people” that had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without documentation.
Reagan echoed that sentiment.
“Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit,” he said. “And then while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they want to go back they can go back.”
.. Reagan’s words that night, and his stance in countless other public and private statements as president, contrast starkly with the false history lesson President Trump offered Friday in an early-morning tweet, hours before a potential government shutdown over funding for the president’s border wall.
.. In fact, Reagan signed a sweeping immigration reform bill into law in 1986, which made any immigrant who entered the country before 1982 eligible for amnesty.
.. “The memorable thing about Reagan is that he was a Californian,” Meissner said. “He was not anti-immigration.”
.. “God made Mexico and the United States neighbors, but it is our duty and the duty of generations yet to come to make sure that we remain friends,” Reagan said during a 1981 welcoming ceremony for Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo. “Our very proximity is an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how two nations, talking together as equals, as partners, as friends, can solve their problems and deepen their mutual respect.”
.. U.S. Border Control didn’t begin building physical barriers on the southern border until 1990, the year after Reagan left office, in which a 14-mile long “primary fence” was erected in San Diego. It wasn’t completed until 1993.
The Weekly Standard is gone. But the future of conservatism is bright.
With the closing of the Weekly Standard, an influential publication that many considered a respectable, center-right, alternative to more pro-Trump outlets such as Breitbart and Fox News, and the continued ostracization of “Never-Trump conservatives” from the Republican Party, many wonder who, if anyone, will carry the torch of prudential conservatism while President Trump occupies the White House.
Just last week, a group of prominent intellectuals and political figures including Maryland Gov.
- Larry Hogan,
- Bill Kristol and
- David Frum
gathered for a conference at Washington’s Niskanen Center titled “Starting Over: The Center-Right After Trump.” The underlying assumption of the conference: It’s time for moderate conservatives to regroup and reconsider their relationship to a Republican Party that has been overrun by populists, nationalists and demagogues.
As someone who runs an organization founded at the time of the Iraq War with the aim of changing the direction of American conservatism, I can sympathize with their efforts, but I fundamentally disagree on their diagnosis of the problem. In the long run, both the conservative movement and Republican Party will be better off for having had Donald Trump shatter the combination of neoconservatism and Reaganism that held the political right captive and blinded since the end of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan was the statesman that America needed for his time, but the clock had run out on many of his policy prescriptions and it took a “hurricane,” as the Niskanen Center conference described it, like Trump to wake up conservatism — and America.
.. I need not provide an exhaustive list, as Time magazine’s October cover story by Sam Tanenhaus, “How Trumpism Will Outlast Trump,” did a good job surveying the landscape that includes thinkers such as
- Julius Krein at American Affairs,
- Daniel McCarthy at Modern Age,
- Yuval Levin at National Affairs,
- Michael Anton at Hillsdale College and
- David Azerrad at the Heritage Foundation.
.. What does this new program for the right entail if not a return to the neoconservatism of the George W. Bush years? It’s time for Republicans to embrace a “Main Street” conservatism that prizes solidarity over individualism and culture over efficiency. America needs a foreign policy that serves our vital national interests by securing the safety and happiness of the American people. This means putting an end to the regime-change and nation-building experiments that have devastated Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya; ending U.S. support for the Saudis’ involvement in the Yemeni civil war; reclaiming our national sovereignty; and prioritizing diplomacy over intervention
.. On domestic issues, especially when our country is bitterly divided along partisan lines, we must decentralize both political and economic power to bring it closer to the people. This would allow local and state governments greater flexibility to address their unique problems, letting California be California and Texas be Texas.
.. Regarding the problem of economic concentration, conservatives should stand up to the crony capitalism that has protected big banks and defense contractors, and revisit antitrust enforcement to prevent corporate monopolies from stamping out competition and entrepreneurship. And finally, conservatives should adopt a cultural platform with a renewed focus on civic education; implementing economic and social policies that strengthen families, such as paid family leave and an increase in the child tax credit; promoting vocational training as a dignified alternative to traditional universities; and working toward an immigration policy that better balances economic and cultural concerns.
.. When searching for a prudential conservatism today, it’s best to ignore the advice of those who brought us the Iraq War, the hollowing out of our industrial base and our broken immigration system. The future belongs to conservatives who take Middle America seriously and actually care about the systemic problems that drove the Rust Belt into the arms of then-candidate Trump.
We’ll Always Have . . . Fort Worth?
Conservatives do not do well in the cities. We assume, strangely, that this indicates a problem with the cities rather than a problem with . . . us. We may as well be trying to sell New York City and Los Angeles Edsels full of New Coke — and cursing the consumers for being too thick to appreciate what we are offering.
New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia — as far as conservatives are concerned, these may as well be so many Sodoms upon which we are all too happy to call down fire and judgment. But it’s not only the coastal dens of sin that we have written off: In Texas — Texas! — Republican office-seekers (a reasonable if imperfect proxy for conservative political tendencies) are largely shut out of the cities: Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso — all are reliably Democratic. There is no Texas city larger than Fort Worth that routinely elects Republican mayors or that can be relied upon to support Republican candidates in state and national elections.
And if any American city should have a prestigious institution of higher education in it, it may as well be Pyongyang.
.. Which is a real missed opportunity: If you live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and work in Manhattan, then you get an object lesson in the failures of statism and centralization every damned work day — twice. If you live in Philadelphia and have school-age children, you don’t need to read Milton Friedman: You know from bitter experience what a blessing it is to be free to choose — and what a curse it is to have choices taken away.
National Review Comments: Pro and Anti-Trump
One wonders why a successful business or enterprise would have a reason to hire a “fixer.” You could poll the executives of the largest US corporations and companies and not find one fixer that needed to be retained do administer company business. The smart business people would subcontract the messy stuff (Facebook paying to have false dirt spread about George Soros comes to mind). For small endeavors, only those who intend to do bad things or cover them up, employ a Fixer. Criminal organizations for instance have them on the payroll. Even Mr McCarthy analogizes using figures in the Godfather. These are not good people. Where there is smoke, there may not always be fire. But where there is a criminal organization, there are always criminals.
.. We have just scratched the surface when it comes to all the “fixes” that Cohen provided for the president. We know about payoffs to porn stars.We know about trips to Russia during the campaign to makes deals for a Trump Tower near the Kremlin (with a $50 million penthouse for Putin to seal the deal). Soon, when the Trump tax returns (“So complicated”) are requested by the House Tax Committee, the story will get even more sorted.
Andrew McCarthy is right about one thing. Mueller is preparing a report. But he has also handed off part of that report to the Southern District of New York. There, they can begin a criminal case; a case that Trump can’t use his Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card to keep his subordinates quiet. This report by Mueller is just the roadmap, one where others will soon follow up... mtorillion:.. The Clintons had, and perhaps still have, the bulk of the FBI and Justice Department running and blocking for them. That and the media support gave it an air of “officialdom” the Trump team does not have. The Trump team was all private people, not government fixers and perhaps. In other words, the core of the Deep State... Trump was elected despite having no friends among the established major figures of either party; he was nominated and elected despite the disdain of many of the elite information organs of the Right. He has far fewer natural vocal allies in conservative circles than any Republican president. It ought make serious conservatives take a second look at their virtuous opposition to him now that it is clear that many of the powers of the State were set in motion against his campaign even before his election and these officials—and the Left—have been tireless, since before his inauguration, in assaulting the legitimacy of his presidency.Because he campaigned without Republican elites in his inner circle—most of whom would have nothing to do with him—and because he to this day has few strong allies among the Republican establishment, those who have been working most assiduously to destroy this presidency have understood from the outset that without having a firm foundation of support in DC itself, Trump is at special risk... Certain writers at NRO and certain Commenters here are among the far too many conservatives willing to sacrifice this presidency because they despise the man whom people had the temerity to elect. They are determined to separate the rectitude of their judgment about political matters from that of the hoi polloi: the Mueller investigation is, for them, a necessary cleansing agent. Thus they latch onto a vague unsettling that arises from the sordid iniquities of the president, permitting them to set aside elementary constitutional concerns about placing a presidential administration from its inception under an investigative cloud without just cause.