Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles
By Donald J. Devine
(The Fund for American Studies, 177 pages, $10)
Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on this date, Feb. 6, over a century ago — 1911. It was truly another world, another country, another culture. But the principles to which Ronald Reagan adhered have endured. Indeed, for conservatives, they should. The late Russell Kirk, modern conservatism’s leading philosophical spokesman, described conservatism as adhering to what he eloquently and timelessly called an “enduring moral order.”
One of Ronald Reagan’s best speeches defining conservatism came at CPAC, on his birthday (ironically), Feb. 6, 1977, four years before his presidency. Reagan began that speech by conceding that conservatism can “mean different things to those who call themselves conservatives.” He laid out various positions that identified social and economic conservatives (Reagan was both). He then said this:
Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now, but from what has happened before. The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind.
Reagan was there invoking Russell Kirk. Both Reagan and Kirk in turn quoted G.K. Chesterton, who talked of what he called “the democracy of the dead.” That means that your ancestors — what we in Western society once unapologetically referred to as our patrimony — should have a vote, a say, in what we do today. The secular progressive shrugs off those ancestors of centuries ago as backward bigots — “homophobes” who couldn’t have conceived of something as enlightened as same-sex “marriage” or “gender transitioning.” What could we possibly learn from those troglodytes? (READ MORE from Paul Kengor: The American Spectator’s Conservative Counterculture)
Well, the answer, to the conservative, is that we can learn a lot from them and their experiences and their accumulated wisdom. They lived according to an enduring moral order based on biblical and natural law, laws that are eternal and universal. The progressive seeks to move “forward” and “evolve” beyond those laws, rejecting the very notion of settled absolutes. But to the conservative, there are absolutes. As Edmund Burke put it, there exists an “eternal contract” between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.
That moral order endures. That’s what conservatism professes and what conservatives need to know and believe.
One conservative who knows this as well as anyone is Donald Devine, a longtime friend of The American Spectator, who for years has written many excellent pieces for us on conservatism. Devine has just published a new book fittingly titled Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles.
Devine opens the book with a chapter titled “Why Ronald Reagan Today?,” which is derived from a piece he wrote for us this time last year. The opening words of the book remind of that Burkean eternal contract, as Devine asks: “Why should one look to a Ronald Reagan who was born, lived, and died in … what one may consider very different times? Well, they were different times but more similar than one might at first expect.” (READ THE PIECE: Ronald Reagan Is Still the Answer to Conservative Disarray)
That’s a decidedly conservative question and answer by Devine. The progressive rejects that very notion, which is why progressives are progressives. But conservatives know better. We know that often there’s little new under the Sun.
In chapter three, “The Enduring Tension,” Devine quotes another great speech by Ronald Reagan at CPAC, this time when he was president of the United States. In that March 20, 1981, address, Reagan listed the conservative thinkers who influenced him:
There are so many people and institutions who come to mind for their role in the success we celebrate tonight. Intellectual leaders like Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Ludwig von Mises—they shaped so much of our thoughts.
It’s especially hard to believe that it was only a decade ago, on a cold April day on a small hill in upstate New York, that another of these great thinkers, Frank Meyer, was buried. He’d made the awful journey that so many others had: He pulled himself from the clutches of “The God That Failed,” and then in his writing fashioned a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought—a synthesis that is today recognized by many as modern conservatism.
Devine’s book takes a deep dive into the various strains of conservative, traditional, and libertarian thought, including Frank Meyer’s “fusionist conservatism.” (Meyer, for the record, was a close friend of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., the founder of this magazine. Our Daniel J. Flynn is in the process of writing the definitive biography of Meyer.) In this thoughtful and informed work, Devine digs into the historical roots of conservatism, natural law, “Anglo-American Nationalist Conservatism,” the “Real John Locke,” what he calls the “Necessary Traditionalist Reorientation,” free markets, what he calls “Reagan’s New Stage Conservatism,” “Reagan Philosophical Fusionism,” and then wraps up with “Ronald Reagan’s Way Back.”
That might sound like an overwhelming work, but Devine compacts it succinctly in 177 pages, which is especially impressive given the caliber of the content.
Ronald Reagan believed that the essence of conservatism is to preserve and conserve time-tested values that have endured for good reason and for the best of society, for citizens, for country, and for order — that enduring moral order. As Don Devine sees it, those things, embodied as Ronald Reagan’s principles, not only endure today but “can promote political success today.”
The key to Reagan’s understanding, writes Devine, is that he himself understood conservatism’s “philosophical roots in both freedom and tradition and built his actions upon them.” As Devine notes, it wasn’t merely that Reagan personally understood that the origins of conservatism go to the very roots of Western civilization, “to Aristotle and St. Thomas [Aquinas] and by whatever has survived the fall of Rome, divine right Europe, two world wars, the Soviet Union and, at least so far, bureaucratized and woke America.” Reagan realized that “[c]onditions change but principles endure.”
The key to success for today’s conservatives is to continue to conserve those enduring principles and build their actions upon them in a way that works politically. That key to success includes recapturing Reagan’s unique, winsome ability to get elected and reelected. Without winning elections, the principles can’t become political reality. Reagan knew and did that better than any American conservative ever.
That’s what especially endured for Ronald Reagan.