he had never been a follower. and when he sensed that a new generation of conservatives was leading the movement off in directions he considered politically and philosophically unsound he spoke up. his fusionism was threatening to come apart at the seams as a result of its own success. frank myer, when warned by a young activist years ago that in power, the different of constituencies that made up the movement might want very different things and be willing to use the power of the state in very different ways than he foresaw, myer suggested that we could fight battles over those things in the basement of the white house if and when we ever ended up there. at the time, of course, the idea that we would end up there was fairly farfetched. but we did end up in the white house and once we got there, the differences began to surface.

and in part because the various constituencies could surface them. and in part because many were not sufficiently socialized into the movement that buckley had formed. in the early days, this hadn't been a problem. we argued the issues and we came to accommodationist solutions. we took all of these things into consideration and we got it. my own experience was perhaps typical or at least not atypical. i was mentored by frank myer himself, which was quite an experience. myer as i said earlier was the highest ranking american communist to defect and in those days, the communists took that sort of thing seriously and the kremlin took out a contract on it. he took hiding during the day and working at night, ensconced in a farmhouse in upstate new york. he would get up when the rest of humanity was going to bed, work

all night and then sleep all day as he had learned to do while he was on the lam. but frank was not just the book review editor of national review. he was the conscience of this new movement. and unlike some who defected, he would not even for a minute itch accept the fear expressed by whitaker chambers that he had left the winning for the losing side. frank had never been in a battle that he did not expect to win and he expected to win this one. frank meant to beat the communists and as one who had been in charge of recruiting and training new party members, he knew how to go about looking for, finding, and motivating young conservatives. every couple of months, he would invite or perhaps order me to come to woodstock, new york. i would dutifully fly to new

york, catch a bus to woodstock and arrive in the evening just as he was ready to start a quasi socratic educational session that would last far into the night. he would want to know what i had read since we last met, what i had accomplished and what i was going to accomplish when i got back to wisconsin. back in madison, after getting some rest and sobering up, i would get calls late in the evening from frank myer checking to make certain that i was doing what i had agreed to do and making progress in the struggle in which we were all involved. in between my assigned readings, i would attend work shops organized by the intercollegiate society of individualists or isi. i would organize and debate and if i was lucky, i might get to do a little studying. it was an exhilarating time for me and for those like me. we knew what the movement was about. but with political success, it began to grow perhaps too

quickly. i have observed in a different context that one can tell that an idea-driven movement is on the verge of political success when the rats board the ship. the new recruits that streamed in added to our numbers and were well intentioned, but there were too many to educate as thoroughly as frank and his fellows had educated those of us who were with him in the beginning and before long, they began to say they were conservatives not because of hayek or buckley or kirk, but because they liked reagan or bush or gingrich. if you took away gingrich or reagan or bush and asked them then why they were conservatives, they couldn't answer that question. our task today, and it is one in which many conservatives are engaged, is to resocialize the core and remind new recruits of just what it means to be a

conservative rather than just conservative. the distinction is all-important. as witnessed buckley's description of george w. bush. "he is conservative, buckley told an interviewer, but he is not a conservative." in other words, he didn't get it. in recent years, there have emerged or re-emerged folks that we call paleoconservatives, national defense conservatives, social and religious conservatives, constitutional conservatives, big government conservatives, and neoconservatives. all trying and fighting for the right to redefine and lead the movement buckley called into being. reminding one of the time that al gore campaigning in milwaukee mistranslated e pluribus unum as out of one many. a few years ago, at the conservative political action

conference that mallory mentioned earlier, we honored bill's brother jim and former minnesota senator eugene mccarthy for their 1947 challenge to that era's campaign finance reform. in responding to the toasts, the liberal gene mccarthy stood up and said, you conservatives have had a good run but you are in trouble. because i keep hearing talk of hyphenated conservatives. that's what happened to liberals in the '60s. and when they start referring to you in hyphenated terms, you are headed for a crackup. as bill looks down on us today, he is no doubt hoping that we will be far wiser than mccarthy's liberals and that we will work as hard to preserve our coalition as he did to build it. thank you very much.

>> we're going to take a short break and be right back with questions and answers. >> welcome back. with me is david keene. and we're now going to take questions from the cadets. question. >> sir, you described the political and economic landscape post world war ii as a collectivist faith in government sort of dominating. but to me, i kind of see that not a lot has changed. we still look to the government for entitlements, stupid loans, national disasters, and even today, health care and birth control. has anything really changed? >> in some ways it has.

it depends on whether you look at the glass as half full or half empty. the reagan years changed the way in which people looked at government programs. prior to reagan and post-roosevelt, there was an assumption that if there was a problem, the solution was to spend money on it. and anybody who questioned that obviously didn't want to solve the problem. after reagan, there was and that, of course, was a rebuttable presumption. after reagan there was a presumption and you still see it, that if you have a problem and you want to spend money on it, that's not the answer. that's rebuttal, as well. so it changed the way people looked at these things. and that lasted for some time. now, if you ask whether the government is bigger now than it was then or it was in the '50s, obviously it is. the -- and what we have now is

we have -- we have sort of politically two things have happened. one, the sort of bipartisan establishment thinking of the '50s and '60s which was almost-in-law favor of government solutions to everything has broken down. but now you have two relatively evenly divide camps. and it's one of the reasons why politics has become so -- the critic would say dysfunctional bitter, divided. it's become that way because now we have two camps with very, very different views of the way this country should be run and the very, very different visions of what the future should be like. if the conservative movement hadn't risen from 1955 on, if reagan had not been elected you wouldn't believe how far down that road we might be today. have we turned around and moved backward?

we did for a few years. but that final decision in terms of at any great length of time has not been made. that has to be made by the voters. in many ways, this election may be less about all the personalities that are involved than it is about that question. because if you think about where the two parties throwing out all of the personalities again, one of the parties, the republicans have said it's gone too far. we're on the road 0 bankruptcy. we can't do this. we can't tax and spend and do what we've done before because we're about to hit the wall the way greece and other places have done it. the other party is making a bet that they've always made and that is, you've said the sky is going to fall before and it never has. and we're just going to go on. so you notice in the state of the union message, the president never mentioned the debt. he never mentioned the deficits.

he just said we need to spends more money. in a historical sense, that's a better bet because they've won that one a lot of times. the republicans are making a more dangerous bet because their bet is based on the fact that the reality has changed and that the public recognizes that change and will therefore vote differently. but this could be the election that's decided on the debate between those two views rather than on which candidate smiles better or has a better family or who comes from your state or those kinds of things. so your answer is, no, that hasn't ended. and it was reagan who famously said that at any and all times, the loss of freedom is but a generation away. much of what reagan did in the united states or go to england what thatcher did in england has almost been forgotten. as those countries have moved in other directions since.

so it's the kind of thing you have to do every day. and believe me, when i was a student, democrats, nationally outnumbered republicans two to one. liberals outnumbered conservatives in polls three to one. and today, that's not the case. that's reversed. so there's been a vast change as a result of these ideas. but that has not all translated into public policy because, you know, coming from nowhere to 49% or 51% is a big deal. but it doesn't take you all the way. >> next question. mr. lacy. >> sir i was wondering if you could expound on the idea you mentioned about resocializing the core. you talked about the difference between having conservatives because of reagan, gingrich or bush versus you know hayek and kirk. i feel like we're not of hayek and kirk and school. and i feel the medial produces more reagan, bush conservatives. >> my reference isn't to whether

you read hayek or kirk or someone else but that the movement of ideas which was really a movement of people who got it, who understood the ideas, who understood they were conservative because of a certain view of man and the future and the role of government was replaced by people who liked reagan. you know, and they sort of shared -- al who spoke to you earlier and wrote a book on the movement began a book with a story that i had told him about shortly after george h. w. bush was elected president, his brother called me and said that he was going to run against lowell weicker in the primary in connecticut. that actually the families had lived next door to each other and the kids didn't get along which was the real reason. but he said i need your help because we conservatives have to stick together.

and i said prescott, you are not a conservative. you have never been a conservative and you will never be one. if you want my help because i don't like lowell weicker, that's one thing but don't try that one. he said no, you don't understand. now that reagan's been elected we're all conservatives. and that's what i'm talking about because it was more a political thing than a philosophical thing. and a movement of ideas, i mean, this doesn't just take place among conservatives. think of the communist world. by the time the soviet union collapsed, the communist party was like the rotary club, more dangerous than the rotary club, but to find -- you would have been hard pressed to find a communist in that party. they were there because they got jobs. they were because that was how you succeeded. it was a key to get into various places and the like. and at its worst description was a bunch of thugs but there was

a bunch of marxist/leninists anymore. no faith there. everybody as the soviet empire collapsed had their moment when they realized it was really over. my moment came if you'll remember in romania or if you read in romania, ceausescu ordered his troops to fire on his citizens and they did. and then the general who carried out the order committed suicide because in order to perpetrate inhumanity that the communists perpetrated the people ho did it had to believe in instinct. they had to believe they weren't just killing people. they were doing it for a higher good. and when that general committed suicide that, told you they didn't have any religion anymore and that he couldn't live with himself for having done it. their ideas were gone and their movement collapsed. and that's on the commune just side. i'm not drawing any kind of an analogy in a sense but as yergin points out, successful political

movements begin with ideas. they then become successful any, and people rush in and the ideas begin to get diluted and they become about other things, about power and jobs and success. when i was a young conservative, if you were graduating from the citadel, you did not join up with us because it was the road to success. it was the road to oblivion. so if you joined, you joined because you believed. and you wanted to believe. by 1985, you joined because you might get a job in washington or you might get this or you might get that. that's a whole different thing. now, you need those people to be successful, but as your numbers grow, you have to make sure that as many as possible are socialized into the beliefs that motivated it in the first place. that's what i was really talking about. i've been preaching this for some time is what conservatives now have to do is go back and

re-create that core. re-create the people who get it. and then the rest of the folks are people that you welcome into your movement. but you don't rely on them for the -- to take the -- to steer the ship because they don't really know where it's going. >> buckley's fusionism was a really a movement the of ideas, not a political movement the initially. >> correct. >> you had national review, modern age, isi, yaf, the freeman. but finally, it finds an expression new york conservative party. >> well, buckley. >> goldwater candidacy. buckley, the fusionism was in large measure an attempt to take you the ideas and to create -- to make them saleable, to make them into something that cog one day become a movement. in the early days, a movement of ideas begins with really debates on college campuses. no matter what movement it is. in coffee houses if you will, or in bars.

it begins with writers talking and writing and arguing. if you again go back 0 communism remember the period when they were in exile. that's what they did. they honed their philosophy and they came up with something in their context they thought they could sell at least with the aid of some guns. that was of at the time, the importance of the buckley run for mayor, for example, was that you could actually go out and run for office. you know, that that was something that this was the beginning of another stage, and there was a sense at that time that maybe you could do something. the goldwater, the two most important elections in many ways of the -- of that era before the reagan victory in 1980 were the goldwater campaign of 1964 and the republican party and the mcgovern campaign and the democratic party. both of those campaigns lost. and both of them brought a

generation of people, people that disagreed very much, but idea-based people, into their party and both of them took over their parties, and the goldwater campaign really told conservatives that they could win. now, if you look at the history, goldwater who became the hero of the right even before the publication of conscience of a conservative stood up on the senate floor and was often the only vote on things. and accused the eisenhower administration of running what he called was a dime store new deal and that that had to stop. he was saying we cannot be just a pale imitation of them. if we are, why are we in this business in the first place? and we aren't going to success anyway. goldwater was nominated for the name was put in nomination in

chicago in 1960 for the vice presidential nomination and got up and gave a famous speech in which the most remembered lines are conservatives grow up. you can take this party. and buckley and these people were putting this together beginning to shift it into a political mode with the things that you talked about and barry goldwater said now is the time to stop arguing among yourselves in the coffee shop to get out and organize and take over this party. and that's what happened after chicago. they marched out. and they took over that party and they nominated goldwater in 1964. and that changed the world. >> do you see that happening today? >> well, we're not in that kind of stage. we're now in a sort of fight within the party about -- it's very different. somebody's told me how great it was in those days. you know, sort of like in the

military. wasn't it wonderful when you had the nazis you could fight or the communists instead of these people you can't mind? and he said the same. he said, you know, back in those days it was rockefeller and percy you know and these people who came out and said we're liberals and then the conservatives said there they are, let's get them. now we have fights in which five candidates get up and say i'm a conservative and i'm more conservative than he is, and so it's a different kind of world. so the question now is not who is a better conservative because if you look at who will do the things that need to be done and how do you get them done, not how do you put that together because it is in fact, together.

>> questions? yes, mr. melon. >> going off that - >> this current primary has all three -- the conservatives. big government conservative, it has libertarian, it has social conservatism. to what extent is the eventual nominee going to set the tone for the future of the republican party? >> the nominee always to some extent does. one of the things that the -- a party does not have -- the way our parties work, it's the guy who gets nominated for the presidency who really sets it up. so depending on who is nominated, obviously you'll have a different emphasis, but all of them have to put all of those different things together and all of them will present a conservative message. the interesting thing, there was a "washington post" article the other day. the interesting thing is the candidates really don't disagree on very much. you know, they don't like each other. they'd all like to have the job. but their disagreement is not as significant as you might think it is, except, except with ron paul on some issues. but even there, most republicans agree with ron paul on about 85% of the stuff.

he falls into -- i think in the readings for this course, there were -- there was a -- there was one of russell kirk's readings about the libertarians. kirk overstates it because he dislikes them as much as they disliked him. but the libertarian -- the problem in all of these places, going to extremes, and of course the libertarians that didn't go to the extremes kirk says wasn't really a libertarian, he was a conservative, is on the foreign policy side. although paul's getting a lot of support there because the other candidates have all sort of adopted a neoconservative position on foreign policy, which is the u.s. role is to go forward and remake the world in its own image. and paul is way extreme the other way. but the libertarian sort of view on that came about because their analysis of history which is entirely correct, the growth of

the superstate as a result of what they call the warfare state, that it's the need to get resources and command an economy to go to war that created everything from the income tax, to the regulations, and all these things. back during the '70s they then said, well, so if you didn't have to have a war, then you wouldn't grow the government? that logically follows. but if there's an existential threat, then you have to spend all this money on defense, but what if there isn't? well, then you wouldn't have to. so they ended up in the '70s with a new left saying the cold war was our fault. because if it was our fault, we could stop it. if it was the soviet's, we couldn't stop it. then we had to defend. i remember recently deceased chairman of the cato institute, who is a dear friend of mine, an economist, he just recently died. i remember after the cold war ended and the libertarians were not involved in c-pac and things like this. i said, you should come back in

because now you're not a borderline trader. you're just an interesting excentric. but what they did was, when you have an ideology and you take it, you know, and you say, how do i get to where i want to go, that's where -- and ron paul does the same thing today. he says, we shouldn't be invading all these countries. i agree with him on that. but then he says the reason we shouldn't do it is this is all our fault. and that's not true. what you get in these camps, you see it with kirk's hostility toward the libertarians. you see it with the objectivist attack on religion and all that. you get people that are ideologically motivated primarily to, you know, to construct the world that doesn't exist. and that's the legitimacy of kirk's observation. was also the legitimacy of what

buckley was dealing with. and he said, okay, let's get real, guys. you know, it doesn't work quite this way and you can't be that ideological. but that fight is an important fight, which is going on now, i would say, in the movement, but now unlike the '60s, the movement is reflected by the republican party. and you've got the -- there are a couple of examples right now. there's a fight going on over the control of the cato institute between the koch brothers, and cato was originally the koch brothers foundation. and became cato. the current people who control the cato institute, because they are libertarians who basically say -- on both your parties. and the kochs are saying, we're libertarians who think that doesn't get you very far. that's a legitimate argument within that movement. on the other side, you have

the -- you have people now who are beginning to say, we can't remake the world in the -- in our image. that was something the neoconservatives really wanted to do. that we could make iraq into little america. that, you know, afghanistan is a place where we could have elections. and i was in vietnam right after -- this takes this -- i'm taking too long. i'm branching out from your -- i'm going to do it, anyway, because i'm long winded. in, i think it was '65, '66, maybe, lyndon johnson went it hawaii and said we're going to win the vietnam war with village elections. i asked, when in the middle of the iraq war, i was in a meeting where they sent somebody from the national security council to explain how we were going to win iraq war. i said, sounds like you have a plan, you're going to keep applying it until you find some place where it works.

we ordered the government, we ordered them to have village elections. so they went. and our greatest allies in vietnam -- and i raise this question in an argument with frank who was a leading neocon -- is. i was at a -- our greatest allies were the montagnard tribesmen. not even vietnamese. their polynesians. nobody knows why they're even there. they're up in the mountains. they were repelled by the regimentation of the communists as they came down. they became our really strongest allies in the war. the vietnamese army showed up at this village and told them they're going to have to have an election. they all looked at them, they said, we've been choosing our head man for 5,000 years in this

whatever way, stone age cultures do this. they said, no, you have to have an election. that night they told the american advisers to stay in their tents and they beheaded all the south vietnamese soldiers that came up there. i raised the point to frank, i said, what right -- these were our allies. these were people who fought with us and they were fighting with us for all the reasons we wanted them to. because they wanted to be free of this. what right did we have to tell them they had to change their governmental selection process that had been in place for 5,000 years? i said, that was absurd. he said, on the contrary, you don't understand, that's the most important thing we could have done because we need to remake things this way. the neoconservatives really believed that. that just leads to a lot of beheadings, you know, and fortunately nobody told those tribesmen that the south vietnamese had been ordered to do that by the americans. so the americans got to survive the evening. but there -- that had never been