Not far from where George Washington lived, a gathering of conservative eminences met Wednesday to affix their John Hancocks to the Mount Vernon Statement, an eloquent new expression of the timeless truths that make America what it is.
I won’t tell you their names here because who they are is infinitely less important than the principles they affirm. You can read the full statement here, but for the moment consider this excerpt:
“In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics. The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.
“Some insist that America must change, cast off the old and put on the new. But where would this lead — forward or backward, up or down? Isn’t this idea of change an empty promise or even a dangerous deception?
“The change we urgently need, a change consistent with the American ideal, is not movement away from but toward our founding principles. At this important time, we need a restatement of constitutional conservatism grounded in the priceless principle of ordered liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
“The conservatism of the Declaration asserts self-evident truths based on the laws of nature and nature’s God. It defends life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It traces authority to the consent of the governed. It recognizes man’s self-interest but also his capacity for virtue.”
Those four paragraphs convey a sense of the urgency felt by the signers, many of whom remain loyal Reaganauts. Mount Vernon could be their valedictory to a movement that first emerged nationally in the 1960s, but was then temporarily displaced by the disastrous aftermath of Nixon’s debacle in the 1970s.
The Gipper brought it back in the 1980s, but the movement has been mostly quiescent in the years since then. Now it seems poised to rekindle the revolution.
There have been murmurs among some of the Reaganauts’ successors about the “presumption” of such graybeards pronouncing ex cathedra concerning conservative orthodoxy. It is no such thing, of course, because no genuine conservative would ever submit to such enforced orthodoxy.
The Mount Vernon Statement is simply a reminder of the eternal truths about individual freedom, limited government, economic progress, and national security that invigorate and unite all friends of republican liberty.
The statement speaks to the reality that republican liberty has been under siege by liberals for many years. Maybe those who have fought longest on the battlefield are most intensely aware of its dangers and are thus subject to an ingrained pessimism.
I’ve been around a while, too, but such pessimism is foreign to what I see of freedom’s prospects. America overcame far greater perils, then experienced what Mr. Lincoln called a “new birth of freedom.” Evidence abounds that another rebirth is imminent.
How else to explain millions of formerly apathetic Americans who joined the Tea Party movement in the past year? You see it in the thousands of Right bloggers who are reinventing the free press. It’s there in a millennial generation empowered by the Internet to take entrepreneurial enterprise, family renewal and independent community to undreamed-of new heights.
Maybe most of all, you see it in the incredible devotion and valor of the young uniformed men and woman who defend this country.
Like the Rascals said: People just got to be free. That’s why the old truths of conservatism must always be new discoveries for the next generation.
