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LONDON—Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), President Pro Tempore of the United States Senate, delivered the following remarks at the Oxford Student Union on November 21, 2017:
It’s great to be back in the United Kingdom. You know, when I told my youngest granddaughter I was coming, she got so excited. She loves rock and roll history, especially the Beatles. So when she asked what I remembered about the British Invasion, I told her everything. I told her about the media frenzy, the screaming crowds, and the public panic that ensued when the British beat us back at the Battle of Bunker Hill. And I told her how relieved we all were when the King’s troops got back on their ships and sailed back to England.
The Revolutionary War was an awkward time for US-UK relations. But hopefully my being here is a sign that we’ve put our differences behind us.
Now for the record, like my granddaughter, I am a huge Beatles fan. And I’ll never forget the audience’s reaction when they played their first set in America: hundreds of women crying hysterically, screaming at the top of their lungs, and fainting en masse. I find that I usually have the same effect on people.
You think I’m joking, but I’m not. In the hundreds of speeches I’ve given over the years, I’ve made plenty of people faint. Some have even died of their boredom. When audience members start falling to the floor, that’s usually my sign that it’s time to wrap up.
In seriousness, it’s a privilege to be here. Twenty-five years ago Ronald Reagan stood before this very body and said that of the many honors he’d received in his life, few could match the experience of standing at this podium, speaking to this distinguished audience.
I feel the same way standing before you today. Who would ever have thought that this son of a metal lather, who was born in poverty in a Pennsylvania steel town, would one day have the opportunity to speak in this celebrated hall—a place where kings and prime ministers, captains of industry and cultural icons have contested the great issues of their time.
I can just imagine Disraeli and Gladstone duking it out right here in this very room. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it. I saw it last time I was here.
I’m doubly honored to be here today to mark the 25th anniversary of President Reagan’s address to this body and to share some remarks in his memory.
To many of you, I expect—perhaps to most of you—Ronald Reagan is a figure you read about in books. Many of you likely have no memory of his presidency. Many of you probably were not even alive during it.
But to me, Ronald Reagan is more than a historical figure. He was a dear friend, and an ally in some of my earliest political battles.
Indeed, Ronald Reagan played an important role in my very first run for the Senate.
I remember well the day in March 1976 when my wife and I gathered around our television set to watch the future President deliver an address entitled To Restore America. Reagan was then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, running against Gerald Ford. In that speech, Reagan sounded a number of themes that later became hallmarks of his presidency. He talked about how he felt America had a divine purpose, a rendezvous with destiny, and how the American spirit unleashed was one of the greatest forces for good our world had ever known.
Reagan’s words inspired me. They electrified me. In part because of his stirring message that night, six weeks later I filed papers to run for the U.S. Senate.
Reagan’s role in my race wasn’t over. Following a closely fought nominating convention, I faced a tight primary race against a well-known, well-connected opponent. I was the outsider in the race. People accused me of being a carpetbagger—a fake Utahn—because I was not born in the state.
On the eve of the primary election, and with the polls still close, Ronald Reagan endorsed me. I’ve been told it was his first, and only, primary endorsement ever. Reagan’s endorsement provided an extra surge of energy to my campaign, and with that support, I went on to win the primary and the general election as well.
I’ll always be grateful for the inspiration and the support Ronald Reagan provided me in that first campaign, back when I was a political novice, a political nobody. The telegram with his endorsement—yes, we still used telegrams in those days—hangs in my office. It’s one of my favorite mementos, and a reminder of the signal role Ronald Reagan played in my life.
You know, Reagan and I actually shared a lot in common. Yes, we were both conservatives. And yes, we were both movie stars. Or often mistaken for movie stars.
But there was also more.
We both started off as Democrats, for one thing. He, a Hollywood liberal. I, a blue-collar tradesman. We both idolized Franklin Roosevelt but later became disaffected with a Democratic Party that seemed to believe that government was the answer to all of life’s ills and that seemed embarrassed about America’s role in the world.
We both came from humble circumstances but found success through grit, determination, and a belief in hard work. I like to think our backgrounds helped us connect with everyday Americans who didn’t enjoy privileged childhoods or fancy schools.
Not that there’s anything wrong with fancy schools, of course. They tend to have excellent judgment in selecting speakers, for example.
But our experiences coming up from humble circumstances, I think, helped us understand the challenges so many people face just to put food on the table and a roof over their head. It also gave us a great love for America, because we knew firsthand that in America, one’s beginnings don’t have to determine one’s future.
Now, up to this point I’ve focused on my own experience with Ronald Reagan. But I’m far from the only person whose life he affected. Indeed, it’s difficult to overstate the impact Ronald Reagan had on my country, and on the world as a whole.
Three decades removed from his presidency, I think we take much of what he accomplished for granted. For many or most in this room, communism has always been dead, America has always been the global economic leader, and our best days have always appeared to lie ahead.
But when Ronald Reagan took office, none of that was a given.
Start with communism. The Cold War may seem like a distant relic at this point, but I assure you, it was a very real struggle with very real consequences for all of us. And I say all of us because that includes those here today who had not yet been born.
Arrayed against the values of freedom, liberty, and individual choice was an ideology that exalted centralized control, stamped out personal freedom, and sent millions of men, women, and children to early graves.
I know it’s fashionable these days to want to rewrite history and to challenge established views. But I tell you, as sure as I stand before you today, that communism was evil. It was a plague on our planet. A triumphant Soviet Union would have meant the end of individual liberty as we knew it in the West. It would have meant the end of freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of the press. Even a draw in the Cold War would have meant decades of continuing geopolitical uncertainty and an ever-present danger of nuclear war.
When Reagan took office in 1980, communism was on the upswing and American power was in retreat. The USSR had recently invaded Afghanistan and was strengthening its grip over Eastern Europe. There was good reason to think the Soviet Bloc would persist well into the next century and beyond.
And it wasn’t just the Soviets. The year prior, America had been humiliated when Iranian revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage. There followed a disastrous failed rescue mission that seemed only to underscore American impotence.
America was in retreat economically as well. Unemployment was high, GDP was stagnant, and double-digit inflation had become a way of life. The word that came to define this era, coined following a pessimistic speech in which President Carter told Americans to turn down their thermostats and stop driving as much, was malaise.
Ronald Reagan would have none of this. Always an optimist, he told Americans that their best days were in front of them. He said the present gloom was a passing spell, the result of failed leadership and an overreliance on Washington bureaucracy.
As president, he sounded many of the same themes that had inspired my run for the Senate. He spoke of the American spirit and American ingenuity. He described our country as a choice land—a shining city on a hill—with a mission and an obligation to safeguard liberty from statist oppressors. And he saw communism for what it was: an evil, godless regime that claims to empower the many but instead exalts the few at the cost of great suffering and degradation.
President Reagan reoriented American economic policy away from the high-tax, high-spending fiasco of previous administrations and toward a cleaner, simpler, fairer approach. He cut taxes, worked to slash Washington bureaucracy, and all the while told the American people that it was them, not the government, that was the true engine of economic growth.
And the results spoke for themselves. Inflation fell from 13.5 percent in 1980 to 3.2 percent in 1983. By 1986, four years after the Reagan tax cuts passed, economic growth had increased by 18 percent. And when President Reagan left office in 1988, more than 18 million new jobs had been created.
In foreign policy, President Reagan stood up to communism and revealed it to be a fundamentally failed and false ideology. He rebuilt American power and might at a rate the Soviets simply could not match. Pilloried as a warmonger by holier-than-thou leftists, he showed that peace through strength is not an oxymoron, but rather a winning strategy against hollow strongmen. America’s free market economy, which Reagan helped unleash, proved far stronger than Soviet Russia’s top-down command economy, which was neither nimble nor robust enough to keep pace with Reagan’s reforms. And so, while America flourished, communism collapsed.
Through these and other successes, Ronald Reagan showed Americans that conservatism works. He showed Americans that the answer to every problem isn’t more government. To the contrary, he showed that the answer is frequently less government. Unencumbered by sclerotic and often misguided government mandates, the American spirit and American work ethic can produce untold prosperity and growth.
And what’s true of America is no less true of any place else on earth. There is nothing uniquely American about the drive to succeed, or to innovate, or to invent. Business acumen is not limited to one population or one culture. All people have within them the desire to better themselves and to provide a more fulfilling life for their posterity.
And so, the lessons of Ronald Reagan’s presidency are universal. Reducing unnecessary central power emboldens private initiative. The people, left to their own devices, will act in ways more likely to spur economic growth than will overstuffed government bureaucrats told to come up with some grand design. And efforts to constrain the human spirit, though they may appear to succeed for a time, will always be doomed to failure, because the human spirit is irrepressible and seeks always for freedom and opportunity.
It’s noteworthy that when President Reagan addressed this very body nearly three decades ago, it was here that he announced the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, an initiative I was closely involved with in Congress.
Democracy, and faith in the human spirit, is more relevant today than ever before. In the Middle East, the protection of religious minorities and the promotion of democracy is a matter of particular urgency. As we progress in the military fight against ISIS, the final blow to its evil ideology will emerge as we help ensure the prosperity of local communities, the protection of individual rights, and the promotion of democratic principles. As President Reagan said, the only cure for what ails democracy is more democracy.
Now, I can’t share my memories of Reagan without also offering some thoughts on the current state of the Republican Party.
No doubt the vast majority of the coverage you all see in the news media on the Republican Party is negative. The narrative, which I’m sure you’ve all heard many times and probably internalized, is that the Republican Party is a dying party—a collection of old white men who, as President Obama once put it, cling to their guns and their religion, who are scared of change, and who will soon be dead, anyway.
Now, most of you are probably thinking I’m not exactly the best messenger to rebut that narrative.
In my defense, I’m pretty sure I have at least a few years left in me. And I can tell you that this narrative that the Republican Party is dying is not only false, but illogical.
Let’s reflect on this narrative for a moment. According to the narrative, “The Republican Party is dying. It will soon be dead.”
Curious, then, that the party now holds the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. More curious still that the party holds two-thirds of state governor’s offices and fifty-six percent of state legislature seats. The Republican Party has complete control of the state government—meaning it holds the governor’s office and both chambers of the state legislature—in twenty-six states, a majority.
The Democratic Party? Following elections earlier this month, it will have complete control in eight. That’s not a joke.
So you have twenty-six states with complete Republican control, and only eight with complete Democratic control. That’s better than a three-to-one ratio. You tell me which party is dying.
Indeed, this notion that the Republican Party is dying is based on two fallacies. First, that political alignment is static. Second, that past results determine future performance.
Let’s take the first fallacy, that political alignment is static. You may have heard of an influential 2002 book called The Emerging Democratic Majority. This book, which was published early in George W. Bush’s presidency, examined demographic data and voting patterns and concluded that Democrats were on the cusp of an enduring majority.
Specifically, the authors noted that, first, the proportion of white Americans was due to decline over the coming years and the proportion of minority racial groups due to increase. Second, the authors observed that members of minority racial groups tend to be more Democratic than whites. In simpler terms, whites tend to vote Republican, minorities tend to vote Democratic, and there are likely to be proportionally fewer white voters and proportionally more minority voters in the future.
Fair enough. Indeed, the 2008 election of Barack Obama seemed to bear this thesis out.
But there’s a problem with it. It doesn’t account for changes in individual partisan alignment.
Many voters, perhaps most, tend to pick a party early on and stick with it. But not all do. Some swing back and forth. Others leave the party of their youth as they realize the other party better matches their values. That’s what happened to me. It’s what happened to Ronald Reagan, too. It happens to a lot of people. And here’s a dirty little secret: this change from one party to the other as people grow older—it usually favors the Republicans.
Winston Churchill is reputed to have said if you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brain. There’s some truth to that, and I don’t say that just because that’s what happened to me.
When you look at polls across generations, you see that young people tend to hold more liberal views and older people more conservative ones. And this holds true across time. You see it in polls taken in 1970, in 1990, and in 2010. Given population turnover, that means there is a population of people—a sizeable population—that begin their voting life on the left side of the spectrum and gradually move to the right.
When you have some time, look up the backgrounds of prominent American conservatives. You’ll be shocked how many cut their teeth on the 1972 George McGovern campaign.
McGovern was probably the most liberal major-party nominee in American history. He lost in a landslide, to Richard Nixon of all people, because his views were so far out of the mainstream. But there sure are a lot of prominent conservatives who were McGovernites back in the day.
And so the fallacy of The Emerging Democratic Majority was that voting patterns circa 2002 wouldn’t change. College-educated whites would vote Republican, blue-collar whites would remain marginally Democratic, and minorities would remain overwhelmingly Democratic.
Donald Trump’s election blew that premise out of the water. In the 2016 election, college-educated whites—long the backbone of the Republican Party—voted for Hillary Clinton. Blue-collar whites, meanwhile, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. And minority voters gave their support to Hillary Clinton, albeit in lower numbers than for Barack Obama.
Between 2002 and 2016, there was a seismic shift in the blue-collar vote. Long a core Democratic constituency, over the course of fourteen years, this enormous bloc of voters switched sides. The demographic changes predicted in 2002 may have borne out, but the voting patterns did not.
The simple fact of the matter is that politics is a dynamic business. Party coalitions are constantly changing. The American South for a hundred years was the base of the Democratic Party. Now it’s solidly Republican. The Republican Party was born in the Northeast. For decades Vermont was the most Republican state in the nation. Now the Democratic Party is ascendant in the Northeast and Vermont is a Democratic bastion.
Though it does have a Republican governor. Not all hope is lost!
The purpose of a political party is to win. If a party goes long enough in a dry spell, it will adapt to better match the electorate. That’s why there are no permanent majorities in politics, and why the claim that one party is destined for eternal success while the other is doomed to permanent defeat is foolishness.
Yes, older people in America tend to be more Republican right now and younger people more Democratic. But that’s often been the case in my country’s history, and it hasn’t doomed the Republican Party yet. Yes, white voters tend to be more Republican right now and minority voters more Democratic. But that may not always be the case. And more importantly, even if present alignments remain relatively stable demographically speaking, shifts in voting patterns among subgroups—even minor shifts—can make a world of difference.
Remember the blue-collar vote, which I mentioned earlier. Donald Trump’s genius—I recognize that’s not a word you often hear associated with him in the media, though in many things he is a genius—was his ability to tap into the blue-collar vote in a way that no Republican had since, well, Ronald Reagan.
According to one statistical analysis, eight-and-a-half million people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 pulled the lever for Donald Trump. That contrasts with only two-and-a-half million Romney voters who switched to Clinton. And if you dig into the data, what you find is that a whole lot of those eight-and-a-half million Obama-Trump voters were blue-collar workers.
So don’t let the Democratic boosters in the media trick you into thinking present demographics mean the Republican Party is on the path to oblivion. As long as there are Republican candidates able to tap into voters previously aligned with the other party, the GOP will be just fine. And I have every confidence there will be plenty such candidates in the future. That’s what we politicians do: we work to win votes.
I’ve already gone on at some length here, so let me just briefly mention the second fallacy behind the claim that the Republican Party is dying, namely, that past results determine future performance.
Many who argue—or who argued prior to the 2016 election—that the Republican Party is doomed used Barack Obama’s election as their baseline. They assumed that because President Obama did however well with such-and-such groups, the next Democratic nominee would as well.
But every Democrat is not Barack Obama. President Obama was a singular political talent, a once-in-a-generation orator, if you ask me.
One thing the 2016 election revealed was that Hillary Clinton, for all her strengths—and I do think she has many—does not have President Obama’s natural political talents. She is a hard worker and a tough, dedicated advocate, but I think most of us would agree she does not have the ability to thrill a crowd the same way Barack Obama does.
And so the fact that President Obama had a certain level of success with certain voters did not mean Hillary Clinton was destined to have that same level of success. Look at Reagan. He won 49 states in 1984. That didn’t portend a permanent Republican majority any more than President Obama’s 2012 election foreshadowed a permanent Democratic one.
It’s easy to get caught up in the moment and to think that what’s true now in politics will always be true in the future. But those of us with longer experience know that what’s true now in politics is almost never true in the future. You’re lucky to predict what the political climate is going to be like a month from now, let alone a year, or a decade. What would have happened if two-and-a-half years ago I had stood here and told you the next President of the United States would be Donald Trump? You would have laughed me out of the room.
To succeed in politics, you always need to have the future in mind. It can’t just be about the present. You need to have a vision: What will people need in the future? What will they want? How can I speak to their future aspirations?
Ronald Reagan understood this better than anyone. When he spoke of America as a shining city on a hill, he hearkened back to America’s Founding and the words of our Pilgrim forebears. But he also touched on our hopes for the future. Yes, America has been a shining city on a hill to prior generations, a proponent of democracy and freedom, however imperfect our application of those principles may have been. But America also aspires to be that shining city on a hill. Americans want our country to lead. They want to set an example of liberty and equality. Ronald Reagan tapped into these innate yearnings within the American character, and in so doing, led his country back to confidence and prosperity.
I, for one, have great confidence in the future of my country and the future of the Republican Party. Right now is a rather interesting time in American politics. Much of what we thought we knew now seems upside-down.
But the only constant in politics is change. The Republican Party will continue to adapt, as will the Democratic Party. And the leaders who will win the future will be those who are able to tap into the American spirit and speak to our future aspirations.
That’s what Ronald Reagan did. That’s what our greatest leaders have always done. And that, in my view, is the measure of a successful president.
Thank you again for your kind invitation.
