On Conservatism
It began with Ronald Reagan. There was something that happened that lit the spark inside. Reagan – the man who would turn around the nation’s ailing economy and end Soviet Communism – was beloved in the Sanders’ household.
After losing the only grandfather I’d ever known, I suppose on one level I was drawn to a president who seemed rather grandfatherly – caring, funny, kind and strong.
That said, my support for Reagan was also very practical. After the searing images from “The Day After,” ABC’s acclaimed miniseries, were burned into our impressionable minds, me, a third-grader, and my brother, a seventh-grader, took to our backyard swinging shovels, digging a huge hole every day after school for about two weeks.
The president didn’t want my older brother and me to feel the need to dig a fallout shelter in our backyard, but that’s what we did. Our parents were just happy we were outside playing. Supply-side economics didn’t cement my affection for President Reagan, but rather it was fear of those godless Communists who’d like to vaporize me and my brother.
If Reagan started it, then my parents cultivated it.
My Baptist-minister father entertained pulpit guests from Eastern Europe who told the local congregation horrific stories of religious persecution behind the Iron Curtain. My mother and I would pray at night for our Christian brothers and sisters who couldn’t worship God freely.
Stories about Revolutionary War soldiers at Valley Forge, who fought in the cold snow without shoes and coats, deepened my love of country at a young age. My mother taught me to value our country and the truths deemed self-evident by our founders.
Barely a teenager, I read from the pages “National Review” and watched William F. Buckley Jr. slay those who would enter his court on “Firing Line.” While others tuned into Johnny Carson, I stayed up late and watched Newt Gingrich and Bob Dornan deliver long, special order speeches to a single camera and an empty House of Representatives.
Politics, increasingly, was a way to protect our freedoms. I traveled all over the state as a high school student, listening to a Texarkana preacher with a funny last name who told whoever would listen that he wanted to go to Washington to lessen the burden of an intrusive federal government.
But the election returns in 1992 showed that my candidate who had grown up in Hope, Ark., had lost, while another candidate from Hope, in a much bigger race, had won. Months later, after I had worked in his special election campaign, Mike Huckabee broke free from the jaws of defeat, becoming the Arkansas’ new lieutenant governor.
As my love for politics grew, my desire for knowledge deepened.
As I rounded out my teenage years, I added depth and breadth to values and beliefs by pouring over the pages of Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind,” George Gilder’s “Wealth and Poverty,” and Robert Bork’s “Tempting of America.”
Kirk taught that rights and responsibilities are a gift from God and those who came before us, and that tradition is not to be mocked. It provides a living connection to the past, present and future. Gilder proved that capitalism, at its earliest roots, was not based on greed; on the contrary, it was built upon the notion of a gift. He knew that it would take new wealth to do away with poverty. Bork showed that over time the Constitution must take into account new circumstances, but stay true to its original understanding.
Others who’ve hiked a similar trail have stories analogous to mine. The conservative path, on which I still walk, was forged by loving parents, principled politicians and deep thinkers.
