Excerpts

CHAPTER ONE The Six Challenges Facing America These are the best of times and the worst of times, as Charles Dickens wrote. On the one hand, America is the leading country on the planet, with the largest economy and providing the opportunity to pursue happiness to more different kinds of people from more backgrounds than any society in history. On the other hand, our civilization is decaying, with an underclass of poverty and violence growing in our midst and an economy hard pressed to compete with those of Germany, Japan, and China. We can look around us with both great satisfaction and great concern. We are the people who led the coalition that defeated Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and fascist Italy and then led a worldwide coalition that contained the Soviet Empire for a half century before its collapse. While we as a people were winning our battles around the world, here at home our elites were deserting us. For the past thirty years, we have been influenced to abandon our culture and seem to have lost faith in the core values, traditions, and institutions of our civilization. The intellectual nonsense propagated since 1965 - in the media, on university campuses, even among our religious and political leaders - now threatens to cripple our ability to teach the next generation to be Americans. We have placed men on the moon, led the world in molecular medicine, and entered the age of computers ant telecommunications. Yet we have simultaneously allowed our schools to decay to the point that our children regularly score below all others of the industrialized world in math and science. We risk not being able to understand the very world we have invented. It is impossible to know which of these tendencies - our great strengths or our great weaknesses - will prevail. Will historians record America as a meteor that emerged as a world power in the twentieth century, then found itself unable to solve its own internal problems and rapidly declined into a regional power? Or will they remember America as the center of freedom that, having defeated its foreign enemies, found the moral and political courage to revitalize its civilization and lead the human race to even greater levels of freedom, prosperity, and security? It is impossible to know today which story will be told to our descendants. It is clear, however, that the answer matters both to ourselves and to our neighbors on this globe. If we fail to reform, the consequences will be incalculab]e. The underclass of poverty and violence will continue to grow. Our economy will gradually fall farther and farther behind those of our best competitors. Our vision will blur and our civilization continue to lose its focus as fewer and fewer people learn about our culture, traditions, and institutions. We will have fewer scientific and technological breakthroughs. Our quality of health and life will diminish. In this weakened state, we will be unable to sustain our military and diplomatic responsibilities and the world will break into isolated and competing blocs characterized by internal and external violence. Rwanda, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Somalia will all be harbingers of the future. If we can reform ourselves, on the other hand, there is every reason to believe our best days are still ahead. A renewed and reinvigorated America that educates all its children could compete with any country. An America that has replaced the culture of poverty and violence with a culture of opportunity would be the safest, most prosperous place on the globe. An entrepreneurial America that embraces science and innovation would progress at a fantastic pace, opening a vastly greater range of choices to its people than any civilization in history. Such a revitalized America could sustain its military and diplomatic responsibilities with ease and still find the world eager to be led toward greater prosperity, security, and freedom. Once again, America would be the last, best hope on earth. The choice between these two futures is stark and decisive. Either we will pull ourselves together for the effort or we will continue to decay. There is virtually no middle ground. An America that arouses itself to replace the culture or poverty and violence and insists that its children learn the core values of American civilization is an America that will find each challenge more invigorating than the last. But an America that remains passive and apathetic, divided and confused, will be on the road to decline. I believe the task can he accomplished. I believe we can revitalize American society, restore the greatness of American civilization, and reinvigorate the American economy while we remake the structure of American government. My optimism is based on the simple belief that we have seen enough of the decay and failure of the welfare state to be ready to restore our historic principles. Older Americans who grew up with the certainty and convictions of World War II and the Cold War are eager for a rebirth of American values. Baby boomers who grew up with the counterculture are now sober and mature enough to see that many of its principles simply don't work. Younger Americans - from Generation X on down - know from personal experience that a culture of violence, ignorance, and government debt poses a severe threat to their future. When more people below the age of thirty believe in UFOs than believe that their Social Security pensions will be waiting for them when they retire, you know we are ready for a change in course. America has had many similar reform eras. Almost once a generation, we have reached the point where the political system is so out of touch with the new needs and new realities that we require a momentous transformation to set us free once again. The Revolutionary War, the Federalist period, Jeffersonian democracy, the Jacksonian era, Lincoln and the antislavery crusade, the Progressive Era, FDR and the New Deal, the civil rights movement - each represented a tremendous burst of energy and upheaval, conflict and rebirth. Now we are entering a similar era - one that saw its beginnings in the Goldwater campaign, saw some success during the Reagan years, and has finally come to full flower during the historic congressional elections of 1994. As during every reform era, there are sincere people who favor the changes, just as their are equally sincere people who will do everything they can to prop up the old order. It may be more than a decade before the forces that have been set in motion achieve their full result. But most students of American history would agree that another era of American reform has begun. America is a great country with good people living in it. For this reason alone, I am optimistic that the necessary reforms will be embraced and our civilization renewed. However, as my grandmother taught me, God helps those who help themselves. In the past, when America has gotten in trouble, we have always been fortunate to find a generation of leaders who were prepared to rise to the challenge and step outside the normal political currents to engage the overriding issues of the day. This book represents an effort to define those issues. Let me begin by outlining the six major changes that I believe are necessary to leave our children with an America that is prosperous, free, and safe: 1. We must reassert and renew American civilization.From the arrival of English-speaking colonists in 1607 until 1965, there was one continuous civilization built around a set of commonly accepted legal and cultural principles. From the Jamestown colony and the Pilgrims, through de Tocqueville's Democracy is in America, up to the Norman Rockwell paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, there was a clear sencse of what is meant to be an American. Our civilization is based on a spiritual and moral dimension it emphasizes personal resronsibility as much as individual rights. Since 1965 however, there has been a calculated effort by cultural elites to discredit this civilization and replace it with a culture of irresponsibility that is incompatible with American freedoms as we have known them Our first task is to return to teaching Americans about America and teaching immigrants how to become Americans. Until we reestablish a legitimate moral - cultural standard, our civilization is at risk. 2. We must accelerate America's entry into thc Third Wave Information Age. The scientific and technological changes going on around us are far more significant and unprecedented than we have recognized. The opportunities to improve our lives are almost unimaginable. Scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs are creating a feature of enormous power and potential. Yet we are often remarkably incapable of understanding these changes or fitting them into our everyday lives. If we can graps the true significance of these changes, we can lead the world into the information Age and leave our children a country unmatched in wealth, power, and opportunity. If we fail, we will at best thave a lower standard of living and at worst find that another country has moved into the new era so decisively that it can dominate us. Second only to renewing our civilization is making the intellectual investment necessary to understand these changes and harness them to our lasting advantage. 3. We must rethink our competition in the world market. The world is rapidly becoming a place of serious and intense economic competition. The best of our competitors are very, very good. Yet we can only lead the world to freedom if we remain the predominant economy. When the dollar falls against the yen and the mark, America's prestige and ability to lead fall with it. Eventually, our children's standards of living will fall as well. We must rethink all the things that inhibit our ability to compete: regulation, litigation, taxation, education, welfare, the structure of our government bureaueracies. We want our labor to add the highest value so that we can be the most productive and effective competitor on earth. Only then will our children be assured good jobs and higher take-home pay. Given the quality of our competition, this is going to mean real work and real change. 4. We must replace the welfare state with an opportunity society. Every American is entitled to a life filled with opportunity. After all, we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienahle rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet today too many Americans are bound in bureaucracies and antihuman regulations by which families are destroyed, the work ethic is undermined, male responsibility is made irrelevant, and young mothers find themselves trapped in a world where "income maintenance" replaces opportunity. No civilization can survive for long with twelve-year-olds having babies, fifteen-year-olds killing one another, seventeenyear-olds dying of AIDS, and eighteen-year-olds getting diplomas they cant read. Yet every night on the local news, you and I watch the welfare state undermining our society. The vast majority Americans (96 percent by one recent poll) is ready to admit that the welfare state has failed. They have lost faith that government can improve the lot of the poor and want their children reeducated in core American values. We simply must abandon the welfare state and move to an opportunity society. 5. America is too big, too diverse, and too free to be run by bureaucrats sitting in office buildings in one city. We must replace our centralized, micromanaged, Washington-based bureaucracy with a dramatically decentralized system more appropriate to a continent-wide country. As I listen to stories from around our nation about particularly foolish arrogant and uninformed behavior from Washington, I am struck by the conceit that led people to believe a country this size could be managed by people who never even visited your town. How can your affairs be handled by people who don't have a clue as to how much things have changed since the last time a government inspector came through? We simply must shift power and responsibility back to state governments, local governments, nonprofit institutions, and - most important of all - individual citizens. "Closer is better" should he the rule of thumb for our decision making; less power in Washington and more back home, our consistent theme. 6. We must be honest about the cost of government programs and balance the federal budget. Medicare will be in serious financial trouble by 1996 and will start going bankrupt by 2002. If the federal budget remains in deficit, the Treasury will not be able to repay the notes in the Social Security Trust Fund and the baby boomers will see their retirement pensions evaporate. At the current rates of borrowing, a child born in 1995 will pay $187,000 - an estimated $3,500 per year over the course of his or her working lifetime - just to pay off the interest on his or her share of the debt, without beginning to reduce principle and relieve the burden on the next generation. If you are a senior citizen, you need fiscal honesty so we can save Medicare. If you are a baby boomer, you need fiscal honesty so you can have Social Security when you retire. If you are a young person, you will need fiscal honesty in order to have economic opportunity in your lifetime. The American tradition used to be to pay off the mortgage and leave the kids the farm. Now we are selling off the farm and leaving the kids the mortgage. No civilization can survive if parents and grandparents cheat their children by leaving them crushed with debt. We have a moral obligation to balance the budget now. In 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the American public, "Our generation has a rendezvous with destiny." That generation courageous]y met its challenge - and triumphed. Now it is our turn. If we rise to the task, if we meet the challenges of our era, we will leave our children with a much safer and more prosperous nation. If we fail, our children will inherit all the problems we have failed to resolve - plus much more. We will have squandered their inheritance and undermined their freedom. I have spent much of my life studying and working on the problems of how civilizations survive. It began when I was surprisingly young. In the next chapter, I am going to carry you back through some of the personal experiences that led me to believe a nation must continually attend to the challenges that confront it. From there, I shall outline in more detail the six major changes I believe we are facing. Later I shall review the development of the Contract with America and the drama of its implementation during the 1994 campaign and the first one hundred days of Congress. I shall also address what I see as the critical issues that we as a nation must confront ever as we overcome the six vital challenges of renewing our civilization - issues that will engage the energies of every American until the millenniums end. Finally I shall explore the romantic idealism that led our Founding Fathers to pledge their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor to their country and suggest a twenty-first-century vision worthy of that same kind of commitment. The issues are clear before us. The choice is ours. Let us begin.