From Berlin to Budapest: How Republicans Surrendered the Fight for Freedom
There was a time when my former party spoke easily about evil—not as a slogan, but as a real force manifested in regimes that crushed individual freedom and devalued human life.
I was in Berlin with a film crew when the wall came down. A Congressman running for the Senate had family ties in East Germany, and we thought it could make for some powerful scenes reuniting with family members.
Less than a thousand days earlier, Ronald Reagan demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Eight hundred and eighty-eight days was all it took for Reagan’s moral challenge to be answered by history.
My candidate was a Republican, of course, because I only worked for Republicans. Political consulting is like that. You pick a side and stick with it. If not, neither side will trust you.
We were there hoping that the pixie dust of freedom would fall on my candidate. He was what would have been called an “establishment” Republican, which was the sort I tended to work for. I’d like to say that was driven by a deep ideological commitment, but the truth is, those were the kinds of Republican candidates who won most frequently. I learned very quickly that the key to a successful political consulting career was to work for people who were going to win anyway and not screw it up. I was good at that.
At the time, there was more ideological diversity in the Republican Party. More than half the Republican governors were pro-choice in varying degrees. When President Reagan vetoed the 1987 Civil Rights Restoration Act, twenty-seven Republicans voted to overturn his veto. This was a party that included Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, who received a mind-boggling 90% approval from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, and Senator Jessie Helms of North Carolina, who won reelection in 1990 with the infamous “white hands” ad that was an openly racist racist attack on affirmative action.
But across the party, there was an assumption that the Republican Party was united in opposing the tyranny of the Soviet Union. To challenge that fundamental truth would have been like arguing that gravity was a regional phenomenon. Since World War II, the most consistent opponent to the Soviet Union and an expansive Russian Federation has been the Republican Party.
Now that Party is the beating heart of the pro-Putin movement in American politics.