IMPRIMIS

Imprimis, which in Latin means "in the first place," is Hillsdale's national speech digest. It publishes presentations delivered at the College's many seminar and lecture programs. Begun in 1972 (the year of my birth) with a circulation of 1,000, it now reaches over 1.7 million readers monthly, the largest thing of its kind. Imprimis promotes the principles of individual rights, limited government, free market economics, personal responsibility and strong national defense. It is part of Hillsdale's commitment to "pursuing truth and defending liberty."
I have mentioned Imprimis to most everyone I know. It is a FREE publication sent out by the preeminent Conservative University in New Jersey, Hillsdale College. Imprimis (current and past issues) can also be read and free PDF copies downloaded at their website http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp
When a guest gives a speech at Hillsdale, the transcript is published in that month's Imprimis.
With such guest speakers as the late Paul Harvey, Ronald Reagan, Margret Thatcher, Clarence Thomas, Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, Larry Arnn, F.Lee Bailey, Fred Barnes, Bill Bennett, Gary Bauer, Rush Limbaugh, James L. Buckley, Sarah Palin, Steve Forbes, Milton Freidman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer, Michelle Malkin, David McCullough, Michael Medved, Benjamin Netanyahu, Walter E. Williams, George Will, J.C. Watts, Cal Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Fred S. Singer, Tony Snow, Shelby Steele, Hillsdale President George Roche, Dan Quayle, Grover Norquist, Edwin Meese and many others having graced the pages of Imprimis issues, you can understand why I recommend this priceless publication.

I began reading Imprimis in high school. I subscribed to my own copy in 1990. I then began subscribing to two copies in 2002 so I could share it with friends and neighbors. I have given away dozens of copies and have personally contributed to more than 100 subsequent subscriptions by those I recommended it to. However, I first heard about Imprimis from Paul Harvey and over the years his advertisement and support of the monthly digest has resulted in a great many of the now 1.7 million current subscribers!

I have many favorite issues and among them is the February 2009 issue by Rush Limbaugh.
Surely you are aware of the current controversy surrounding him and the comment made regarding his desire for President Obama to fail in implementing his Marxist agenda of wealth redistribution and government consumption of the private sector. In his speech to Hillsdale he addresses the popular movement by confused Conservatives who say the era of Reagan is over and that we should embrace the centrist and Leftist ideals espoused by the current Democrat party. In true Imprimis fashion and only as the legendary Limbaugh can do, he explains what Reaganism really is, why it is not dead and why Conservatives MUST NOT turn away from those principles!

Thanks to Hillsdale, I have permission to reprint this speech and I hope it inspires you to join your fellow Conservatives in taking back the Republican party.

You can start by calling 1-800-437-2268 or click here to apply online.

January 2009
Rush Limbaugh
Do Conservatives Need to Get Beyond Reagan?
THERE ARE ongoing discussions and debates among conservatives about the kind of president Barack Obama will prove to be, and about how they should react to him. But there is a larger and more important debate going on within conservatism-a debate about what conservatism is. Remarkably, we are hearing from a lot of people who are thought to be conservatives that conservatives need to "get beyond Reagan." After all, these people say, "The Reagan era is over." And the liberal media love to print their articles and broadcast their pronouncements to this effect. My response is, well, yes, the Reagan era is over in the sense that it has been 20 years since Reagan was president. But the funny thing is, I never heard the liberals saying that because the era of FDR was over—it ended in 1945—that they needed to "get beyond FDR."

They didn't say that 35 years later when Reagan was first elected, or when he was reelected in 1984. They didn't say that when the liberals lost Congress in the 1994 election. Nor did they say it after the 2000 or 2004 elections. Instead, they kept arguing and fighting for the ideas they believe in. And now Mr. Obama is plausibly promising to revive the era of FDR.

So why are some so-called conservatives today arguing that we need to "get beyond Reagan," by which they mean that we need to abandon the ideas that Reagan stood for? To understand the roots of this argument, I think we only need to look back to the years when Reagan first emerged onto the national scene. There was a lot of resentment at that time among many of the elites in the Republican Party because Reagan hadn't gone to the right schools, he didn't come from the right part of the country, he had been an actor rather than a lawyer, he was a bumbling dunce, he was an extremist who was too far outside the mainstream to win, and so on.

People have been making these kinds of arguments for a long time. They were saying that conservatives needed to get beyond Reagan even before the Reagan era began. A few of them are the same people. Many of them are new. But what they have in common is that none of them agree with the principles that Reagan stood for. And I would argue that this means that they are not conservatives.

Today the get-beyond-Reagan arguments are often put in so-called pragmatic terms of needing to create blocs of voters who will support the Republican Party. And in order to accomplish this, all that conservatives have to do, these self-proclaimed smart people say,iis embrace the idea of big government, because that's what the American people want and because only so-called big-government conservatives will be able to create blocs of voters by spending money to do them favors. But in answer to this, one has to ask the question—and I'm being a real pragmatist myself here—what's left for government to spend these days? It's already bailing people out right and left with taxpayer money that the government doesn't have.

The spigot has been turned on under President Bush. The Obama administration, we can presume, is going to be even more generous in terms of bailouts. But honestly, when we look at auto executives being grilled on TV by liberal members of Congress about their irresponsibility, can we take it seriously? Has anyone ever been as irresponsible with money—and in their case other people's money—than these very same self-righteous members of Congress?

As history has amply demonstrated, down the line the kind of central planning that Mr. Bush has begun and that Mr. Obama plans to escalate isn't going to work. Although it may succeed in increasing the control of government over people's lives—which is how many liberals these days seem to define prosperity—it will fail miserably in restoring economic health to America. So in fact, during a time of economic trouble like this when liberals are in charge of both elected branches of government, conservatives have a golden opportunity to reintroduce to the American people the free market ideas and policies that have made our country the greatest and most prosperous country in human history.

My first point, then, is that there is no pragmatic reason today for conservatives to abandon the ideas of Reagan. It is worth remembering, after all, that despite the warnings of Republican "pragmatists" in the economically bleak 1970s that Reagan was too far outside the mainstream ever to be successful politically, Reagan won the presidency in two landslides—and that in 1994, his party took over the House of Representatives, for the first time in 40 years, using Reagan-like arguments.

But there is a second and more important point to be made in response to the argument that conservatives should get beyond Reagan. The main idea that animated Reagan wasn't anti-communism or supply side economics. Reagan's main idea was the main idea of the American founding—the idea of individual liberty—and the policies that he supported, both internationally and domestically, grew from that. America was founded on the idea that our individual freedoms derive from God, not from government, and that government should protect those freedoms and never violate them. Reagan argued, and history has shown, that America does best when it is true to its original idea. It does best when its people are left free to work in their individual self-interest—not meant in the sense of being selfish, but in the sense that they are left free to work to improve their own lives and the lives of their families, and for the good of their communities and of the nation at large.

The biggest problem with the argument that conservatives should get beyond Reagan, then, is that the idea of individual liberty will never go out of style as long as America exists. To argue that the Reagan era is over is to argue that the era of freedom is over. And to argue that conservatives should abandon Reagan's principles is to argue that they should stop being conservatives.

There is no such thing, at least in America, as "big-government conservatism." A government that abides by the Constitution and protects our God-given freedoms is by definition limited. Rather than carving out blocs of voters by surrendering their principles, conservatives need to continue to tell the American people as a whole that the ideas of individual liberty and limited government are right and that the policies that come from those ideas work best to produce prosperity. Conservatives don't need to reinvent themselves. They need the courage to be once again who they were.

Download PDF- 01/2009

Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.
Copyright © 2009 Hillsdale College