Ashcroft warns Lincoln Day audience of a liberty crisis

Former U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft spoke of the importance of liberty during the Cape County Republican Women’s Club’s annual Lincoln Day celebration.

He first thanked the people of Southeast Missouri — not only for their history of support, but also for their contributions to the culture of modern conservatism.

But, he said, the GOP is facing a serious moment of trial in the next election.

“Politics isn’t easy,” Ashcroft said. “It’s not all winning. We’ve got to be prepared to be resilient, and if we ever needed resilience, we sure do need it now.”

He said in his estimation, American society has succumbed to a dangerous confusion.

“We have begun to confuse the concept of liberty with the process of democracy,” he said.

The former, he said, dates to before the country’s founding, to the time of the Boston Tea Party.

When proto-revolutionaries in the original colonies gathered to draft the Virginia Resolves in 1765, they first composed a document that articulated individual rights, Ashcroft said. The next day, they began the process of framing the hypothetical government.

They worked in that order deliberately, Ashcroft said, because individual liberties are more important than the structures of government that are intended to further and preserve them.

“They didn’t call themselves the ‘Sons of Democracy,’” he said of the Sons of Liberty. “The centrality of liberty is the core of America’s existence.”

Ashcroft, also a former Missouri governor and U.S. senator, made sure to stipulate he is not opposed to the idea of democracy, invoking Churchill’s famous line about democracy being “the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

But the Founding Fathers, he said, understood the inherent shortcomings of the system — the most dangerous of which is the possible tyranny of the majority.

“It’s time for the Republican Party to make it clear that we stand for liberty,” he said.

Ashcroft also spoke about immigration, saying the American government’s benefits spending has gotten out of control.

“We’ve become a benefit society instead of an opportunity society,” he said.

Liberty begets opportunity, while benefits beget bureaucracy, he said. While he admitted the current birth rate in America means immigration is necessary, he drew a distinction about what that immigration should be.

“We need to attract the right kind of immigrant,” he said. “We don’t need immigrants who come here for free stuff. We need immigrants who come here for freedom.”

He spoke of the need for resiliency when it comes to religious freedom. He shared a story about seeing a historical site where people once were burned at the stake, wondering what conviction it must have taken to endure such a punishment.

“They don’t recant,” he said. “A person has the right to respond to the Almighty. ... The core of our existence is liberty, and the core of that is religious liberty.”

He said conservatives must insist the U.S. Constitution is not “some evolutionary document” subject to interpretation.

“It is something for which men have lived and fought and bled and died to protect,” he said.

He finally spoke about the national debt, which he said has become unmanageable.

“Democracy in America has stopped being democratic,” he said. “We are now buying votes by providing benefits to attract a constituency.”

That the practice would increase the debt only made it more unacceptable, he said.

“That’s the money of generations to come,” he said, likening it to taxation without representation the colonies suffered under British rule.

Liberty, he said, should come first.

“We must respect it, must cherish it, must speak it, must teach it, must write it, must read it and we must vote for it,” he said. “Vote for the Republican Party.”

tgraef@semissourian.com

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