Mickey Edwards

Mickey Edwards spent most of his congressional career in the field of international affairs as the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, official observer of numerous overseas elections, a contributor to magazines on international affairs, speaker at the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Military Academy, advisor to the U.S. State Department under Secretary Colin Powell, and foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. Edwards was a leader in Congress’s support for the first Gulf War but has been a frequent critic of America’s seeming insistence on inserting itself into difficulties wherever they occur around the world: not a pacifist and not an isolationist—he has written persuasively for America’s role as a promoter of human rights and liberal democracy and believes the U.S. needs to be more deliberate about when and where it intrudes on the international stage.

Nobody has had a better, or more comprehensive, close-up view of American conservatism—and how it has changed—than Mickey Edwards. He was a leader in Barry Goldwater’s grassroots campaign to reshape the Republican Party, national vice chairman for the Young Republicans when they formed the conservative core of the party’s activist base, national chairman of the American Conservative Union, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference, one of three founding trustees of the conservative Heritage Foundation, a conservative staffer for Republican members of Congress, and director of the Reagan presidential campaign’s joint House-Senate policy advisory committees. It was Edwards who hit the campaign trail for Reagan, was with him in his hotel room in New Hampshire when he won that state’s pivotal presidential primary, and later intervened with fellow conservatives to bridge the gap between movement activists and Reagan’s Vice President, and later President, George H. W. Bush. And it was Edwards who helped shape the Republican National Convention platform for the Reagan campaign.

But what conservatism was then and what it is now are very different animals. As Edwards wrote in his book, Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost—and How It Can Find Its Way Back, published by Oxford University Press, people who call themselves conservatives today support positions that earlier conservatives would have marched on Washington to protest, including government surveillance of citizens and defense of corporate abuse (earlier conservatives championed small business and market competition). In his devastating critique, Edwards cites dramatic changes in Republican Party platforms as the party and its conservative movement have begun more and more to represent the antithesis of what they once stood for. Neither Goldwater, conservative’s 1964 choice for President, nor Reagan, their choice in 1980, could win a Republican primary today, Edwards claims. As for himself, he points to a study by a political science professor who found that Edwards, once chairman of the American Conservative Union, with a 100 percent conservative rating, and one of the most conservative members of Congress for 16 years, would be one of the more liberal Republicans in Congress today if he voted exactly the same way.

But Edwards does not know modern conservatism only through an activist lens. When he left Congress after 16 years, during which he was an acknowledged conservative leader, he continued to write from a conservative viewpoint in weekly newspaper columns in The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Boston Herald, and in a weekly broadcast on NPR’s All Things Considered (his Los Angeles column was entitled “On the Right”). At the same time, he introduced a new class on American conservatism at Harvard, where he had begun a teaching career that lasted 16 years at Harvard, Princeton, George Washington University and Georgetown. The course examined every aspect of American conservatism (distinguishing it from European and Asian conservatism; American conservatism at its root was originally similar to the European liberalism of John Locke, with its emphasis on individual rights and freedoms). Edwards taught about conservatism by looking at both policy and theory, introducing students to the work of Hayek, Von Mises, Friedman, Churchill, Burke, Buckley, Kirk, Irving Kristol, and other voices of the early conservative movement.

The heart of Edwards’ argument is that what passes for conservatism today is not that at all, but a hodgepodge of big government and anti-government, liberty and state control, populism and elitism, limited government and military adventurism. It is an argument he has taken all over the country, on campuses, through the airwaves, and in newspaper and magazine articles. It is not an attack on conservative ideas but an attempt to reclaim them and to recapture the title from those who have usurped the name of the movement without even a rudimentary understanding of its principles.

Fierce, articulate and nonpartisan in his judgments, Mickey Edwards is one of the nation’s best-known defenders of the Constitution, protesting unconstitutional expansions of federal and presidential power (regardless of which political party is guilty), criticizing practices by police and prosecutors that limit a citizen’s access to justice, and arguing against federal and local government targeting of American citizens with far-reaching surveillance activities. A board member of both The Constitution Project and the Project on Government Oversight and co-chair of a task force on privacy and security, he played a central role in an MSNBC special debating the NSA’s surveillance programs, was part of a select American Bar Association task force investigating presidential claims of the authority to bypass federal law, a key member of the American Society for International Law’s task force on limits to the authority of the International Criminal Court and co-chairman of a high-level Constitution Project task force on the war power. As a member of Congress for 16 years, he fought vigorously against well-intended reforms that violated fundamental tenets of the Constitution and pressed his congressional colleagues to meet the responsibilities the Constitution had placed on them.

A former professor at Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown and the University of Maryland Law School, Edwards has defended the Constitution at law schools, public policy schools and at public events in every part of the country and in dozens of newspaper and magazine articles.