During the past year the views of NR's staff on the domestic political situation have corresponded closely, we judge, to those of the conservative community at large: we have been much and increasingly disturbed by a number of the major policies and tendencies of the Administration. And we have had doubts and disagreements concerning what conservatives should try to do about it. With the formal entry of Rep. John Ashbrook into the New Hampshire primary, the doubts and disagreements are resolved for at least the next several months. We support John Ashbrook now that he has entered the race; and we believe he should have the support of all American conservatives.

The Administration policies, and—perhaps even more important—the tendencies that have caused conservative dismay, are not trifling or incidental. Let us list some of the most significant.

1. During the three years of the Nixon Administration the strategic balance between the Soviet Union and the United States has continuously shifted against the United States. The U.S. has already lost the strategic superiority it held throughout the postwar generation. The diversity of the systems that compose a modern nation's strategic armament makes a summary calculation difficult. But it is no longer disputed by the experts that, if the U.S. is not already strategically inferior to the Soviet Union, it will unquestionably become inferior in the near future unless the current trends are not merely modified but reversed. Over the past years, and conspicuously in the India-Pakistan war, our weakening strategic position has been plainly reflected in our lessened international authority.

   Now it may be that, granted the mood of the country in these years just past, Mr. Nixon could not have persuaded Congress to do any better by our nation's security. But what is perhaps more alarming than the military slump itself is that Mr. Nixon has failed to communicate or even to try to communicate, its existence and its urgency. The strategic shift quite literally threatens the nation's survival. Until public opinion comes to understand and feel this, it is not likely that anything serious will be done about it, no matter what proposals may from time to time be made in or to Congress. And this is the kind of truth that only the President can communicate convincingly.

2. The control apparatus instituted by Mr. Nixon as part of his New Economic Policy is not merely a direct repudiation of the doctrines he has professed and of his explicit campaign pledges in 1968. It is an assault on the freedom of the citizens to deal with each other, a massive turn toward regimentation and centralized rule, toward authoritarian "government by decree." It is also, as we are all learning day by day, a bureaucratic monstrosity. Not only was it unnecessary, but as the experience of many other nations testifies, it will prove ineffective, an added and costly burden to the economy, not its savior. But it is its rude curtailment of freedom, more than any practical economic deficiency, that calls for its rejection. Those citizens with a feeling for history will have shivered as they read the prediction of Paul McCracken (see below), just resigned as chief economic adviser to the President, that controls will not end with Phase II, but will stretch indefinitely into the future. Popular vision is now blurred by the razzle-dazzle and the signs of moderate economic improvement set in motion by forces present prior to the start of NEP, but we believe disillusion with the control apparatus, and bitterness, will set in rapidly during 1972.

3. In the longer run, moreover, the controls will prove powerless to halt inflation, so longs as the more fundamental factors making for inflation continue at work. The control mechanisms will succeed only in disguising the inflation while they distort, strain and cripple the economy. These underlying inflationary forces are present and richly fueled through the fiscal and monetary irresponsibility that has been exhibited by an Administration that entered office with the promise of restoring fiscal health. Although the President has occasionally vetoed a relatively small appropriation of too manifest impropriety, his acceptance, sponsorship and extension of the programs of the Big Society will bring in the next fiscal year the largest deficit in the nation's history, with still larger deficits looming as probable.

4. The huge deficits are the expression of the Administration's seeming conversion to the ideal of the wall-to-wall social-service state, coddling, supervising and controlling the citizens from cradle to grave.

5. Most directly shocking to many conservatives are the signs, especially in the past year, that an Administration under Richard Nixon is not merely playing soft with our avowed enemies, but risking the friendship and support of our proven allies by its manner of playing the new game. It was not so much the political overtures to Communist China that so startled conservatives as the way in which we rudely affronted Japan, Free China, and all the Pacific nations in approaching Peking; and risked, too, the critical strategic interests that are founded on trustworthy relations with the non-Communist states. Similarly, conservatives are astonished at some of the hopes that have been expressed by Administration spokesmen in the kind of disarmament agreement that could come out of the SALT talks with the Soviet Union. Conservatives do not trust Communists.

John Ashbrook's campaign in New Hampshire translates into both symbol and action these misgivings of conservatives, and gives all dissenters a chance to express themselves in a mode meaningful and traditional in the American political system. There are those who argue persuasively that it would be a travesty if no Republican primary ballots carried any other names than Richard Nixon's and Paul McCloskey's. Such a ballot would falsify the Republican reality. McCloskey, in truth, is no more than an interloper in Republican mask; he belongs where John Lindsay has finally been honest enough to betake himself, not merely in the Democratic Party but in its leftmost wing. At the same time, the name of Richard Nixon, though Nixon was and in all probability will again be the candidate of the entire Republican organization (save for its McCloskey-Lindsay fringe), does not embrace all other tendencies within the party. In particular, the conservative tendency, though it can vote for Nixon, has a distinct philosophical and political existence it is not willing to bring under an amorphous and equivocal label. It would have been—many conservatives insist—a sad business if New Hampshire voters (and voters everywhere, who will be identifying themselves with the country's lead-off primary) could have expressed their wish for a changed Republican course only by voting for Paul McCloskey. John Ashbrook has offered them a happier and more fruitful alternative.

We have no notion how the New Hampshire primary will go. We know that there is a very large conservative contingent in the Republican Party, quite probably a majority, but we are not at all certain how conservatives will decide about giving support in primaries to a candidate other than the incumbent leader of both party and nation, even when the alternative is, as it will be with John Ashbrook on the ballot, far closer to them philosophically and politically. We are aware that some of the most venerable among the conservative political leaders of the older generation, among them Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and John Tower, have, so far, been opposed to any primary challenge from a conservative. Who knows. We hope that, with John Ashbrook now present and accounted for, they will mitigate their opposition to a thoroughly democratic clarification, and help John Ashbrook, and conservatism, score a smashing victory over Paul McCloskey, and thereby redirect the Republican Party toward the course that they and we believe in, and believe essential to the nation's survival.

John Ashbrook is one of the exceedingly rare breed in political life: a man at once of principle and of skill and experience in practical politics. Concerning that first characteristic, Wm. F. Buckley Jr. remarked several years ago: "He shows the kind of political courage by which one distinguishes between those automatons who represent us in Washington and those special others who are human beings endowed with mind and an active conscience… a human force in which the high qualities of the statesman come together in profusion." The second is attested by the success with which he has pursued his political career from his leadership of the Young Republican organization and his election to the Ohio Assembly in 1956 through his six successive elections, in spite of two gerrymanders specifically against him, to Congress.

No vote for John Ashbrook will be wasted.