Leader McConnell Receives AEI’s Irving Kristol Award

AEI President Robert Doar (left) and Chairman of AEI's Board of Trustees Daniel D'Aniello (right) awarded U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (center) the highest honor bestowed by the Institute. Photo via AEI.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Annual Dinner on Tuesday, November 12th. Below is the text as prepared for delivery:

"[T]hank you to the entire Institute. You do important work that advances important ideas. I'm glad to be with you and I'm deeply honored by this recognition.

"I appreciate, in particular, the weight of an award named for such a prolific mind as Irving Kristol's.

"The namesake of this celebration understood better than most anyone the value of scholars and intellectuals in American public life. And he understood how their roles were distinct.

"By any definition, Irving Kristol was among the last century's greatest public intellectuals. In an observation for Foreign Affairs about the engagement of academics with Vietnam-era foreign policy, he chose rather modestly to define the role of the intellectual as one 'who speaks with general authority about a subject on which he has no particular competence.'

"By contrast, he observed that 'an economist writing about economics' or another expert working in their respective field is 'not acting as an intellectual' but as a 'professional at work'.

"Quite evidently, Irving Kristol's longtime affiliation with AEI continues to inspire work that advances both intellectual pursuit and professional scholarship… Both broad interdisciplinary inquiry and deep subject-matter expertise…

"…All of it in the service of American ideas worth celebrating. And all to the great credit of an institution worth preserving.

***

"So, once again, I'm grateful… as someone who's spent a great deal of my time in Washington studying institutions. And I thought I might briefly share some thoughts about the institutions that most require our attention and our allegiance.

"The first thing I'll suggest may sound obvious: institutions that endure are built on enduring ideas.

"Take the proposition of free markets and free people. As I'm sure last year's distinguished recipient of this award, Paul Gigot, would agree, that's an idea worthy of an editorial page, and much more.

"How about the notion of restraining the will of simple majorities. In my unbiased opinion, that's an idea worth building a legislature on… Or at least an upper chamber.

"Or take American primacy and leadership as forces for security and prosperity. That's an idea big enough to underpin a century's worth of alliances, partnerships, and trading relationships… And, God willing, centuries more to come.

"Worthy institutions are built on worthwhile ideas. It's impossible to preserve institutions that skip this step.

"I emphasize this not because anyone in this room needs a remedial lesson. But every one of us can think of others who could do with a reminder.

"Perhaps those on both the left and the right for whom American primacy has become a dirty word… For whom the exercise of power is no longer about preserving our exceptionalism, but instead about managing our decline.

"Perhaps those in academia who have abandoned the pursuit of knowledge and free thought for indoctrination, advocacy, and postmodern nonsense.

"Or those in professional scholarship who are tempted to unmoor their institutions from foundational ideas… And orbit instead around individuals.

"Enduring ideas come before enduring institutions. This truth is inescapable. And it ought to be self-evident.

"But what it most certainly is not is self-enforcing. Institutions worth preserving have to be defended. And this is the work which, by necessity, has occupied my focus during my time in Washington.

***

"I realized from a fairly junior perch in the Senate that the power to block bad ideas is every bit as potent as the power to advance good ones. And by design, this power gets considerably greater use in the defense of institutions.

"The first major way I got to put this recognition in practice was in the debate over campaign finance.

"The institution of the First Amendment is built on the idea that political speech deserves explicit protection. And it was as clear to me in the early 1990s as it is today that if you want to defend this explicit good, you need to protect the implicit avenues for exercising the right to political speech.

"Of course, if you buy this premise, it's likely to take you to politically uncomfortable places. The same reason I so strongly opposed federal restrictions on political speech in campaign finance also led me to oppose a Constitutional amendment banning flag-burning.

"Needless to say, I don't mind taking my lumps for unpopular positions, and that one was about as unpopular as they come! But hopefully, it demonstrates that we don't get to tamper with the ideas underpinning our core institutions without risking the institutions, themselves.

"That much has been even more vividly clear in the fight to preserve minority protections in the Senate. Frankly, if you told me in 1985 that one of the most consequential debates I'd participate in would be over the notion of scrapping the legislative filibuster and the Senate's promise of unlimited debate, I wouldn't have believed you.

"It's been quite evident to me that a credible check on majority rule was worth preserving even when it didn't serve my party's immediate political interests. Because wild swings in policy with every transfer of power don't serve the nation's interest. For consequential legislation to endure, it should have to earn the support of a broad coalition.

"And yet, just two years ago, my Democratic colleagues almost succeeded in shattering the defining characteristic of the Senate for short-term political gain. They lined up to scrap the idea of checking majority rule - and the entire institution along with it.

"Well, power is fleeting. And as of last week, we know just how fleeting the power of Democrats' majoritarian dream would have been.

"Of course, while institutions like the Senate are attacked for too effectively carrying out their founding purpose, the co-equal institution of the federal judiciary is attacked for failing to embrace a role it was never meant to play - that of an unelected super-legislature.

"This is, after all, the frustrated expectation behind every attack on the Court of late - from the talk of resurrecting the ninety-year-old specter of court-packing… to vague threats of 'consequences' for Justices who confine their jurisprudence to the text of the law as it is written.

"In each case, attacks on the institution betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the idea on which it is built.

"Thank God that the Constitution assigns the Court a higher calling than validating the preferences of a handful of my most vocal colleagues.

"And thank goodness that the Senate is empowered to restrain their worst impulses - blocking the expansion of the Court, preventing the coercive withholding of security funding to Justices and their families, and of course, withholding consent on nominees who misunderstand the role of a judge.

"Now, to this point, I've discussed how defending institutions often means preventing action. But today, the urgent defense of one institution in particular requires quite the opposite.

"For nearly eighty years - through the Cold War and the dawn of a new century - Western peace and economic advancement have been, first and foremost, the products of American leadership. They are the principal exports of the world's greatest superpower, and engines of prosperity here at home.

"American military might is the guarantor of the maritime commerce that feeds and clothes American consumers. It is the rigid foundation that underpins NATO, the most successful military alliance in world history.

"Today, the American-led order faces the gravest combined threats in its history - from an axis of authoritarians in Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and Pyongyang. But in this critical moment, leaders across the West have unlearned the lessons of that order.

"Some simply forget how the institutions of collective security work. Until quite recently, many of America's closest allies mistook American-led security cooperation as self-sustaining… and neglected their own responsibility to share the burden.

"But here in Washington, others have convinced themselves that the institution of American leadership is actually self-enforcing. Members of my own party now contend that, somehow, the stability of markets and the deterrence of adversaries are achievable without tending to the requirements of American hard power.

"This is a fanciful delusion, and it has flared up periodically throughout American history. But eighty-five years ago, it was resoundingly overtaken by reality.

"Winning the Second World War meant surging investments in defense to 37% of GDP. Korea saw nearly 17%. The Reagan buildup that won the Cold War cost 6%.

"History makes it all too clear that fighting a war is far costlier than deterring one. But today, in the face of the gravest array of threats since the 1940s, we spend less than 3% of GDP on the hard power that sustains American leadership.

"It is even more impossibly naïve today than it was in 1940 to expect that the problems of the world can easily be kept far from America's shores. And it is uniquely shortsighted today to pretend that the world's problems can be dealt with a la carte.

"Today's adversaries are working in concert to test that very assumption… And to undermine and destroy the American-led order.

"Confronting this particular challenge is where I now place my focus. Shoring up American primacy, combatting the dangerous tendency toward isolationism, and urgently restoring America's hard power: this is how I will spend a great deal of the time I have left in public life.

"But, if I might paraphrase Admiral Harold Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations on the eve of Pearl Harbor, dollars cannot buy yesterday.

"Today's investments may well shore up America's defenses and reassure worried allies. But dollars cannot buy back the belief here at home that the institution of American leadership is worth defending. Not if this belief is allowed to wane much further.

"So the defense of the institution of American leadership must be a shared cause. One that starts with foundational ideas.

"It will require that institutions founded on ideas, like the power of American enterprise to advance human flourishing, continue to advance them without apology.

"It will require that those of us committed to securing peace and prosperity are clear-eyed about the means that put those ends within reach.

"I am so proud to navigate by the same unmoving stars - the same unchanging principles - as so many of you at AEI.

"Once again, thank you very much for this great honor."

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