Citizens for Free Enterprise CEO and former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey joined Erick Erickson at The Gathering in Georgia to talk about Citizens for Free Enterprise, school choice, and his accomplishments leading the state of Arizona for 8 successful years.
Below you will find excerpts from the interview, which can be viewed in its entirety here.
Governor Ducey: What I really noticed on the right is there was no one really doing the hard work of actually registering new voters, of getting into those hostile rooms – and you can probably tell I like going in to hostile rooms and making the case for things I believe in. It should scare all of us to death that if you went into high school or a college classroom today with a placard that said “socialism” and “capitalism” – it’s about a 50/50 proposition. So if we don’t get back to making the case and then asking those young people to identify with certain principles that can influence their future career and pursuit of happiness, we’re going to be really behind the eight ball.
Governor Ducey: Arizona was the first state in the nation to pass universal ESAs, Educational Savings Accounts. We were the first state to get it over the finish line, and that was most powerful in some of our more hostile rooms – where there weren’t a lot of Republicans, but there were people whose children were trapped in schools that weren’t doing all that well, and they had the same value that they wanted to work hard, climb the economic ladder, and wanted their children to learn something of value in school – and they were the ones that helped get those votes.
Governor Ducey: We don’t beat Democrats by becoming them – and I have spoken out against this big government Republicanism that I see creeping in on the right because I think we’re only sharpening the knife that the left will eventually use on us. There’s a lot of freedoms that are worth fighting for in this country, and they’ve been articulated by your previous guests very well: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion – but it really has been this freedom to pursue the American dream, to seek opportunity that has helped differentiate our country. I mean, part of the reason we are so consequential around the world is because our economy has been so innovative and we have created such wealth that it’s funded the greatest military force in the history of the world, and it’s allowed us to overcome a lot of the stupid spending decisions that have happened in Washington, D.C. – and if we’re to lose that, then so much of our might dries up, and we need to be the spokespeople and the defenders and the advocates of free enterprise and proper free enterprise principles. The other thing I want to say is, I think you can see by the net inflow into Georgia – I’m very proud that Arizona’s among the fastest growing states in the country – Americans vote with their feet, voters are smart, and so are consumers. Look what they’ve done and how they’ve punished some of these corporations that have made really poor, woke decisions.