This piece from W. James Antle III in The American Conservative is another attempt to find a new way forward between what he sees as the two current poles within the Republican party: “There is a flavor of conservatism that has not been discredited by the events of the past eight years. If anything, its criticisms of loose monetary policies, overconsumption, reckless private and public borrowing, uncontrolled immigration, and foreign adventurism now seem prescient. It is a conservatism unburdened by the Iraq War, the ‘heckuva job’ response to Hurricane Katrina, and the financial meltdown, which are really the biggest contributors to the GOP’s decline. Most of all, it is a conservatism that does not need to rehabilitate the Bush legacy since its leading exponents were never full-time Bush apologists.”
This is one of most prescient paragraphs about the Republican Party that I’ve read recently: “But conservatives don’t need higher volume. Conservatism at its best is a tough and demanding creed. To sell it, you can’t call people who’ve lost their jobs and their homes ‘losers.’ You need to sell the virtues of a growing and flourishing economy and the free-market policies that will make it happen. Because conservatives aren’t a majority, hard-edged accusations of socialism wind up alienating millions of potential allies — voters who are a little uncomfortable with Obama’s spending, particularly if it threatens to saddle their children with debt, but who recognize that the government needs to act to stave off an economic collapse. And so conservatives need to understand their political opponents. They need Whig men and Tory measures: candidates who genuinely feel the voters’ pain.”
This is a fascinating piece that attempts to cast the internal struggle within the Republican Party and the conservative movement as a battle between so-called “low church” conservatism and “high church” conservatism. It’s a helpful way to describe the issues that need to be central to this conservation.
With all the talk about how the GOP has to find its way again after the last two election cycles, it’s disheartening that fewer people are actually engaging in the thoughtful work of actually articulating what the right way should be for Republicans. I think this piece by Scott Payne is a good starting place to identify some core areas that conservatives should embrace or re-embrace, in some cases.
