ideology

 This is something I've been grappling with for a while.  Any suggestions or advice would be most welcome.

The Conservative Paradox (note: this is equally problematic for liberals as well; just flip the factors around and you have the same situation)

Conservatives believe in limited government: people work best when they are unconstrained, and government should be as small as possible to minimize restraints and allow people to live their lives as they so choose.  We endorse this behavior particularly in the marketplace, as we believe the free market allocates resources much more effectively than government oversight.  Even if some types of spending are irresponsible or even morally wrong, the free market punishes and rewards behavior better than the government does, so it should be left to act unfettered.

But...

A good majority of conservatives believe that the government should regulate moral behavior such as same-sex marriage, abortion, drug use, etc.  We believe that these practices are inherently wrong and threaten society at large, and that a responsible government eradicates these ills by outlawing them.  

So...

If I have stated these two goals correctly, they seem to contradict each other on their face: in one instance we want a small and non-intrusive government, and on the other we want a powerful and far-reaching government.  Why do we feel that people are perfectly capable of economic self-governance but need the government to make their moral decisions for them?  (The flip side is equally damning for liberals: why can you trust people to make their own moral decisions but don't trust them to know how to spend their money?)

Personally, I do have deep personal beliefs about the moral issues that the culture wars have been and are being fought over.  Having said that, though, I feel uncomfortable with granting the government the power to make these decisions.  I don't really want Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi deciding my moral convictions, and would rather that be a private decision informed by my church, my family, my own reading, etc.  

Any comments, thoughts, criticisms, etc. are welcome.

I often hear from moderates that it should be a worthwhile goal to "get away from ideology".  My response, though, is that a political ideology is really nothing more than a guiding philosophy underpinning a set of political positions.  And "getting away from ideology" suggests that we judge issues based on their own merits, and not according to some guiding philosophy.  Sounds reasonable enough, except that issues are not independent, discrete units.  They are all interconnected, sometimes in subtle ways.  For instance, from the Great Society, we know of the connection between generous welfare state benefits and the breakdown of the traditional family unit.  So, if after some rational cost-benefit analysis of each separate issue, the non-ideological moderate concludes that government should have a generous welfare state but yet still promote the traditional family through family-friendly policies, what is the sense in that?  Isn't this contradictory state of affairs arguably worse than the ideologue's supposedly dogmatic adherence to a rigid philosophy?

Defining the Republican/Conservative Party

One of the biggest mistakes we as Conservatives and Republicans have made over the past four to six years is that we allowed the Democrat Party and the libs to define who we are and what we stand for.

George W. Bush and Karl Rove sat back the past six years and allowed the Democrat party and the liberal media to attack the party, the administration, the administrations policies, and the economic record these policies have produced. George W. consistently stated that he believed it was disrespectful to the "office of the President" to respond to the flurry of constant attacks.

As a result, the majority of the American people do not understand how the banking crisis has been culminating since the 1970's and how President Clinton helped to accelerate the problem. They are not aware that the Democrats holding power in committees consistently blocked efforts by Republicans (and President Bush) to reign in Freddie and Fannie through regulation. They are not aware that the CEO's of Freddie and Fannie were former hacks of the Democrat party and the congressional black caucus. They have not seen the mounds of video with the democrats in congress stating how there was nothing wrong with Freddie and Fannie.

Further, most Americans are not aware of the economic record of the Bush Administration. Most are not aware that no president has had more consecutive months of job growth than George W. Bush (including Reagan). The American people are not aware that the fastest growing segment of the American electorate are those making over $100,000. They are not aware that 40% of all voters voting in this years election make over $75,000 (the highest ever).
 

Furthermore, most American people do not know that the poorest segment of the electorate (those making under $15,000) has shrunk from 11 percent to 6 percent. And further, they still are not aware that the "working poor" (those making between $15,000 to $30,000 annually) have shrunk from 23 percent to 12 percent of the electorate. Most Americans are not aware of the significant growth of GDP this country has experienced through the majority of the Bush Presidency. And lastly (as I don't have time to list everything), most American's are not aware that if the black population were their own country, they would be the 16th richest nation in the world. How is that for improved racial equality.

No one from the Republican or Conservative groups have adequately communicated these facts to the American Electorate. If we do not find a way to successfully communicate our ideas, values, and successes, we will continue to fail. We must stop this vicious cycle of allowing the Democrat party and the liberal establishments to define who we are and what we stand for. We must define ourselves to the American people.

Doug Peterson

www.twitter.com/dpeterson329

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I just got back from the RGA conference in Miami. And though most of the learning and listening for me happened in sideline conversations, Tim Pawlenty put his finger on why the "traditionalists vs. modernizers" debate David Brooks is trying to foist on us is the wrong one. Pawlenty argues we need to return to our core principles and apply them to 21st century issues. This is essentially Newt's argument too. And 21st century issues doesn't just mean taxestaxestaxes. It means we need to be for broad, sweeping, dramatic free-market solutions to issues like health care and the environment that don't let us get painted as any less visionary or aggressive on those issues.

Let me lay down a few propositions here for discussion and debate.

For the foreseeable future, the GOP will continue to be the party of the Reaganite triumvirate of a strong national defense, free markets, and traditional values. Any effort to displace any part of the coalition will be met by fierce and automatic resistance. When Bush tried to transplant free markets with "buying good policy" on Medicare and education, the patient nearly died on the table from blood type mismatch. With the GOP in the minority, now is not a good time to be throwing parts of our coalition over the side -- but to keep everybody in the fold and add new people.

American elections are by and large not referendums on ideologies. They are contests of personality, optics, and performance in office. This goes the same for when they win or we win -- whether it's 1980, 1994, or 2006/2008. The Democrats did not have to change their ideology to win; they needed to change the charisma level of their standardbearer and needed an economic crisis and a prolonged unpopular war.

Because ideology doesn't matter in elections, and so much of politics depends on ephemeral characteristics like personality and who was in when the economy cycled south, the parties paradoxically have relatively wide latitude to govern ideologically without fear of public backlash once they get in. This is why cries of "socialism" were so ineffective during the campaign, and likewise why Bush got most of what he wanted in his early Presidency, even before 9/11. If Barack Obama is able to adopt far-left policies and make it look like he's making the trains run on time, the country will enter a new liberal era not by virtue of public opinion, but by acquiesence to what appears to be competent governance. In 1993-94, the Clintons tried to move the country to the left and looked incompetent in the process. It was the latter more than the former that opened a door for conservatives in 1994.

There is a relationship between ideology and competence in that ideological governance makes the other side fight harder, while middle of the road policies usually stymie effective opposition (but don't move the ball ideologically). This means that Mitch McConnell must obstruct to increase the likelihood of Obama being seen as ineffective or incompetent (independent of his ideology), but we have to lead with our positive alternatives to inoculate against the inevitable charge that the GOP is too negative.

What does this mean for the current party debate?

It means that the GOP will stick to its traditional principles, while distancing itself from examples of Bush's botched execution. It also means that modernization will happen in other, more useful contexts  -- be it in the aggressiveness with which we apply conservatism to a nontraditional issues, revamping how we use technology and modernizing our grassroots efforts, and most crucially, by fielding younger, more inspiring candidates who can transcend petty battles between the "so-cons" and the "fis-cons" by providing a better hope of winning elections and restoring both factions to power.

This is not the United Kingdom, where there is a center-left majority in the population and the party as currently constituted could not possibly have won. In an ideologically flexible America, the political tenor of the times will be determined by the respective positions of the two major parties. If the GOP moves to the center and Democrats stay the left, America will be a center-left country. If the GOP represents the right and Democrats the left, America will be in the center. But if we can continue representing the right, and goad the Democrats into the center, as happened in the '90s, America will be a center-right nation again.

You can read a lot about the Republican Party's current status (Much of it posted on Kos, which was kind enough to link to this site -- maybe stop kvetching so much about your new visitors, ya?). There were extremely few places that voted more heavily for McCain than for Bush -- and that can't be due soley to McCain, because Palin was running too -- and campaigned hard in Appalachia.

What is there to do, people ask, and people come up with tactical decisions.

That won't matter one jot, because you are still the minority party.

The minority party ALWAYS engages in voter suppression. A movement predicated on voter engagement is asymmetric warfare to the minority party. It will not help the minority party to try and achieve parity. (can you tell I worked at the Army War College?)

So, you ask, how do the Republicans avoid perishing in obscurity, doomed by demographic change, among other things?

Show some courage, make some big changes. And don't be afraid to take on the Golden Cows. Make a splash, make sure that everyone listens to "it's not the same party anymore" -- just like the Democrats managed this year.

1. End the Corporate Welfare that goes to the Prison Industry.

2. Hell, end corporate welfare in general. Understand that people who aren't doing so hot don't like to hear about huge corporations and how well they are doing. So... make it so they don't have to!

3. End the War on Drugs

4. Do something different with foreign policy. Anti-China, Pro-Iran, something. Reinvent yourselves. I can't see anythign that the democrats are really treating as sacred here...

I guess the bottom line is that you can cast smaller government as not anti-poor, but anti-freeloading-corporations.

There has been some recent blog posts here that have talked about conservatism and the GOP being in dire straights. There is no doubt that the GOP is in bad shape. Public perception has plummeted along with self-identification. However, the mistake being made of conflating the GOP with conservatism is one that we should quickly clear up.

I, as a Republican operative, obviously have concerns for the Republican Party. However, I am a conservative first and the decline of the Republican Party is NOT a decline in conservatism. In the past forty years the word conservative has gone from being a dirty word to the plurality political identification of Americans.

There are a lot of blue collar, union Democrats who are conservatives. There are suburban Republicans that are liberals. Conservatism's goals and the GOP's goals are 90% of the time the same, but it is not the case that it is 100%. It is conservatism's best interest to have conservatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties. This is not in the best interest of the GOP. The GOP's best interest is accumulating all the voters as possible in their tent.

As we consider the "new" or "next" right it is important we realize that reviving the GOP is undoubtedly in the best interest of conservatism.