rebuilding the republican party

Check out this article on Healthcare debate myths:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/23/health_care_mythology_97552.html

It's a pretty long read, but very important.  I'm more and more convinced that this is the type of messaging we need going into the 2010 and 2112 cycles - sort of a push back against all these liberal premises that have become conventional wisdom.  Kind of an "Everything they've told us is wrong".  McCain missed a lot of these opportunities in the debates; we need a candidate in 2012 who will be capable of making concise arguments against these types of liberal yarns.  All the more so because President Obama is a very conventional thinker.  Taking the weak premises out from under his leftist policies will leave him looking foolish (or more foolish). 

Despite all their claims to the contrary, Dems have a crucial weekness we can exploit with facts and science.  For an excellent treatise on this, see the late Michael Crichton's "Aliens Cause Global Warming" speech from 2003.

http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html

Dems have completely married themselves to the "science" of man-made global warming.  As the "concensus" further unravels in the coming years, Republicans have an opportunity to once again be seen as the true champions of science and reason.  Ditto with the breakthroughs in adult stem cell (iPS) research versus embryonic stem cells.  This will have the added benefit of broadening our appeal to younger voters, with whom the Republican party has struggled of late.  While I've always been sympathetic to conservatism, my public school education grounded me in the liberal myths and presuppositions that carry one naturally to liberal policy prescriptions.  It wasn't until I began looking more closely that these foundations eroded and I found myself back on conservatism's shores.  This happened issue-by-issue.  I think we can do much to help a generation of youth until now firmly in Democrat land find their way to the Republican party.  They are The Next Right.

Dear Republican Party,

So you lost. And it must have been especially painful, being the party of free markets and creative destruction that you are, that the forces behind your failure was your reluctance to innovate.

Conservative success up until this point has been on the basis of innovation. In the 70s great conservative thinkers put forth their sound rebukes of Nixon-style corruption and Carter-style stagflation under the pretense limited government. By the time Communism was collapsing and the failure of central planning was most obvious, your view of American Exceptionalism seemed self-evident.

But when George Bush came into power he ignored the new context of the 21st century. Instead of innovating where change was necessarily, like with Finance, Health Care or Education Reform, ill-conceived tax cuts and an all out war on terror were the path chosen. This was fundamentally a problem of nostalgia. The enemy was not as clear cut as Communism was. And globalization made American Exceptionalism unsustainable in its current form.

Then came the 2006 elections. The Democrats innovated with an anti-war message. They won. In 2008 the Democrats innovated with the promise of universal health care, ending the war, confronting climate change, and fighting corporate excess. They won.

All the while your Republican message floundered. It argued to stay the course, that the economy was fundamentally strong, that the environment didn't much matter, and that social conservatism could survive in the 21st century.

It is no surprise that as the world secularizes social conservatism seems more and more absurd. It is no surprise that limited government loses its appeal when private fraud is rampant. The Democrats won because they stayed competitive and innovated on what were all the biggest issues. The painful thing was that Republicans weren't out of ideas. On education alone you had dozens of innovative ideas like vouchers that could have revolutionized the quality of American public schools yet were never implement.

What's the lesson to be learned from this? If you want to win again, Republican Party, you're going to have to literally renew itself -- creative destruction applied to ideology. Social Conservatives will have to back off. Foreign Policy hawks will have to become more pragmatic. Science and rationality should be favored over faith and tradition. The environment must be priority. Supply Siders must align themselves with the middle class instead of Wall Street. Civil liberty must be seen as just as important as economic liberty. And a more youthful leadership must resist special interest and tackle corporate welfare.

And a note on wasteful spending: Earmark reform is going to be necessary, but it a go-no-where argument when A. Obama is for it too, B. Earmarks account for so little of what is spent, and C. you're just as guilty in its abuse. No one is going to take your anti-spending message seriously after Bush.

These changes are going to happen eventually but if you try first to revert back to the supposed ideal of Reagan Conservatism your party will only continue to sink. I'm not asking you to move towards the center, just into the new century. It's time to find something new.

Sincerely,

Samuel Hammond