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Redstate
Go
Big or Go Home
By Erick Erickson
May 29th, 2013
In
1960, Barry Goldwater published
The Conscience of a Conservative. In it, he noted
Conservatism
is not an economic
theory, though it has economic implications. The shoe is precisely on
the other
foot: it is Socialism that subordinates all other considerations to
man’s
material well-being. It is Conservatism that puts material things in
their
proper place — that has a structured view of the human being and of
human society,
in which economics plays only a subsidiary role.
The
root difference between the
Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take
account of
the whole man, while Liberals tend to look only at the material side of
man’s
nature.
Fifty-three
years later that
remains a constant. Unfortunately for conservatives, much of the
hand-wringing
over paths forward to victory involve haggling over taxes and balanced
budgets
and spending and debt to GDP ratios, etc.
Ben
Domenech gets to the heart of
this.
The
choice for the Republican Party
is whether to invest more in the 2010 strategy of this populist strain,
to
refine it and connect more policy proposals to it … or to embark on an
effort
to restore the party’s standing as the adult in the room – the
competent, clean
cut, good-government technocracy that sees the chief appeal of
Republican
politicians as combining agencies and seeking out efficiencies rather
than
rolling back government power and draining bureaucratic swamps. The GOP
swung
back to this technocratic approach on a national scale in 2012, and
let’s just
say the electoral results left much to be desired.
The
budgetary and economic wonkery
only gets the GOP so far and that isn’t far enough to victory.
In
truth, I think it will take a magnetic
personality to pull the GOP out of the gutter. We live in an age of
personality
politics. But that personality will have to have a message that
resonates with
the American public. What resonates right now with the American public
is a
deep-seated distrust of government. Any Republican way forward must
capitalize
on this. In other words, the faces in Washington who can play the role
are very
limited to people like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and — if immigration can go
away as
an issue and the base forgives him — Marco Rubio...
Read
the rest of the article at
Redstate
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