The GOP’s Intellectual Unfreezing. By Peter Wehner. Commentary, February 19, 2013.
How to Save the Republican Party. By Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner. Commentary, March 2013.
Reaganism After Reagan. By Ramesh Ponnuru. New York Times, February 17, 2013.
Wehner:
Ponnuru
in his op-ed, and Gerson and I in our essay, offer up policies that we believe
address the issues facing America in the 21st century. People can read both
pieces and judge the merits of our recommendations. But I want to make two
other points.
The
first is that there is an intellectual unfreezing that is taking place within
the Republican Party that is all to the good. People from different parts of
the party and who represent different strands within conservatism are offering
up ideas for what needs to be done. Not all of them are wise, of course, but
competing ideas need to be heard. Fortunately the impulse to attack people as
heretics who should be expelled from the party is for the most part being held
in check. That’s not true of everyone, of course. Some people are
temperamentally attracted to an auto-da-fe.
But it seems to me that in general there’s a real openness on the part of
Republican lawmakers and conservatives to recalibration.
The
second point is that Reagan himself was a fairly creative policy entrepreneur
in his own right. He advanced what was essentially a new economic theory,
supply side economics, and replaced détente and containment with a strategy of
rolling back the Soviet empire.
Those
approaches are well known and seem obvious now, but at the time they were
unorthodox and controversial. It was Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan who in
1980 confessed, “Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas.”
Ronald
Reagan adjusted his policies to meet the challenges of his time, and two
generations after Reagan, Republicans and conservatives need to do the same
thing.
Let the
recalibration and rethinking continue.
