Thursday, February 21, 2013

The GOP’s Intellectual Unfreezing. By Peter Wehner.

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.