Go Big or Go Home. By Erick Erickson. RedState, May 29, 2013.
The Path Forward for Conservative Reform. By Ben Domenech. Real Clear Politics, May 28, 2013.
The GOP Coalition Wants More Than Just Limited Government. By Conor Friedersdorf. The Atlantic, May 30, 2013.
The Importance of the Limited Government Brand. By Ben Domenech. Real Clear Politics, May 31, 2013.
A Note on Bridging the Gap Between Conservative Theory and Pracitce. By Jake (Diary). RedState, May 31, 2013.
Erickson:
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.
The
message to seize on is pretty straight forward. Under Republican and Democrat
policies in Washington, particularly accelerated in the past five years, the
United States meritocracy has given way to an aristocracy.
Only
those of means can get ahead. Increasingly, they view their role as making life
comfortable for the less well off instead of enabling the less well off to
become well off. Wall Street, banks, major corporations, politicians,
bureaucrats, lobbyists, and the rich are the only ones who can prosper because
they are the only ones who can either navigate the system or afford to pay
others who can figure out how to navigate the system.
For the
rest of Americans, from small business to the middle class, the only path is
one of dependence on a governmental structure too byzantine to figure out and,
should one be smart enough to figure out, too costly through litigation,
regulation, and complication to navigate through.
An
America where, as Lincoln said, every man can make himself, is replaced by an
America where men are made by how the government takes care of their individual
circumstances. Students are no longer trained to be creative, entrepreneurial
citizens, but to be workers for others. The self-employed are encumbered to the
point of needing to be employees of others. The nuclear family is
disincentivized and destabilized.
The
America where one could work hard and get ahead is less and less possible
because Democrats wish to force us all onto a safety net on which all are entangled,
ensnared, and punished if we escape. Republicans, for fear of being disliked,
would rather nibble at numbers than paint a picture of a better America for
everyone.
Just
one fact worth noting: under the present system, enabled by Republican and Democrat
alike, a single mother on $29,000.00 a year and government benefits would have
to get to $60,000.00 in salary to make it worth her getting off the safety net.
This is a bipartisan construct, but one only an outsider conservative can build
a campaign around fixing to the betterment of the single mom and everyone else.
But, to
begin, the Republicans must be able to relate. With distrust in government at
an all time high, a relatable Republican is probably going to be a guy who
hates the status quo, not one who talks Washington wonkspeak.
Domenech:
There
is a healthy acceptance on the part of a significant number of influential
intellectual and policy elites that the state of conservatism is not strong,
and that it requires reform. But do they understand why that reform is
necessary? It is because the Republican Party has failed to connect with
people, has failed to meet the test of competency, and has failed to live up to
its promises.
Justice
Scalia once wrote, “Campaign promises are—by long democratic tradition—the
least binding form of human commitment.” One could explain much about what the
Republican Party has done over the past fifteen years, and even earlier, as an
effort to prove Scalia thoroughly correct. The goals of limited government,
fiscal responsibility, traditional values, and strong defense have been an
ever-present litany of bullet points from Republican politicians – but talking
about limited government and actually delivering on it are two very different
things. As the representatives of conservatism in the political square, the
Republican Party has proved to be an abject failure at delivering to the people
what they promised.
There
are numerous reasons for this. Under President Bush, it was largely because the
core of his policy team never believed in limited government anyway, and the
challenge of an unexpected terrorist attack and their subsequent push into
security buildout and two wars pushed any limited government efforts beyond the
initial tax reform to the side. The failure of the Bush administration to meet
its core conservative promise led to dissatisfaction in the limited government
ranks, and the failure of Republican competency – not just in war, but in
disaster relief, and in character – led to the 2006 rebuff. The response to the
financial crisis made this frustration explode in an organic outpouring of
disgust and distrust toward government institutions which led directly to the
rise of the Tea Party.
As Sean
Trende has pointed out on numerous occasions, the Republican Party has won not
so much when it was conservative as when it was populist, the Contract With
America being the most prominent modern example of a government reform agenda
packaged for a dissatisfied electorate. The Tea Party kept this trend alive:
this movement dramatically altered the makeup of the Republican Party on
Capitol Hill: today, the overwhelming majority of House Republicans arrived
after the 2006 election, and half the caucus came from 2010 on. It had an
enormous impact on the governorships of major states as well. These are
politicians who have fewer establishment credentials – some of them not even a
college degree – and tend to be far more libertarian-leaning than preceding
classes. But they are also far more populist, and more averse to negotiation on
matters of principle, which they view as a betrayal of the base which put them
in power. That’s why things like sequestration, a nightmare for the Washington
elites, have actually happened: this crew wants, more than anything, to live up
to their promises.
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
Republican Party needs to understand that shrinking its policy aims to more
modest solutions is not going to be rewarded by the electorate. Yes, they need
to tailor their message better and find policy wedges which peel off chunks of
the Democratic base (winning political strategy is built on an understanding
that every drama needs a hero, a martyr, and a villain). But what’s truly
essential is that the party leadership rid themselves of the notion that
politeness, great hair, and reform for efficiency’s sake is a ballot box
winner, and understand instead that politicians who can connect with the people
and deliver on their limited government promises – not ones who back away from
them under pressure – represent the path forward.
