Lately I’ve been putting in a lot of thought about the political scene in general, and my small role in it. Some of that has been put down for all to see in my “50 year plan” series of posts, but other portions are still swirling around in my mind waiting to coalesce into the words I’ll eventually post on monoblogue. (Rest assured I don’t have writer’s block, more like life and time block sometimes.)
A couple items that I stumbled across thanks to my local blogging brethren have shifted my thinking into a different but just as tangible action. Crabbin’ linked up to a commentary by WorldNetDaily founder and columnist Joseph Farah while Delmarva Dealings hooked me up to a post on a website called “Conservative Times” which was also thought-provoking.
So it got me to thinking: is conservatism really dead as Joe Farah believes?
To me, the principles that are regularly considered “conservative” are generally correct; however, just as the left wing politicans abandoned the sobriquet “liberal” once the connotation was successfully changed by conservative pundits, it now appears those who favor a less intrusive government but also favor an interventionist foreign policy where it’s required may have to abandon the term “conservative”. (As noted in the Conservative Times post, many people who bill themselves true conservatives are isolationist, and I part from them in that regard.) The politicians and media on the left have successfully given the term “conservative Republican” an almost equally bad name as that assigned to liberalism – note the lefties’ pet term for themselves is now “progressive.”
In a way, the name changes are quite ironic, given that many of the principles of what’s been known as conservatism evolved from what’s known as “classical liberalism” – embodied by the writings of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill among others. It wasn’t until the last century that those who favored a more interventionist federal government reallocated the term “liberal” for themselves.
But Farah’s article, in particular, got me to thinking. He notes, “First, one must understand that conservatism is, by definition, a defensive agenda. When one’s goal is simply to “conserve,” or preserve, or to hold onto what is good and right, you have abandoned the idea of advancing. In military terms, your objective would be holding on to turf, rather than attacking, defeating the enemy, taking new ground.”
If you’re familiar with the board game “Risk”, it’s a game that bills itself “The Game of Global Domination.” Quite simply, the object is to take over the world by eliminating your opponents’ armies off the board through a combination of good strategy and a little luck. One option in playing the game is to simply defend and build up a small number of armies on the territories a player holds, which would equate with Farah’s analogy. But, in Risk, by seizing territory one receives cards that entitle a player to eventually attain additional armies as well as gaining proportionally more armies as the number of territories held increase. Thus, holding on to a small number of territories in a defensive posture eventually seals a player’s doom as he’s overwhelmed by opponents who have become stronger by seizing the remaining territories.
But the way I see government is completely different. Perhaps it’s because I do planning for a living (granted on a small scale) but I feel that government should follow a few basic principles:
- The government should be as small as possible with limited tasks, those that cannot be done as well by the private sector or the market. For example, a standing army is a legitimate federal task, but federal involvement in the health care industry is beyond their assigned duties.
- The closer the government is to the people, the better and more responsive it is. Tasks which have been usurped by the federal government should, where possible, be reassigned to the states or even counties. I think this would encourage a bevy of possible solutions to problems which crop up, rather than the “one-size-fits-all” approach that the federal or state government seems to come up with.
- Above all, the reason I prefer government that’s as close to the people as possible is that smaller government can more easily be proactive rather than reactive. It’s a lot easier to steer a rowboat around an iceberg than to steer the Titanic around it.
For all of these reasons I think that it’s time for people who feel like me to abandon the “conservative” moniker. Unfortunately, even though we’re really much more in favor of progress than the so-called “progressives” (a group whose idea of progress is adding layer upon layer of laws and regulations on average folks while exempting themselves), we have long since ceded the use of that term.
Saying that, though, there are elements of the past that we want to keep. I still believe that the Constitution as written is the law of the land, and where it says something like, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”, that means what it says. Just as importantly, where the terms “right to privacy” and “separation of church and state” are not included, the silence of the Constitution on these matters meant that they were supposed to be determined by the states and the people – not by judicial dictate. The Founding Fathers have placed within the Constitution a means to change it, but they made it difficult on purpose – thus it’s only been successfully done 17 times, and just once in the last 35 years. (Awhile back, I had some suggestions for new amendments as well.)
As I’ve noted before, I’m a fan of two contemporary leaders in our government. One was Ronald Reagan and the other is Newt Gingrich. While I don’t agree with every little thing both these men have done or advocated in their exercise of governmental power, more often than not I’ve seen their ideas work when put into practice. And what I truly admire about Newt Gingrich is that he’s a forward-thinking individual. Like me, I feel he espouses government that’s proactive rather than reactive.
I’m on the e-mail list for “Winning the Future”. Last week I got an e-mail that spoke about something more important to him than running for President. Regardless of whether I or anyone else thinks he has a legitimate chance to become President, I’m enthusiastic about the idea of someone of his stature and beliefs putting together an organization like American Solutions; one that professes to work on solutions, that, as Gingrich notes, make it possible to, “move the entire system — if we can have school board members committed to incentives, hospital board members exploiting new technology, and state legislators who understand how to bring market principles to public problems — this country can and will fix itself.”
So I think it’s high time Republicans like me and dare I say Newt Gingrich (and on a posthumous basis Ronald Reagan) should really be known as “reinvention” Republicans. We want to move the party away from staid, defensive conservatism but also want to maintain the principles embodied by our Founding Fathers when they wrote the Constitution. Not only that, I think we’re in favor of keeping many of the ideas which were later written into our founding document.
Unlike the view of true libertarians, I think government does have a place and once in awhile there’s a compelling public interest that outweighs individual freedom. But the place we’ve arrived at after 230 years of independence does not leave the people too independent at all. It’s time to work toward rolling back the influence of the federal nanny state and shifting the balance of power in this nation back to where it belongs. And I think reinventing the Republican Party to one that advocates this change is the option we as the GOP need to follow.
So no longer am I a conservative. It’s time to go on offensive, retake our rightful territory, and become a “reinventionist.”
