The Road Ahead
February 16, 2009 3 Comments
Like so many of us on the Right, I suspect Ross Douthat is also feeling a bit aimless at the moment. It’s not that conservatives, or at least the center-leaning / progressive / moderate ones don’t have any good ideas…it’s just that we don’t feel like we have a place to send them. Douthat voices that frustration:
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I spent a lot of time during the election just passed issuing complaints roughly like this one about the McCain campaign, and the GOP more generally. I’ve issued fewer over the last few weeks – partially out of exhaustion with the topic, and partially out of a sense that there’s nobody to issue them to. At least during the 2008 election the party had a titular leader, from whose campaign a constructive new direction for conservatism might plausibly originate – even if the campaign in question seemed to have little interest in pursuing any such new direction. Whereas today’s Republican Party has no leaders at all, if you define leaders as politicians with the credibility and power to chart a new course for the party, as opposed to having it charted for them by the GOP’s most vocal constituents and most ideological backbenchers.
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The rest of his piece outlines a lot of potential scenarios for conservatives over the next few years and it’s worth reading. The best part though is his warning in the close, which I agree with 100%:
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But those risks would be preferable to what seems to me like the worst-case scenario for a Republican revival, in which the party regains power without having developed any new leadership at all – as the beneficiary of a disastrous “Obama economy,” but without any ideas for how to handle the situation save the same “clapped-out package of 1980s-vintage solutions,” as Frum puts it, that too many Republicans are content to offer now. Which is why my watchword for now is patience: The only way conservatism is really going to come back is gradually, and the best thing for right-of-center thinkers to do is to call out bad ideas and promote good ones, and wait for politicians with the wit and courage to give some of the best ideas that bubble up a trying-out. This may not happen at all: The Republican Party could remain dysfunctional for years. But I’m trying not to get too discouraged if it doesn’t happen in the first few months of Barack Obama’s Washington.
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If a real leader does not emerge by 2012, we are better off taking our lumps at the hands of President Obama’s re-election machine. If we merely win as the default party under economic duress, we will have learned nothing, which seems to be our problem lately.
Mike,
Along those lines I hope you will continue posting what you consider “new Conservative ideas” for us to dissect. Granted, you may not have David Brooks’ readership (Yet!), but I suspect that if good ideas are to be had, they are just as useful here as elsewhere.
Philip
Well Douthat is full of ‘new conservative ideas’ and as a protégé of Brooks, I think he is continuing that fight, though he wisely stays within a more basic conservative framework (Brooks bashing is a popular conservative pastime for some these days). I like the idea of using the tax code to create a lot of family-centered reforms, which is the basis for much of Douthat’s work. Things like pension credits for stay-at-home parents or a huge increase to the EIC.
There are plenty of good conservative ideas out there (I think we are leading on education reform) but we have to have the right people distribute them. If they come from bloggers, pundits, think tanks alone and not the actual policy makers, the party as seen as ignoring it’s brightest voices.
Very true, Mike. And I’m not hopeful that will change any time soon….