By Timothy Daughtry
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
America’s political history over the last century – and,
if we stay on our current course, its political future – can be read in two
symbols that were ever-present in the last election.
The Forward slogan of the Obama campaign is the battle
cry of a movement with a destination and a plan. In its European versions,
Forward carried with it the idea of a march towards the eventual victory of
socialism or Communism. Obama’s campaign slogan retained that sense of a march
towards a destination, a new kind of America ruled by principles long espoused
by leftists of various stripes.
Don’t Tread on Me connotes the spirit of independence and
resistance to tyranny that emboldened the patriot movement at the country’s
founding. Revived by the grassroots conservative movement of today, the slogan
conveys the determination of modern patriots to defend liberty when it is
threatened.
But Forward connotes action, and Don’t Tread on Me
connotes reaction. And unless conservatives see the strategic implications of
those two symbols, America will continue its descentinto the moral and economic
bog of socialism.
Since the days of Edmund Burke, conservatives have
conceived our political role in defensive terms, as protecting the rights of
citizens against government encroachments and defending social stability
against the radical movements of the day. In describing the mission of his new
magazine in 1955, William F. Buckley, Jr. said that National Review “stands
athwart history, yelling Stop.” Today, the grassroots conservative movement
stands athwart the far left’s agenda for America yelling Hell No.
But there are two problems for conservatism as a
defensive movement. First, because the left is always on the strategic
offensive, deciding when and where to push their agenda, leftists only have to
win occasionally. As an essentially defensive movement, however, the right has
to win every encounter, or liberty loses ground.
The right stopped Hillarycare in 1994, but the left just
came back again with Obamacare. Even if the right had stopped Obamacare, the
left would have come back with the same bill under different names. The left
only had to win the battle for control of health care once. In the courts, the
left mounts challenge after challenge to Second Amendment rights, traditional
marriage, and anything else that stands in the way of their agenda. It does not
matter how often they lose; the left only has to win once, and a new precedent
is set. In politics, time is on the side of those who maintain the offensive,
and the left is always on the offensive.
The second problem for conservatives is that a defensive
movement cannot regain lost ground. Considering the left’s political gains and
their success in attacking the Judeo-Christian foundations of liberty in
American culture, stalling the left’s advance now would still leave liberty
with its back against the wall of socialism.
In short, it is time for conservatives to realize that
‘Hell No’ is not a political strategy.
It is not the failure of conservative ideas and
principles that have lost ground for the cause of liberty, but the right’s
failure to develop and execute a proactive political strategy, one that tells
the electorate what we are for and not just what we are against, one that
educates voters outside the conservative base about the benefits of liberty and
the power of free enterprise.
As Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots said
recently, “Our Forefathers were not content railing against the Crown…They
fought for freedom and liberty.” Martin belongs to a new generation of
conservative leaders calling not for the mere rebranding of conservatism but
for its transformation from a defensive force into a positive force with a
vision for liberty and a plan for taking that vision to the electorate.
A transformed conservative movement would still make the
case against the inefficiencies and the inevitable abuses of power that come
with big government, but the case would not stop there. Thomas Sowell and other
economists have made the case that free enterprise provides a higher standard
of living and better upward mobility than state-controlled economies. The
Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups have a wealth of proposals
that address problems with our health care system by expanding personal choice
and reducing government control. The right has sound and workable ideas on
issue after issue, but, at present, only the conservative base ever hears those
ideas.
Liberty works, but our cultural institutions – education,
news, and entertainment – are dominated by the left. If the case for liberty is
to taken into a culture increasingly conditioned to the idea that the only good
government is big government, the conservative movement will have to do an end
run around the left’s institutions and take our case directly into our
communities. The grassroots vehicle is there, if conservatives can expand our thinking
from Taxed Enough Already to Teaching Every American that there is a better
path than the one we’re following.
For the conservative movement, the alternative to
transformation is to stay on the reactive path that brought us here, the path
that leads Forward to socialism.
No comments:
Post a Comment