Kristol offers some cautions and some hope:
Republicans, newly liberated, need to resist calls to shackle themselves to prematurely announced agendas and already anointed leaders. This is the time for a thousand Republicans to bloom. Congressmen used to looking to the White House for guidance or approval–or fearing disapprobation–should show some healthy ambition and unleash their inner policy entrepreneur. Backbenchers need to come forward with heterodox ideas. There should be vigorous debate. Disharmonious disarray is in the short term much less of a danger than a false and stultifying unity.
Everyone looks back nostalgically to 1993-94, the last time Republicans were out of power, but that example is a bit misleading. In 1992, Clinton had won only 43 percent of the vote, and the Republicans had gained congressional seats. The successful Reagan years remained fresh in voters’ minds. The task was simply to reclaim and revivify the Reagan agenda. The task today is both harder and less well defined.
The situation is more like 1977. For one thing, given the unlikelihood of Republicans taking back Congress in 2010, it requires a four-year horizon rather than a two-year one. More important, it requires serious rethinking in fundamental areas. Consider how far the party moved from 1977 to 1980. It was a period of vigorous, even hectic, political, policy, and institutional entrepreneurship, among conservatives both old and new. Thanks to the controversial efforts of backbenchers like Jack Kemp and Bill Steiger, the party rejected green eyeshade budget-balancing and embraced pro-growth supply-side economic policies. Thanks to the emergence of the neoconservatives, Kissingerian détente gave way to Reaganite freedom-fighting. Religious conservatives moved en masse to join the ranks of the GOP. All of this in four years.
The revival of the GOP has to come from the ground up and from outside Washington – from the ground up because we need fresh blood, new faces and bold, new ideas of reform; from outside Washington because the healthy contempt most Americans feel for the people who run government is simply going to get stronger and broader-based as Obama and his Democrats set America rolling on the slow-motion train wreck which will be the Obama Administration. We don’t want to be identified at all with what is going on in DC, except in as much as we can be involved in opposing the clearly bad bits of Obamanomics and offering those bold, new proposals as a counterweight to the Democrat plans.
It is time that we started looking our selves in the mirror and realizing that there’s no Reagan out there to come rescue us. Indeed, if we pay close attention we’ll realize that Reagan wasn’t able to do half what he wanted because the GOP simply sat around waiting for Reagan to do it. No one man can ever do it all (and Obama should pay attention to this truth…but I don’t think he even suspects it exists) – each must play his part, large or small, to advance the cause. If we want to have a conservative government in the United States which will undo the social, political and economic damage liberalism has inflicted over the past decades, then we’re going to have to make it happen – person by person, precinct by precinct, State by State until we get it done.
Nothing can be left off the table and no area of the country can be conceded to the Democrats – while it is certain that prayer in public schools and banning abortion won’t play well in, say, Los Angeles there is the fact that there are plenty of people in Los Angeles who want strong defense, low taxes, secure borders, less burdensome regulation, etc, etc, etc. We can put candidates up all over the country, and we should – because conservative ideals are for everywhere; because liberalism is bad everywhere and must be opposed; because if we even get the liberals to spend 10% of their effort holding their own, that works to our overall advantage.
While adhering to the core values of conservatism (limited government, low taxes, free markets, individual liberty, etc), we must be willing to mix it up and play take away from liberalism. We have to change the terms of the debate – we have to cease having the debate being over whether or not we’re rat bastards and change that debate into a question of who can best govern the United States in the interests of the average American?
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