Our very own Sun Journal ran a good piece from conservative blogger Rod Dreher today, whose CrunchyCon blog is one I read regularly. By this column, and some of his other posts, I’d put Dreher in the Ross Douthat/David Frum/Rammesh Ponnuru/Rich Lowry camp of conservatives, which is to say the camp that believes it is time for the conservative movement to embrace some new ideas and new approaches to governing if it is ever to recover from last week’s thrashing at the hands of voters. While there is no question that Bush and GOP congress could have been a good deal more conservative than they were in terms of limited government and fiscal responsibility, we have to begin looking for ways to develop conservative policies that have more resonance with the working class, the young, the college-educated, and other groups whose affections we’ve lost.
Dreher:
The right has developed a vicious habit of tagging any dissenting conservative as a closet liberal. This folly has constructed an airtight bubble around the GOP and conservative leaders, not only depriving conservatism of constructive criticism from within its ranks, but also reinforcing the rank-and-file’s worst instincts. If the election results didn’t convince Republicans that they couldn’t afford to throw people out – especially their intellectuals and people who respect intellect – then their ignorance is invincible.
This election ought to once and for all teach conservatives that Ronald Reagan is dead, and he’s not coming back. The intellectual poverty of the GOP primary debates showed itself by the candidates’ ritualistic invocation of Reagan’s name, as if saying it often enough would compensate for the lack of new ideas among the sorry bunch.
Reagan and his popular brand of conservatism arose out of a particular set of historical circumstances – specifically, the challenge of Soviet communism abroad and welfare-statism at home. It’s a new day with new challenges, and the intellectually exhausted right is not up to meeting them.
Conservatives must return to the philosophical sources of our tradition and reinterpret its insights and truths for the world we live in now. Ideas really do have consequences as, obviously, does the lack of same. Yes, conservatives have to oppose the Obama Democrats when they overreach, but if the only response conservatives offer is defensive and obstreperous, they will not soon recover.
I’ve just started Ross Douthat’s book Grand New Party, which he wrote with Reihan Salam, and which discusses ways that the GOP can craft conservative public policy that speaks to the working class. You can find an interesting discussion between Douthat and National Review’s Jonah Goldberg here.
