This post is very well done.
Hat Tip: Conor Friedersdorf @ Culture11
leader
Many are saying this election was a failure of Conservatism. Not so. It was the product of poor Republican leadership and big government policies. Fiscal discipline went out the window. Earmarks were snatched up eagerly. Corruption scandals sprang up too often. Communication and message management were poor.
In short, the Republican party became undisciplined, greedy, weak and ineffective. This dirtied and eroded the Republican brand such that it became unrecognizable and uninspiring.
We need new leadership. We need new voices and/or the renewing and rejuvination of existing voices. Our elected officials need to stop concerning themselves with power grabs, pandering, and placating. We must unapologetically and unashamedly stand on True Conservative values.
We need to get back to basics and get on message, recognizing that effective and persuasive communication matters. As Laura Ingraham said today, “We must cultivate a new generation of leaders who are both proud of their conservative beliefs and comfortable articulating them with vision, clarify and optimism.”
I hereby invoke part of Russell Kirk’s introduction to Ten Conservative Principles:
Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.
The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.
In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers.
I have always loved Kirk’s Ten and that intro. Not an ideology but ”a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the social order.”
Conservatives are skeptical of change for its own sake and will always pause to ask, “but what are the unintended consequences?” Conservatives value that which has been good, and is good, and are not eager to dismiss that good in favor of untested new ideas. Conservatives are open minded but cautious. Social experiments are looked upon with great skepticism. As Kirk later writes:
Therefore the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression. He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise. The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.
Just so.
